Even More Things That Nobody Knows E-Book

William Hartston

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

There are many, many more things that nobody knows...! Why do we have five fingers? Do animals have a sense of humour? Did the universe have a beginning? What causes déjà vu? Why do cats purr? How fast did dinosaurs move? In Even More Things That Nobody Knows, William Hartston once again explores the limits of human knowledge, revealing 501 further mysteries in subjects as diverse as cosmology, mathematics, animal behaviour, medical science, music, art, language and literature. From the trivial to the profound, this is an enthralling and enlightening investigation into the things we just don't know, and which lurk tantalizingly beyond the bounds of our understanding.

Leseprobe

‘To succeed in life you need two things: ignorance and confidence.’

Mark Twain

CONTENTS

Introduction

Aesop

Alchemy

Alcohol

Anatomy

Ancient Cities

Ancient History

Ancient Rome

Animals

Ants

Art

Asparagus

Astronomy

Atilla

Austen

Australia

Autism

Avocados

Aztecs

Baboons

Bears

Bees

Bible

Big Bang

Biology

Birds

Black Holes

Bones

Brains

Brazil

Camels

Cancer

Cannabis

Cannibalism

Carroll

Cats

Chaplin

Cheese

Chemicals

Chewing Gum

Chickens

Chimpanzees

China

Chocolate

Christianity

Codes

Coffee

Comets

Computers

Cosmology

Costa Rica

Crickets

Crime

Crocodiles

Death

Dinosaurs

Disease

Dogs

Dolphins

Dracula

Dreams

Ears

Earth

Ebola

Egypt

Einstein

Elephants

Energy

English History

Evolution

Eyes

Fashion

Fish

Florida

Food

Football

France

Frogs

Fundamental Particles

Games

Genetics

Geology

Germany

Global Warming

Gold

Gorillas

Gravity

Guillotines

Guinea-Pigs

Hair

Henry VIII

Hitler

Human Evolution

Humour

Hypnosis

Incas

Intelligence

Inventions

Iowa

Italy

Jesus Christ

Jupiter

Kangaroos

Kisses

Language

Legs

Lemurs

Leonardo

Leopards

Literature

Lobsters

Longevity

Mammals

Marriage

Mars

Mathematics

Mayans

Medicine

Meerkats

Mercury

Mesopotamia

Meteorology

Mexico

Mice

Milky Way

Monkeys

Moths

Mountaineering

Mummies

Murder

Music

Myanmar

Mythology

Names

Napoleon

Nazis

North Dakota

Noses

Numbers

Octopuses

Opera

Otters

Outer Space

Palao

Pandas

Pangolins

Parapsychology

Penguins

Philosophy

Physics

Plants

Platypuses

Poker

Polar Bears

Porpoises

Prehistory

Psychology

Quasars

Rats

Religion

Riddles

Russia

Salamanders

Salmon

Salt

Saturn

Science

Sex

Sex Differences

Shakespeare

Sharks

Sheep

Shellfish

Ships

Sleep

Sloths

Smell

Snails

Snakes

Socrates

Solar System

Spiders

Sport

Squid

Squirrels

Suicide

Technology

Tennis

Termites

Theatre

Time

Treasure

Troy

Turkey

Turtles

Tyrannosauruses

United Kingdom

Universe

USA

Vanuatu

Venus

Vikings

Volcanoes

Waitresses

Wales

Walruses

Water

Whales

Wild Boar

Wine

Witches

Words

Worms

Zebras

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

‘Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.’

Confucius (6th–5th century BC)

I have always found it much more enlightening listening to experts talking about what they don’t know rather than what they do know. Only when we start peering over the boundaries of human knowledge do things begin to grow really interesting.

Every year, an estimated 1.5 million papers appear in academic journals. Each one of these pushes the boundaries of our knowledge a little further forwards. Just as important, it points the way into the unknown, giving us ideas for where our explorations should go next. The majority of the 501 unanswered questions in this book are about those areas where ‘further research is needed’, as the writers of those papers love to put it. Even if that is only a way of asking for their research grant to be renewed, it may also serve as a bright signpost into the unknown.

When I wrote the previous Things That Nobody Knows book in 2011, some readers were apparently disappointed that I did not give answers to the 501 questions posed. They both missed the point and clearly didn’t read the title carefully: if I, or anyone else, were able to give the answers, the questions wouldn’t have been in the book. These aren’t the things that most people don’t know; they are the things that nobody knows.

So here are another 501 unanswered questions. I hope you will find that my discussion of each of them is nonetheless enlightening, intriguing and in some cases even amusing.

William Hartston Cambridge, 2015

AESOP

1. Was Aesop a fable?

The collection of stories known as Aesop’s Fables dates back to around the sixth century BC, but whether Aesop himself was fact or fiction is still an open question. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, and Aristotle in the fourth century BC both wrote of Aesop being a slave in Samos. Plutarch, some 300 years later, wrote of Aesop visiting Delphi on a diplomatic mission, annoying the locals and being thrown from cliffs to his death. Later still, probably around the first century AD, a work entitled The Aesop Romance appeared, putting together and further embellishing tales of Aesop’s life.

Great doubt, however, has been cast on the accuracy of these tales, and in some cases the chronology simply does not add up. In 1965 the Aesop scholar Ben Edwin Perry concluded that much of what had been written about Aesop ‘must be reckoned as literary fiction’. So the question of whether Aesop himself was a fable is still open.

‘Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.’

Michel de Montaigne

ALCHEMY

2. Who was Fulcanelli?

In the 1920s a Frenchman who called himself Fulcanelli gained the reputation in Paris of being the last of the great alchemists. His writing style and knowledge of Latin, Greek and several modern languages marked him out as a well-educated man and references in his writings to a wife suggest that he was married, yet no evidence has been found of his education or marriage. He disappeared in 1926, after which tales of alleged sightings have only added to the mystery surrounding his true identity.

