Great Mythconceptions
Dedication
To Ganesha, the God of overcoming obstacles.
Thanks for getting us safely out of the Himalayas.
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Dirty Desks
Low Nicotine Cigarettes
Goldfish Memory
Cellulite
Einstein Failed School
All White, My Sun
Fan Cools Room
Eclipse Blindness
Anaesthetic Bomb
Everest Not Tallest Mountain
Lemmings Suicide
Stitch
Killer Aspartame and Diet Drinks
The Black Box
Duck Quacks Don’t Echo
Switch on Light Bulb
Cat Years
No Lead in the Pencil
Milk Makes Mucus
Tampon Tampering
Hindenburg and Hydrogen
Antiperspirant and Cancer
Dinosaurs and Cave People
Growth Spurts
Truth Serum
Nails and Hair Grow After Death
Man on Moon Conspiracy
Camel Hump
Gun Silencer
Knuckle Cracking and Arthritis
Curse of King Tut
Zombies
Dissing the Dishwasher
Aluminium and Alzheimer’s Disease
Bermuda Triangle
Prayer Heals
Microwaves Cook From the Inside
Schizophrenia and Split Personality
Pyramid Building
Astrology
Use Your Brain
Quantum Leap
White Spots on Nails
Bible Code
Chocolate Zits
Baby Delivery Myths
Uluru to You
Typhoid Mary
One-way Mirror
CD-ROT
21 Grams
Cerebral Palsy and Birth
Thanks
Copyright
Dirty Desks
If things get a bit rushed at work, you might grab a quick sandwich at your office desk. On the other hand, you would never dream of eating off the toilet seat, because everyone ‘knows’ that toilets are ‘dirty’, and loaded with germs. But, on average, a desk has 50 times more bacteria per square centimetre than a toilet seat!
Dr Charles Gerba, a microbiologist from the University of Arizona, discovered this fact. He’s ‘Dr Germs’. Over the past three decades, he’s written some 400 papers on infection and disinfection in peer-reviewed journals.
He solved the problems that the National Science Foundation was having with the waste-water treatment system in the Antarctic at McMurdo Station. He helped out with advice on water-recycling systems for both NASA and the Russian Mir Space Station. He loves his work so much, that he even gave his first son the middle name of Escherichia, which is the ‘E’ in E. coli, the famous faecal bacterium. He got around family resistance by telling his father-in-law that Escherichia was the name of a king in the Old Testament of the Bible.
From June to August of 2001, he and his team looked for five different types of bacteria — E. coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Streptococcus, Salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus. The team studied offices at four United States locations — New York City, San Francisco, Tampa and Tucson. At each site, they tested surfaces three times a day for five days. They sampled 12 different surfaces — desktop, telephone receiver, computer mouse, computer keyboard, microwave door button, elevator button, photocopier start button, photocopier surface, toilet seat, fax machine, refrigerator door handle and water fountain handle. The team wanted to measure the effect of cleaning each surface. At each location, one group of employees used disinfecting wipes to clean the surfaces they worked with, while the other group did not. (The study was partly funded by Clorox, a company that makes disinfecting wipes.)
The results were astonishing. In terms of bacteria per square inch (25.4 mm2), they found that the telephone receiver was the filthiest — 25 127 (probably because many people often share the same phone). This was followed by the desktop at 20 961, the computer keyboard at 3295 and the computer mouse at 1676. The least contaminated surface was the toilet seat with only 49 bacteria per square inch — making it about 400 times cleaner than the desktop. Gerba says that, for bacteria, the ‘desk is really the laptop of luxury. They can feast all day from breakfast to lunch and even dinner.’ Your desk is the second ‘germiest’ place in the office.
Pat Rusin from the University of Arizona is not sure why the shared toilet seat, which you would expect to be a maelstrom of maximum microbial activity, is actually one of the cleanest. He said: ‘What we found, and what we are still theorising as to why, is that the toilet seat was always the cleanest site.’ One theory is that toilet seats are too dry to provide a good home to a large population of bacteria.
The other major finding was that if you went to the trouble of using their sponsor’s antibacterial wipes, you could drop the bacteria count by about 99.9%.
While I know intellectually that the toilet seat has a lower bacterial count than the desktop, I’m not going to have my next snack in the toilet. Perhaps I’ll go halfway and wipe down my desktop, not with a germ-laden sponge (10 000 bacteria per square inch), but with a clean disposable tissue.
Flush Toilet with Lid
Up or Down?
Dr Gerba also studied germ counts in the home and discovered the right way to flush the toilet. You should flush with the lid down.
If you flush with the lid up, a polluted plume of bacteria and water vapour erupts out of the flushing toilet bowl. He describes the germy ejecta as ‘Baghdad at night during a US air attack’. The polluted water particles float for a few hours around your bathroom before they all land. Some of them will even land on your toothbrush.