Fulcanelli is said to have met with the Russian/French spy Jacques Bergier in 1937 to warn him of the dangers of atomic explosives, which he said alchemists had known of for centuries. He is also said to have told a pupil, Eugène Canseliet, the secret of transmuting lead into gold, and there is an account of Canseliet demonstrating the method successfully by turning 100 grams of lead into gold at the gasworks of Sarcelles in the north of Paris.

Canseliet was also responsible for ensuring the publication of Fulcanelli’s great work, Le Mystère des cathédrales, which his master had left with him before he disappeared. It has been suggested that Fulcanelli was in fact Canseliet himself, which would of course have involved a deception of great ingenuity to stage the disappearance of a man who didn’t exist.

Canseliet insisted that Fulcanelli survived the Second World War and that the two men had their last meeting in 1953, when Fulcanelli would have been in his eighties but was said to look about thirty years younger. Canseliet died in 1982 and, if one is to believe the tales about Fulcanelli, the secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone and eternal youth vanished with him.

SEE ALSOFRANCE 201; LONGEVITY 280; PHYSICS 372

ALCOHOL

3. Why does alcohol make women less fertile?

In 1998 a paper was published in the British Medical Journal with the title ‘Does moderate alcohol consumption affect fertility?’ Based on a study of 430 Danish couples who were trying to conceive their first child, it concluded, after correlating their conception rates with their drinking behaviour, that: ‘A woman’s alcohol intake is associated with decreased fecundability even among women with a weekly alcohol intake corresponding to five or fewer drinks.’

Previous research studies had shown lower conception rates among women who drank more than five units of alcohol a week, but most of them had not detected any such effects for moderate drinking. Another surprise was that: ‘Among men no dose–response association was found after control for confounders including women’s alcohol intake.’ In other words, previous studies reporting low conception rates among male drinkers may have occurred because men who drink a lot may be more likely to have partners who drink a lot and whose conception rates suffer as a result.

Since then, many further studies have failed to reach agreement on whether low alcohol intake can decrease chances of conception. Alcohol has been associated with effects on the production of oestrogen and other hormones in women, but the mechanism by which this occurs is not properly understood.

A further complication was added in 2014 when a study in the USA reported that stress may diminish a woman’s fertility. Measurements of the levels of an enzyme associated with stress showed that women with higher levels were twice as likely to be infertile. Since people may have a greater tendency to drink when they are feeling stressed, this finding raises the possibility that the alcohol effect reported in earlier studies may, at least in part, be explained by stress.

See alsoATILLA 31; BIOLOGY 58; CANNABIS 87; WINE 494

ANATOMY

4. Why do we have pubic hair?

In the course of human evolution, we have shed a great deal of our bodily hair. With much of our heat loss occurring through the head, it makes sense to have retained hair there to perform a warming function, but armpit and pubic hair need a different explanation. Here are a few theories:

(i)

Pubic hair has a similar warming or protective effect for our reproductive organs.

This is hardly convincing. The hair is not very well located to perform either of those functions in regions where it might be useful.

(ii)

Hair reduces friction when love-making.

This is also unconvincing when one considers the amount of time people spend making love.

(iii)

Hair acts as a protective barrier to prevent dirt and unwanted organisms from entering the vagina or penis.

This appears a more likely explanation, by analogy with the hairs in our ears and nostrils and on our eyelashes and eyebrows, but while pubic hair may perform a similar function for women, it would only have a limited effect in that respect in men. Indeed, a consideration of the relative amount of protection one might think necessary for the vaginal and penile openings, pubic hair might by now be expected to have survived only in women.

(iv) Pubic hair plays a role in mate selection through its ability to enhance bodily smells.

There is some evidence that smells created by secretions from glands near our genitals help us select sexual partners in a manner that is most likely to be evolutionarily successful. These apocrine glands secrete a fluid which only develops an odour when it meets bacteria on the surface of the skin. Our pubic hair is perfectly placed to absorb these fluids, thereby increasing the smell. Whether this theory, and our pubic hair, can survive the ever-increasing use of deodorants, however, is open to question.

5. How did the corpus callosum evolve?

The two halves of our brains are joined by a thick bundle of nerve fibres known as the corpus callosum, which provides the pathways through which the two hemispheres communicate with one another. However, not all animals with two cerebral hemispheres have a corpus callosum. In fact, every species of mammal that develops a placenta during pregnancy has a corpus callosum while non-placental mammals, including all marsupials, do not have one.

In 1863 the zoologist T. H. Huxley wrote: ‘the appearance of the corpus callosum in the placental mammals is the greatest and most sudden modification exhibited by the brain in the whole series of vertebrated animals…’ Over 150 years later, we still have no idea how the corpus callosum evolved or of any connection between having a placenta and having a corpus callosum.

Having a brain divided into two halves makes little sense unless something joins them, and in the non-placental animals, that function is served by more primitive structures called commissures. How the primitive corpus callosum evolved with the commissures already in place is a mystery.

6. Does the human appendix serve any useful purpose?

Until recently, the appendix was seen as some sort of vestigial organ which may have served some useful purpose in our evolutionary past, but now had no function other than to give people appendicitis. Surgeons would remove the appendix at the first signs of the disease, and sometimes it would be removed as a prophylactic measure when other stomach surgery was being performed.

In the last few years, however, the view has grown that the appendix may have a useful function after all. First, it was found to be a reservoir of useful bacteria that may play a part in the role white blood cells perform in our immune system, and then a comparison of human appendices with those of other animals suggested that there may be more to these organs than had been thought. A study in 2013 reported a hitherto unsuspected degree of evolution in the appendix, suggesting that it had evolved thirty times in its long history to perform varying functions in different animals according to their diets.

Quite what the human appendix does is still unclear, but it is looking more likely that it does have a useful function after all.

7. Why are the left sides of people’s faces more expressive than the right sides?

A curious result that has been confirmed in numerous studies since the 1970s is that people find the left sides of other people’s faces more expressive, more attractive and generally more fun than the right sides.

It has been conjectured that this may have something to do with the right hemisphere of the brain being more involved with emotions and also controlling the muscles on the left side of the face, but how this would work in shaping human preferences for left or right side is quite unclear and further complicated by the problems caused by mirrors transposing left and right. How can we find the left sides of our faces more expressive when we see them in a mirror, when the image is then on the same side as the right side of anyone we look at?

The closely related question of left–right preferences by painters and their portrait subjects is discussed later (→ ART 25).

See alsoBRAINS 78, CHINA 103, EARS 162, HUMAN EVOLUTION 237, LEGS 269

ANCIENT CITIES

Our knowledge of the ancient world is infuriatingly incomplete, with remains of many lost cities leaving few if any clues as to who were the people who built them or how they were constructed. Here are just a few such mysteries.

8. Who built the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan?

More than a thousand years before the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, the great city of Teotihuacan became one of the world’s largest cities. It had an estimated population between 100,000 and 250,000, and its structures included the Pyramid of the Sun, which was one of the largest buildings in the western world.

We do not know who built it; we do not know what name they called it; but archaeological investigations have dated its beginnings to around 100 BC and believe that it reached its zenith between AD 250 and 650. When the Aztecs discovered the ruins of the city, they called it Teotihuacan, meaning ‘place where the gods were born’, as they believed it to be the place where the world was created.

For a long time, it was thought that the Toltec people built Teotihuacan, but the Toltec civilization did not become powerful until hundreds of years after the city was built, so this seems unlikely. The Totonac, who were another pre-Columbian, pre-Aztec people in Mexico, have also been suggested, and even claimed themselves to have built Teotihuacan, but whether their history goes back that far is also doubtful. When the city collapsed in the seventh or eighth century, so much of it was destroyed that modern archaeologists have been left with few clues as to its origins.

9. Why did Teotihuacan collapse?

Teotihuacan was by any standards, but particularly by those of the first millennium, a huge city, covering a vast area including massive pyramids, temples, canals and canoe traffic. It thrived for at least 500 years, but around AD 550 many of its major buildings were sacked and burnt to the ground, and the city appears to have been completely abandoned in the seventh or eighth century.

With no evidence of a war or of a successfully invading force taking the city over, it has been suggested that the collapse was caused by an internal uprising against the most powerful classes in the city, but again there is no evidence of any other group seizing power. Climate change, droughts and ecological disaster have also been suggested, but without enough supporting evidence to be convincing. With several other sudden collapses of cities and entire civilizations in the region, Teotihuacan serves as a reminder of how little we know about Central and South America in the era before the Aztecs.

10. Who built the city of Nan Madol and how did they do it?

On Pohnpei island in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean lies the ruined city of Nan Madol. Built within a lagoon, it consists of a number of artificial islands linked by a series of canals, which have led to its being described as the ‘Venice of the Pacific’, but its origins are unknown.

According to local legend, Nan Madol was constructed by twin sorcerers Olisihpa and Olosohpa, who used a flying dragon to lift the stones used in its construction. Archaeological investigations have failed to support that view, with carbon dating indicating that Nan Madol’s construction began around 1200, though the region may have been occupied since 250 BC.

The mortuary sector alone contains over fifty islets on which high walls surround the tombs. On the royal mortuary islet of Nandauwas, the walls are 5.5–7.5 metres (18–25 ft) high, raising the question of where the stones came from to enable all this construction and how they were moved there. A number of possible quarry sites on Pohnpei have been identified, but the exact origin of the stones has not been determined, nor has their method of transportation ever been explained.

11. How did the Incas build Puma Punku?

Like Teotihuacan in Mexico (→ 8 and 9), the Inca city of Puma Punku (or Pumapunku) in Bolivia was identified by a legend as the place the world began, and its age, together with the extraordinary precision of its construction, show why. At its heart, Puma Punku consists of a massive clay mound, decorated with polished metal plaques and brightly coloured fabrics and ceramics, and surrounded by massive stone blocks chiselled to fit together with astonishing accuracy.

Radiocarbon dating shows that the stonework was constructed around the seventh century, but chemical samples from the stones indicate that they came from a quarry 10 kilometres away. The largest of these stone blocks is 7.8 metres long, 5.1 metres wide, 1 metre thick, and weighs about 131 tonnes. The blocks are also said to be cut with such precision that they fit together in a way that would not allow even a razor blade to be inserted between them. The standards of engineering needed both to transport the blocks and particularly to carve them with the necessary precision must have been far in advance of those known to have been achieved by the Incas hundreds of years later.

See alsoBRAZIL 82; INCAS 247

ANCIENT HISTORY

12. Who built thousands of giant stone wheel-like structures in the Middle East?

In 1927 RAF pilot Percy Maitland was on a routine mail delivery flight in the Middle East when he spotted beneath him hundreds of wheel-like patterns up to 70 metres in diameter made of stone. When he asked local Bedouin tribesmen about them, he reports that their reaction was fearful and all they would say was that they were ‘the works of old men’.

Stretching from Syria to Saudi Arabia, they are only visible from the air and are now known to number well into the thousands. They depict a number of designs, the most common of which is a circle with spokes radiating from the centre, but the direction of the spokes seems to follow no clear pattern. Several conjectures have been made of their purpose, but none are more than guesses. They are thought to date back around 2,000 years, but who made them and why is totally unknown.