Dr Gerba also found that in the home, the kitchen sponge had the highest germ count, followed by the kitchen sink. The lowest bacterial count, out of 15 household locations, was the toilet seat. He said (perhaps jokingly), ‘If an alien came from space and studied the bacterial counts, he probably would conclude he should wash his hands in your toilet and crap in your sink.’
So if your toilet is in the bathroom and you flush with the lid up, you are probably brushing your teeth with toilet water. I guess that’s one story to tell the males in your household, so that they put the lid down …
References
Adams, Cecil, ‘Does flushing the toilet cause dirty water to be spewed around the bathroom?’, The Straight Dope, www.straightdope.com/classics/a990416.html.
Murphy, Cullen, ‘Something in the water’, The Atlantic, September 1997.
Woods, Kate, ‘Toilet seats cleaner than desk’, Medical Observer, 16 April 2004, p. 23.
Low Nicotine Cigarettes
About 90% of smokers know that smoking is bad for their health and about 60% of smokers want to give up, but can’t. Every week, the average GP will hear an addicted smoker say, ‘Look Doc, I’m already cutting down. I’ve started smoking low nicotine cigarettes.’ These poor smokers have fallen for the myth that low nicotine cigarettes deliver less nicotine into their bodies.
Nicotine is an addictive drug. In fact, it’s extremely addictive. Consider smokers who have had their larynx (voice box) removed as a result of a smoking-related disease. This is a very major operation. And yet, 40% of these smokers will, as soon as they recover from the operation, start smoking again.
Tobacco companies could make a zero-nicotine cigarette — but they won’t, because nobody would buy them. After all, inhaling sugar does nothing for a cocaine addict. Addicted cigarette smokers need their nicotine hit.
A cigarette is an incredibly efficient drug-delivery device
— luckily for the tobacco companies. It accurately delivers to the brain the precise dose of nicotine needed to ensure continued addiction within 11 seconds of sucking in the smoke. If you want to make somebody addicted, you need a very short time between when they do the action (sucking on the cigarette) and when they get the reward (nicotine in the brain). Smoking nicotine from a cigarette fits the bill perfectly. By the way, the average smoker carries about 40 billionths of a gram of nicotine in each millilitre of blood.
Nicotine can have opposite effects, depending on the dose. At low doses, it stimulates your thinking and increases your heart rate and blood pressure. At high doses, it calms you down and drops your heart rate. Smokers will often subconsciously adjust how hard and how frequently they suck, to get either a low or a high dose.
Will low nicotine cigarettes deliver low levels of nicotine? Yes, but only when they are tested on a sucking machine. However, when a human smokes low nicotine cigarettes, they get as much nicotine as they would from a regular nicotine cigarette.
Smokers need their regular nicotine hit, so when they change to a low nicotine cigarette, they just suck harder and more frequently — in order to get the same dose. Unfortunately, when you suck harder on a burning cigarette, you also suck in more carbon monoxide. This forces your body to make more haemoglobin, which makes your blood more ‘sludgy’ — which increases your chances of a stroke. So it’s actually more dangerous to get your ‘regular’ nicotine dose from a low nicotine cigarette.
(Just as an aside, if a person who usually smokes medium nicotine cigarettes tries high nicotine cigarettes, they will suck less deeply, so that they still get their regular nicotine hit.)
The tobacco companies like low nicotine cigarettes. In 1978, the Imperial Tobacco Ltd wrote, in an internal document: ‘… the advent of ultra low-tar cigarettes has actually retained some potential quitters in the cigarette market by offering them a viable alternative …’
So, low nicotine cigarettes not only deliver less nicotine, and give you more carbon monoxide, they also lull you into a false sense of security.
References
Bittoun, Renee, The Management of Nicotine Addiction: A guide for counselling in smoking cessation, University of Sydney Printing Service, 1998.
Fagerstrom, Karl Olov, ‘Towards better diagnoses and more individual treatments of tobacco dependence’, British Journal of Addiction, 1991, vol. 86, pp. 543–547.
Goldfish Memory
The Chinese had already domesticated the goldfish some thousand years ago (during the Sung Dynasty, 960–1279 AD). Since then, many centuries of selective breeding have given us over 125 types of goldfish. However, rumour has it that no goldfish can remember anything earlier than a few seconds ago. So every circuit of their tank or pond should be fresh and new — because they can’t remember the last loop.
Do fish have a memory? And how can you determine whether a fish has a memory? Or whether any animal has for that matter?
Clearly, the Clark’s Nutcracker has a superb memory. This bird lives in North America, and hoards food to get it through the winter. As autumn approaches, a single bird harvests up to 33 000 pine seeds. It then buries them in some 7000 separate hidden treasure troves, each with about four or five seeds. Its memory is so good that it is able to find each of these individual 7000 stockpiles later. It digs up and eats the seeds to survive the winter.
Few humans could do this — except perhaps Hiroyuki Goto, of Keio University in Tokyo, who in February 1995, recited p (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) to 42 194 places.