13. How did ancient Minorcans build the Taulas?

The Taulas is the name given to thirty-five huge stone megaliths on the island of Minorca. Their appearance is remarkably like the similar structures at Stonehenge in England, but rather than being together at one place, as they are at Stonehenge, they are scattered at various locations throughout the island. Each Taula (which takes its name from a Catalan word meaning ‘table’) consists of one or two stones over 3 metres high, with a stone of similar size placed horizontally across the top.

They are thought to have been constructed by the Talayot people, who are believed to have lived in Minorca for around 2,000 years until the Romans arrived in 123 BC, but their reasons for building them and the means by which they transported and lifted the huge monoliths are an even greater mystery than that of Stonehenge. The positions of the stones at the English site at least seem to be connected with the motion of the Sun, which indicates a purpose connected with astronomy or astrology, but the Minorcan stones offer nothing more than a weak hint in that many of them appear to be set in horseshoe patterns facing south.

One theory is that the Taulas were used to predict solar eclipses; another suggestion is that they formed part of a healing ritual; but we know so little of the Talayot people and their beliefs that evidence for such ideas is scanty.

See alsoANCIENT CITIES 8–11; ANCIENT ROME 14; CHINA 99–103; EGYPT 168; INCAS 247; MAYANS 293; MESOPOTAMIA 305; MUMMIES 322; PREHISTORY 380–3; TURKEY 457

ANCIENT ROME

14. What happened to Spartacus?

We all know, even if only from the 1960 film starring Kirk Douglas, that Spartacus was a slave and gladiator who plotted an escape from his captors and led an uprising of his fellow slaves against the might of the Roman empire. Taken by surprise by Spartacus’ forces, and hampered by the fact that many of their legions were taking part in other military operations, a number of Roman army camps were overrun, which enabled the slave army to grow to around 70,000 men in the years around 70 BC.

Spartacus’ forces were finally defeated by the legions of Pompey and some Roman historians said that Spartacus was slain in the final battle, but his body was never found. Six thousand survivors were captured and crucified along the Appian Way, but Spartacus was not among them. Had he been captured or his body found, the Romans would no doubt have wished to make a spectacle of him, so precisely what happened to him is a mystery.

Another problem concerns the intentions of Spartacus in his battles against the Romans. His aim had always been to fight his way to freedom and lead his followers across the Alps and back to their homelands, but when that objective was in sight, he turned his forces back towards Rome and the final hopeless battle. Some of his men may not have joined this final march, but escaped over the Alps. There is a slim possibility that Spartacus did the same.

See alsoENGLISH HISTORY 177; ITALY 258; NAMES 334

ANIMALS

15. Is the number of animal species on Earth increasing or decreasing?

Environmentalists and ecologists frequently warn us of the potentially negative effects of human activity on biodiversity. Hunting and deforestation reduce animal numbers, constantly driving more species to the verge of extinction. Yet while this is going on, new species are constantly being discovered, and we have no idea whether they have existed unnoticed for centuries or are recently evolved.

Around 1.3 million species have been named and catalogued, and each year another 15,000 or so are added to the list. Attempts to estimate the total number of species on Earth have varied between about 3 million and 100 million. In 2011 a paper was published using a new and apparently logical method, which came up with an answer of 8.7 million plus or minus 1.3 million. All estimates are based largely on the number of species that have already been identified and the rate at which new ones are being discovered. That, however, may be more a measure of human activity and interests than the true biodiversity that exists.

Research on flies and fleas and periwinkles and urchins and many other creatures has shown that animals evolve into new species to cope with environmental changes. Even changes wrought by human intervention may be creating as many new species as we destroy. Frankly, we have no idea.

16. Are there more species on land or in the oceans?

One of the problems of estimating species numbers is our relative lack of knowledge of life in the oceans, particularly at great depths. The research mentioned in the previous item estimated the number of species on Earth as 6.5 million on land and 2.2 million in the oceans, but those figures were based on what we know now. Yet 71 per cent of the planet is covered by seas and oceans, with only 29 per cent land. So why should we believe that there are three times as many species on land as in the water?

Perhaps because we live on the land ourselves, our researches have concentrated on that 29 per cent of the planet, for reasons of both convenience and anthropic self-interest.

17. How should a species be defined?

Before we can even try to answer the previous two questions, we need to come up with a good working definition of what a species is, and that is not as easy as it may seem. When Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species in 1859, he spent some time trying to explain to the reader what he and others meant by the word ‘species’. The nearest he came to a definition was this: ‘I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other.’

The words ‘arbitrarily’ and ‘for the sake of convenience’, however, are hardly what one is looking for in a rigorous scientific definition. When such a serious definition has been attempted, the scientific literature reveals over twenty versions, each different from the others in some small but significant way. Most such definitions are based on the idea of a population that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. That introduces the immediate problem of how one expands the idea to include organisms that reproduce asexually, but even if we restrict our attention to sexual reproduction, problems emerge.

What about animals that can mate with each other, in the laboratory or in captivity, for example, but do not do so in the wild? What about three varieties of an animal, A, B and C, distinguishable by sight, of which members of A mate with members of B, and B with C, but A does not, or cannot, mate with C? Should we consider them all the same species?

Darwin himself questioned whether our concept of a species is something that exists in nature, or whether the boundaries between one species and another are too blurred for the word to have a precise meaning. Even now, scientists and philosophers struggle with the same problem. When we cannot even agree whether Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were the same species, the task of enumerating all the species on Earth is impossible.

18. Do animals suffer from depression?

In recent years, there have been reports of cats, rats and even goats showing signs of depression. Vets have increasingly been prescribing antidepressants for dogs, and in 2014 the Home Office in the UK was reported to be funding research into whether laboratory monkeys get depressed. The question of whether animals do, or even can, suffer from depression is not so easy to answer.

The problem is that the diagnosis of depression in humans depends on identifying symptoms that are subjective. Animals cannot directly communicate how they feel and the question of whether they can be said to have emotions at all is open. From that point of view, we would have to conclude that we cannot say whether animals suffer from depression.

On the other hand, research has associated certain physical symptoms, such as low serotonin levels in dogs and a shrinking hippocampus in rats, with apparently depressive animal behaviour. This may suggest that a diagnosis of depression for such animals is more than just anthropomorphism. Quite apart from the communication problem, however, we do not understand enough about depression in humans to draw clear conclusions from such evidence about depression in animals (→ PSYCHOLOGY 389).

19. Is there any species of animal in which homosexuality does not exist?

Ever since Darwin, the issue of homosexuality in animals has been contentious. The very idea of it seemed to run against the principles of evolution. It seemed even less compatible with the religious concept of intelligent design, and anyone who suggested that homosexuality might exist in the animal world ran the risk of being howled down by both homophobic and religious communities.

In 1999, however, the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl blew the lid off the gay animal taboo by publishing his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, which gave a detailed analysis of just how widespread same-sex encounters are in the animal kingdom. Darwinists rationalized that a baby creature looked after by two lesbians could lead to better childcare, while having a gay uncle could also be of positive survival value.

Bagemihl’s research indicated that homosexual behaviour had been identified in almost 1,500 species, from apes to worms, and was well documented in some 500 of them. In particular, lesbian albatrosses, gay giraffes and bisexual bonobos have attracted much attention. According to a recent estimate, homosexuality has been observed in around 10 per cent of all known species.

Twenty years ago, animals were generally considered to act by instinct, and instinct made them want to have sex in order to propagate their species. Having sex for fun was out of the question. Now, however, the question is not whether any animal can be considered truly homosexual, but whether some members of every species display such tendencies.

See also under names of individual animals:ANTS, BABOONS, BEARS, BEES, ETC.

ANTS

20. Do ants have personalities?

For social insects, ants can be very cruel to one another. There are over 15,000 known species of ant worldwide which vary considerably in aggression. Some species even live by making slaves of other species. Even within a single species, it has long been accepted that different colonies may display different ‘personalities’. Some colonies seem naturally aggressive; others show a marked tendency to run away when threatened. The question of whether individual ants have personalities, however, has only recently begun to be addressed.

Research at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in 2011 reported that a single colony of ants may display a wide range of aggression in its individuals. Ants with high aggression were employed in fighting other colonies, while less aggressive ants were assigned to brood care. Further evidence for ant personalities was claimed by research at the University of Arizona in 2014, where individual ants of the same species were seen to show different behavioural traits when foraging for food.

It is an open question, however, whether such individual differences are merely the result of learnt behaviour or evidence of truly innate personality differences.

21. Which weighs more: all the people on Earth or all the ants?

In their book Journey to the Ants (1994), Wilson and Hölldobler assert that the weight of all the ants on Earth is equal to that of all the humans, but it is far from clear whether this is correct.

As of 2015, there are around 7.2 billion people on Earth with an average weight of about 62 kilograms. That gives a total weight of just over 446 billion kilograms for all the people. The weight of an average ant is estimated to be about 2 milligrams, so for the ants to equal the weight of all the humans, there would need to be 223,000 trillion of them. Nobody really has much idea of the true figure for the number of ants in the world, but estimates range from 100 trillion to 10,000 trillion. Even taking the higher figure, the ants would be well behind the humans in weight.

It has also been estimated, however, that there are twenty-seven times as many termites as ants in the world, and termites are generally bigger than ants, so if this is right, there is good reason to believe that all the termites weigh more than all of us.

See alsoBEES 47; PANGOLINS 354

ART

22. Who was Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Thanks to Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and the 2003 film of the same title starring Scarlett Johansson, Vermeer’s painting of that name has become one of the world’s best-known works of art, but nobody knows who the girl depicted in the painting was.

The work, originally entitled Girl with a Turban, is thought to have been painted around 1665–7, and one suggestion is that she could be Vermeer’s eldest daughter Maria, who was eleven or twelve at the time. Apart from her being roughly the right age, however, there is no real evidence that she was the sitter.

Another suggestion is that she may have been Magdalena, the only daughter of Vermeer’s patron Pieter van Ruijven. The only supporting evidence for that idea is that van Ruijven once owned the painting. In any case, if the girl really is either Maria or Magdalena, it would raise the question of why Vermeer painted her against a totally dark background. Some identification of either the person or the location might have been expected in the picture.

23. What is going on in Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas?

Velásquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas (‘The Ladies-in-Waiting’) is one of the most enigmatic in the history of art. Velásquez himself is seen in the painting, working on a large canvas, but we cannot see what he is painting, as only the back of the canvas faces us. Behind Velásquez is a mirror in which we can clearly see King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain, but it is unclear whether the mirror reflects Velásquez’s painting or is showing us the king and queen standing outside the painting and watching the scene as Velásquez paints someone or something else.

The other figures in the painting only add to the mystery. At the centre stands the five-year-old infanta Margaret Theresa, who is attended by two ladies-in-waiting, who are the Meninas of the title. On her right are two dwarfs, one of whom is nudging a large dog with his foot. Behind them, the infanta’s chaperone may be seen talking to a bodyguard, who is the only figure in the painting who cannot be identified. Right at the back of the painting is the queen’s chamberlain, Don José Nieto Velásquez, who is caught in a pose on a staircase with one foot on a higher step than the other. It is impossible to judge whether he is coming into the room or leaving it. It is also unknown whether this Velásquez was related to the painter or not.

Some say that Velásquez is painting the infanta, who at the time was the only child of the king and queen, and the function of the other characters in the painting was to keep the young child entertained while she sat for the painting. Meanwhile, her parents are watching, as seen in the mirror. Several of the characters, however, are seen looking out of the canvas directly at the viewer. Some have taken this to suggest that the whole painting depicts the viewpoint of the king and queen as they watch Velásquez painting their daughter. The fact that one of those looking directly out of the picture at us is Velásquez himself adds further mystery to the question of who is looking at whom. Perhaps the fundamental uncertainty is conveyed by the idea of looking at a painting and seeing the painter looking back at us.