Jonathon Lovell from Plymouth University’s Institute of Marine Studies in the United Kingdom is convinced that some fish have a memory. He has successfully trained fish to swim towards a sound. He wants to release fish raised in captivity into the open sea, and call them back with special sounds to a feeding station, to supplement their natural diet.
Culum Brown (of the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology at the University of Edinburgh) studied the Crimson-spotted Rainbow Fish while in Queensland. He compared fish that knew their tanks well with fish that had been just placed in tanks. He introduced a net with a central hole into a tank, and then swept it from one end to the other. The fish that had a strong memory of their tank were better able to escape through the central hole — presumably because they could ignore what they remembered as being familiar and non-threatening to them (their tank), and instead, could concentrate on the new threat (the net). The fish that knew their tank remembered the trawling net so well, that they could escape it in a follow-up study some 11 months later.
By the way, 11 months is nearly one-third of a goldfish’s three-year life span — a very long time to remember something that has happened to you only once. In human terms, that’s about 25 years.
Yoichi Oda of Osaka University in Japan has spent years studying the fine details of memory in goldfish — and he is also convinced that goldfish have a good memory.
Of course, there are thousands of anecdotes from owners of goldfish, who say that the fish remember regular feeding times. This is very impressive — after all, the goldfish food they are given looks nothing like the food that they are genetically programmed to eat.
Other owners say that their goldfish remember their faces and frolic about in the tank when their owners are the only ones present, but hide for an hour or so when strangers enter the room.
Different Types of Learning
Some goldfish will come to the glass of their tank whenever people walk into the room. These particular goldfish have worked out that when people turn up, so will food — at least, sometimes. In other words, people equal food. This is called ‘associative learning’. The fish now associate people with food.
Some species of fish are very social and hang out together in schools. To survive in the school, they spend a lot of time paying attention to what their schoolmates do and learn by watching them. This is called ‘social learning’.
Some fish can learn music — probably because, in the wild, it’s important for them to be able to tell the difference between different sounds in their environment. Ava Chase of the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts taught carp to tell the difference between John Lee Hooker’s blues music and a classical oboe concerto by Bach, by feeding them smaller fish as a food reward. The music was played to the fish through loudspeakers in their tank. Ava then discovered that the carp could generalise from what they had learnt, and classify music that they hadn’t heard before into the categories of blues or classical.
References
‘In brief: musical fish’, New Scientist, 19 January 2002, p. 24.
Brown, Culum, ‘Familiarity with the test environment improves escape responses in the Crimson-spotted Rainbow Fish, Melanotaenia duboulayi’, Animal Cognition, vol. 4, 2001, pp. 109_113.
Cellulite
Since the 1960s, the television, radio and print media has continually informed us that cellulite is the bane of the appearance-conscious person’s life. And each time, the media usually feed us at least two of the four cellulite mythconceptions.
The first mythconception is that cellulite is abnormal and should therefore be removed. Second, cellulite is caused by toxins and/or poor circulation and/or clogged lymphatics. Third, if you get skinny enough the cellulite will simply disappear. And fourth, there’s a revolutionary new product that will get rid of cellulite.
We all carry some fat as a percentage of our body weight — roughly 15–25% for men, and 20–33% for women. This fat is stored in fat cells. Millions of fat cells sit happily side by side, like a sea of soft butter balls. The fat in your body, like butter, doesn’t have a lot of structural integrity, so you need a few fibrous bands running across this sea of soft bubbled fat to hold it together. Sometimes, there are so many fibrous bands crisscrossing the sea of fat balls that they turn this smooth sea into a set of many bumpy lakes. The technical term for the fibrous bands is ‘hypodermal fibrous strands’.
Cellulite is lumpy-bumpy fat, stored in little pockets. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary calls cellulite a ‘colloquial term for deposits of fat and fibrous tissue causing dimpling of the overlying skin’. It is often found in the lower buttocks, and the backs of the outer thighs and hips.
Cellulite is a normal way to store superficial fat. It has nothing to do with clogged lymphatic vessels, toxins or poor circulation. It is normal. The vast majority of women carry it. You can find cellulite in about 70–80% of women — even if they are really skinny. (Apparently, even ultra-svelte Nicole Kidman has a little.)
Given that most women have cellulite, this makes for a huge market — a merchant’s dream. Anti-cellulite creams claim to turn dimpled, spongy skin (that looks like cottage cheese) into flat skin (as smooth as a baby’s bottom).
These creams almost always have at least one of the following ‘magic’ ingredients — caffeine (a diuretic), tretinoin, dimethylaminoethanol (DMAE, an antioxidant) or aminophylline. The European Journal of Dermatology reviewed 32 anti-cellulite products. Some of the products had up to 31 ingredients — most of them fairly random apart from one of the ‘magic four’. In fact, in the 32 products tested, 263 ingredients were used! It was as if the manufacturers were making wild guesses, and adding unproved products haphazardly. The other constant ingredient was some type of fragrance. About one-quarter of these products can cause an allergic reaction, so harmful side effects are a definite (but small) risk.