No two art critics or historians seem to agree on their interpretation of this picture. All they agree on is that it is a masterpiece.

24. Did Thomas Gainsborough use skimmed milk in his Study of a Cow?

In the 1770s Thomas Gainsborough experimented with unusual innovative techniques to improve the pictorial quality of his drawings on paper. According to the 1772 Royal Academy exhibition catalogue, his drawings were ‘in imitation of oil painting’. Gainsborough himself, in 1773, revealed ‘my secret of making those studies’ when using chalk for his drawing, telling how he would dip his paper in skimmed milk to adhere the white chalk to it, thereby building up layers of chalk and colour. Finally, he would complete the work with varnish or, as he put it, ‘float it all over with Gum’.

The collection at Tate Britain includes Gainsborough’s Study of a Cow in a Landscape, which it dates to 1758–9. This is a pencil drawing on paper which, according to the Tate’s own description of the work, ‘has been coated with a layer of fixative which has subsequently discoloured’. They go on to say: ‘Gainsborough recommended “skim’d milk” for fixing chalk, but whether he used the same substance for fixing pencil is not known.’

Using skimmed milk to fix a drawing of a cow would have been somehow appropriate, but whether Gainsborough would have let such a thing influence him is unlikely.

25. Why do most portrait sitters incline their heads to the right?

Several studies of portraits have identified a significant bias in the way the face of the sitter is inclined. One comprehensive study of nearly 1,500 portraits painted in Europe over the last 500 years found that roughly 60 per cent showed the sitter favouring the left side of their face. Male portraits showed this tendency 56 per cent of the time, portraits of women 68 per cent. Later studies confirmed this finding, extending it back to the fourteenth century and American paintings. Paintings depicting the Crucifixion were found to display the left side of Christ’s face more prominently an astounding 90 per cent of the time. A recent study showed that the same is true of selfie photographs: the left side of the face is preferred.

Why this should be so is not at all clear. One theory links it to the differences in function between the two sides of the brain. Emotions are said to be controlled by the right brain, which also controls the muscles in the left side of the face. This would tie in with other research reporting that the left sides of our faces are seen as more sensitive and generally pleasing. On the other hand, other studies have shown that when we look at other people’s faces, we pay more attention to their right sides, which is odd if we think the left side is more sensitive and pleasing.

Such lateral preferences are often most simply explained by the fact that a large majority of people are right-handed, but the portrait results still seem to be true for left-handed painters. The main exception seems to be self-portraits, but as these were generally painted with the use of a mirror, even that may confirm the general finding.

The ambidextrous Leonardo da Vinci was one of the few painters who showed no left or right preference in his portraits, though it should be noted that the Mona Lisa, who is the subject of his most famous portrait, is indeed inclining the left side of her face towards the artist. And so is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (→ 22).

See alsoAUSTEN 33; AZTECS 38; BIBLE 53; CODES 107; HITLER 232; HUMAN EVOLUTION 238; LEONARDO 273; MUSIC 330–1; OPERA 348

ASPARAGUS

26. Does asparagus make our urine smell?

The science of post-asparagus urine sniffing goes back to 1731 when the Scottish mathematician and doctor John Arbuthnot wrote that ‘asparagus affects the urine with a foetid smell’. Marcel Proust said that asparagus ‘transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume’, while Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels in 1781, wrote that ‘A few stems of asparagus eaten shall give our urine a disagreeable odour’.

For almost 200 years, asparagus retained this reputation, until in the 1950s some research papers appeared suggesting that the effect of asparagus on urine was not universal – it was detectable in some people but not others. In 1980 a classic experiment was conducted in Israel in which subjects were asked to sniff not only their own urine but that of other subjects who may or may not have eaten asparagus. The conclusion was that people differ not in the production of smelly post-asparagus urine but in the ability to detect the smell: ‘Those who could smell the odour in their own urine could all smell it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus, whether or not that person was able to smell it himself.’ They also reported that 10 per cent of their subjects could detect the smell even at very low concentrations, which suggested that some people were hypersensitive to the odour.

In the 1980s research generally seemed to support the view that we all produced the smell, but only some of us could detect it, and chemists even identified a number of sulphurous compounds, including methanethiol, in post-asparagus urine that could be producing it. A study in 2011, however, reported that three out of thirty-seven subjects produced urine after eating asparagus in which the characteristic smell could not be detected by any of the other subjects.

Researchers seem to be coming round to the view that the ability to produce the smell and the ability to detect it are two distinct traits, probably genetically based. According to another report in 2011, ‘excreting may be a simple one-gene character, with the allele for excreting dominant, but more work needs to be done’. The same report also concluded that ‘There is no family data on the smelling/non-smelling trait… so more work needs to be done on this trait as well’.

ASTRONOMY

27. How do stars form in galaxies?

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe consisted of radiation and subatomic particles. Out of that were formed the stars, star clusters and galaxies we know today, but how that happened is a matter of intense dispute. Did the small particles clump together into bigger and bigger celestial bodies, or did the early universe consist of even huger bodies than we know today, which later split into galaxies?

On the one hand, everything is being brought together by the gravitational pull of every particle on every other particle; on the other hand, the energy of the expansion of the early universe is flinging everything apart. Our knowledge of what must have happened in the earliest moments after the Big Bang led astronomers to produce the idea of dark matter and dark energy, without which everything would indeed have fallen apart. The gravitational forces exerted by the mass we can detect is far too little to hold it all together.

The latest hope for progress on this question lies in the study of some recently discovered dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way which have appeared in regions thought to be free of dark energy. These may provide a clue to where stars come from and how they form.

28. Why do space probes change speed?

When space probes are sent on long missions, their routes are often calculated to take them via the regions of planets or moons in order to use the gravitational fields of those bodies to add to their momentum. Gravity accelerates their speed in the region of the body before they are catapulted out into space again.

For over twenty years, precise monitoring of such craft has revealed something known as the ‘fly-by anomaly’, which causes an unexpected variation in the craft’s speed. In 1990 and 1992, when the Galileo space probe flew over Earth, its speed increased by a small but totally unexpected four millimetres per second on both occasions. In 1998 the spacecraft NEAR was measured to be going at thirteen millimetres per second faster than it ought to have been, and similar anomalies were found for Cassini in 1999 (whose speed was two millimetres per second less than expected), and for the Messenger and Rosetta probes in 2005.

In all these cases, the deviation from the expected speed was tiny, but it remains unexplained. Various theories have been put forward, including solar radiation, the influence of tides, magnetic fields, dark matter and a hypothetical gravitomagnetic field, but none of these has attracted great support, so the mystery remains.

29. Why is Betelgeuse shrinking?

Over the past twenty years, astronomical observations have shown that the star Betelgeuse seems to be getting smaller. Between 1993 and 2009 it was reported to have lost 15 per cent of its size, and nobody is sure why. Actually nobody is even sure whether these figures can be trusted or are just an illusion, but recent measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope seem to confirm that it is smaller than it used to be.

Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, is one of the brightest stars in our sky. It is a red supergiant 600 light years away; it is about 135,000 times as bright as our Sun, with a diameter about 700 times that of the Sun, and it is believed to be near the end of its life. Soon – which in astronomical terms means probably within a million years, and perhaps as soon as a thousand – it will explode into a massive supernova. In our skies, it will be as bright as the full moon, and it is possible that its decrease in size is part of its process of dying. It could also be due to a number of other factors:

(i)

Red supergiants do not have a true surface. They are just a core surrounded by massive balls of gas, so we may be measuring something happening in the atmosphere of Betelgeuse rather than the star itself.

(ii)

Betelgeuse is rotating but it is not spherical; it may have just turned and be presenting a smaller surface towards us.

(iii)

There is evidence that such stars undergo an oscillation in their apparent size. Two such pulsations have already been identified for Betelgeuse. We may have just caught it in another slimming period which will be followed by one in which it regains its former size.

(iv)

The whole thing may be an illusion caused by temperature differences in different parts of Betelgeuse’s atmosphere.

A decent supernova has not been widely seen on Earth since 1054, and an explosion of Betelgeuse promises to be even brighter than that one. Those who hanker after great astronomical events would be delighted to hear that Betelgeuse’s weight loss is a real sign of its impending death, but the truth is we just don’t know.

30. What, if anything, was the Star of Bethlehem?

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. Matthew 2:1–2 (King James Bible)

Was there really such a star, or is Matthew’s tale just a piece of religious romanticism?

The birth of Christ is now dated at around 4 BC. It cannot have been later, for that was the date Herod the Great died and Herod is clearly identified as king at the time of the birth. So what was going on in the sky at that time? Anyone in search of astronomical verification of the star has a surprising number of candidates to choose from.

The only genuine star among those candidates is found in the records of Chinese astronomers which identify a new star being born in the constellation of Aquila in 4 BC. A new star, or nova, can be bright when it first appears, then fade, so it might have drawn the attention of the wise men. Whether one tiny new star could have been seen as sufficiently important to draw them to Jerusalem, however, seems unlikely.

A more visually striking candidate is not a star at all but a comet. In 5 BC a bright comet appeared in the constellation of Capricorn, which was again recorded by the Chinese. This would have appeared in the southern sky with its tail pointing upwards. This could be taken as a south-pointing signpost, and Bethlehem was due south of Jerusalem, so following the ‘star’ might have taken the wise men to the right place. One problem with this theory, however, is that comets tended to be associated with disasters or other destructive events.

A third idea rejects the star or comet hypotheses and suggests that the event was a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, which would have brought the Sun, the Earth and those two planets into close alignment in the sky on three closely spaced occasions. The appearance of two bright planets together in the sky would have made quite an impact on people who believed in astrological portents.

Finally, the Greek astronomer George Banos published a paper in 1979 suggesting that the ‘star’ was in fact the planet Uranus, which the Magi had discovered some 1,800 years before William Herschel did so.

See alsoBIG BANG 54–6; BLACK HOLES 70–1; COSMOLOGY 117–26; ENERGY 172–4; MARS 285–6; MILKY WAY 315–17; OUTER SPACE 350; SOLAR SYSTEM 441–4; UNIVERSE 463–7; VENUS 479–80

ATILLA

31. How did Atilla die?

The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in eastern Europe and central Asia between the first and fifth centuries AD. Little is known about them until the fifth century when, under the leadership of Atilla, they became an unlikely threat to the Roman empire, both in the east and the west. His campaigns stretched from Persia to Constantinople to Roman Gaul and to Italy itself, all of which he attempted and failed to conquer. In 453, at the estimated age of forty-seven, Atilla died, though the cause of his death has never been clear.

The only contemporary account was by a chronicler named Priscus, who said that Atilla suffered a severe nosebleed at a banquet held to celebrate his marriage and choked to death in an alcoholic stupor. A later analysis of this story from a more modern medical viewpoint suggested that the nosebleed might have been a symptom of internal bleeding caused by a condition called oesophageal varices, which can be caused by heavy drinking. However, the Roman chronicler Marcellinus Comes, writing some eighty years later, reported that Atilla was stabbed by his wife.

For over 1,500 years, historians had only these two versions to choose from and most went for Priscus’ account, despite the fact that other accounts of Atilla’s life portrayed him as a man of simple tastes who did not drink excessively. Comes’ account was generally viewed simply as a means of blackening Atilla’s name.

In 2005, however, a new theory emerged in a book by the American philologist Michael A. Babcock called The Night Atilla Died. In his view, Atilla had made enough enemies during his rise to power and subsequent conquests for an assassination to be a distinct possibility. Indeed, there is evidence of a failed plot to have him killed a year or two earlier. A painstaking reconstruction of the politics of the time led Babcock to believe that Priscus’ account was just a cover story for an assassination plotted by Emperor Marcian, ruler of the Eastern Roman empire in the 450s.

According to legend, after Atilla’s death his body was placed in a triple coffin of gold, silver and iron, which was buried under a riverbed. The burial party were all killed when they returned, so that nobody would be able to find the body. Until it is found, however, there seems no hope of advancing our knowledge of how he died.

32. What language did the Huns speak?

Under Atilla, the Huns conquered much of Asia and a good deal of Europe to form a huge empire, yet we do not know what language they spoke. It is not even known if they had a script for writing their language, and the little we do know has come through the writings of others. All we have to go on are a few unidentified inscriptions on pots which may or may not have been part of the Hunnic language, and three words which are the only ones generally agreed to be Hunnic: medos, a drink possibly similar to mead; kamos, a drink made from barley; and strava, a word for a funeral feast. These words, together with the names of various Huns, have fuelled a long debate about the origins of the language, but there is no agreement on which other languages it may be related to, if any.

AUSTEN

33. What did Jane Austen look like?

Only two paintings of Jane Austen exist that were painted in her lifetime: both were by her sister Cassandra, and one is a back view. The other, an unfinished portrait, was painted in 1817, the year of Jane Austen’s death, and depicts her looking pale and rather sickly. Her family reportedly declared the painting a bad likeness, and fifty years after her death her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh commissioned an artist to paint a more flattering portrait of her.

His own account of his aunt, in his 1872 Memoir of Jane Austen, described her as ‘very attractive’ and went on to say:

Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls round her face.

In 2014 the forensic artist Melissa Dring was commissioned to produce a waxwork of Jane Austen based on that description. Austen lovers generally approved of the result, which was definitely more cheerful than Cassandra’s portrait, but whether it looked more like her or was just an idealized chocolate-box type of image is open to debate.

34. What did Jane Austen die of?

In the last year of her life, Jane Austen suffered from increasing ill health. She described her illness as ‘bile’ and a form of rheumatism, but she found herself having difficulty walking or finding the energy to work. She died on 18 July 1817 at the age of forty-one.

For many years, her death was attributed to a chronic disorder of the adrenal glands now known as Addison’s disease, but recently a number of alternative diagnoses have been made. One suggestion is Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer affecting the white blood cells. Another idea is bovine tuberculosis, which is now associated with drinking unpasteurized milk. And finally there is Brill–Zinsser disease, a recurrent form of typhus which she is known to have had as a child.

Unsurprisingly, there is little enthusiasm for the idea of exhuming Jane Austen’s body and trying to settle the matter.

AUSTRALIA

35. When did the first Aboriginal people reach Australia?

Until about 12,000 years ago, Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania were joined by a land bridge and together formed a continent which has been called Sahul. The earliest colonization of Australia is thought to have been by settlers crossing this land bridge from New Guinea. These settlers would have been the ancestors of the Aboriginals, but when they first reached Australia has been hotly debated.

The traditional view, supported by carbon dating of various artefacts, puts their arrival at 40–45,000 years ago. Carbon dating, however, is considered an unreliable method in general for dating items more than 40,000 years old, so the first Aboriginals would be stretching it to its limits and the true answer could be further back in history.

More recently, thermoluminescence has been increasingly used for dating ancient objects. Like carbon dating, it is based on measurements of radioactivity, but it is not linked to the decay of an isotope of carbon, so is not subject to the same limitations.

A few sites in northern Australia have been dated by thermoluminescence to around 50,000 years ago, but recent finds in western Australia have been dated to 70,000 years ago, while reef deposits in Queensland have suggested that humans may have been there up to 100,000 years ago. The most extreme suggestion came in 1998 when data from a rock shelter in northern Australia were published suggesting that artefacts had been found in levels of sand that had been dated by thermoluminescence to between 116,000 and 176,000 years ago.

Until we have more confidence in the results of thermoluminescence as a dating method, or some more accurate method is developed, the debate will continue.

See alsoBIRDS 69; DOLPHINS 156; HUMAN EVOLUTION 240; KANGAROOS 265; MICE 313; PLATYPUS 374

AUTISM

36. Can vaccines cause autism?

In the 1990s huge debates erupted on the question of whether certain vaccinations that were routinely being given to children increased the chance of those children developing autism. In the USA the prime suspect was thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury that was often added to extend the shelf life of various vaccines. In the UK the argument centred on MMR vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella, which were thought by some to have an effect on the brain development of children.

Many studies followed on both sides of the argument, but the majority of medical opinion seems to support the view that vaccines do not cause autism and the entire scare resulted from the fact that the first symptoms of autism tend to occur in children around the same time as vaccines are administered. Nevertheless, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and vaccine manufacturers reached an agreement that thimerosal should be reduced or eliminated in all childhood vaccines for children aged six or younger.

Since then, further studies have been published showing that the rates of autism among children receiving thimerosal-containing vaccines are no worse than among children given thimerosal-free vaccines. Despite this, however, several courts in various countries have awarded damages to children for alleged vaccine-induced autism. In 2012 an Italian court ruled that a child’s autism had been caused by the MMR vaccine; in 2014 a court in Milan awarded compensation to a child who was adjudged ‘more likely than not’ to have suffered brain damage and autism because of the neurotoxic mercury and aluminium in a vaccine that contained thimerosal.

Doctors and politicians may be convinced that vaccines do not cause autism, but the legal profession is clearly not so sure.