Alas, it has been a while since I’ve written a new LSNED article. There are only 24 hours in a day, you know!

Twenty-four seems like an arbitrary number to choose for hours in a day. Consider that somebody along the way had to decide how long an hour was, and how many could squeeze into one day. So just where did the number come from?

It appears the Egyptians are the architects of our daily scheduling. In ancient times, their numbering system was based on 12, just as ours is based on 10. It is believed they learned to count using the joints of their fingers (three on each finger) making 12 the natural sized group. Frankly, that’s no more strange than how we now base everything on 10 because we have ten fingers/thumbs.

Any way you count it, the Egyptians loved their twelves, so they opted to decree there were twelve parts to the day, and twelve parts to the night. For a long time, these twelve parts would stretch and grow throughout the year as sunlight varies with the seasons. It was the Greek mathematician, Hipparchus, who first set about trying to standardize the time periods, but this was not widely practiced until the 4th century.

The word hour began as hore or hora, but the H has fallen silent since early Roman times.

If you’re hoping for more LSNED’s, I suggest you poke back into the archives with this article on clocks that let you smell the time. And next time you complain about not having enough hours in the day, at least know you know who to point your triple-jointed finger at. Yes indeed, we all… clock like an Egyptian.

• Source: Curious About Astronomy – Cornell University
• Source: Origin of the word Hour – Online Etymology Dictionary

I was talking with an amateur astronomer this morning who, in reference to another astronomer and blogger I mentioned, said “He’s great… except that he believes in black holes.”

The comment caught me off guard. Up until that moment I had no idea that “black holes” was a topic of controversy. I dug into research as soon as I got home.

A black hole is the name for a small body of matter floating in the cosmos that is incredibly dense. Like the entire sun being compressed into a ball the size of a city. It is black because the density creates such a strong gravitational field that light itself is pulled back into itself.

If light can’t get out, we can’t possibly see it to prove it exists. However, astronomers observe the outside affects of a black hole and determine, though they can’t point to it, exactly where the black hole must be.

Just like earth and our neighboring planets orbit around the sun (being the most dense, and thus our gravity boss), astronomers can see stars orbiting around a spot in space. Something must be there at the center creating the orbit, and the best guess is that the something is a black hole.

Another way to spot a black hole is from bursts of x-rays. As a star gets too close to a black hole it begins moving faster and faster, heating up in the process. When the gas of the star reaches such temperatures it begins to emit x-rays. Eventually, as the star spirals ever closer to the black hole it too will become invisible, but outside of the “horizon” of the black hole (the tipping point of the gravitational field, a point of no return) we can observe these strange happenings. The clues add up to the presence of a black hole.

Proving the existence of black holes seems to be a case of “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…”, which leaves room for doubt as to whether or not there is a big duck at the center of our galaxy. Let’s take a look at the other side of the argument.

The anti-black-hole debate centers on one sticky issue, “The Information Paradox”. All the details are well beyond my understanding, but it boils down to this. You’ve perhaps heard of the law of conservation of energy… energy cannot be created or destroyed, but merely changed from one form to another. (A car’s forward momentum, through the friction of the brake pads, turns to heat dispersed into the air, etc.)

Well, there is a theory of quantum physics that says there must be a conservation of information. The information in question is sort of like DNA for particles at the smallest level. If matter was to collapse into a black hole, unable to escape, this information would no longer be accessible to the universe. To theoretical physicists, that’s a big problem.

Some of the proposed solutions involve fancy words like “11-dimensional supergravity” and other string-theory brain-busters that are well beyond the scope of the LSNED blog. If you will allow me to over-summarize, conveniently avoiding 500 more words of clumsy explanation, the leading anti-black-hole theory (the Holographic principle) is essentially arguing that a black hole is a mirage of sorts. Rather than a true physical black hole that gobbles up matter never to be seen again, it is a cosmic illusion that just appears that way to our simple three-dimensional brains.

Perhaps I will revisit that another day.

• Source: Black Holes – NASA
• Source: Black Hole Information Paradox – Wikipedia

There is a lot of hub-bub about a neutrino that was witnessed moving faster than the speed of light, a feat which was deemed impossible by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. The science community is working overtime to figure out if the experiment can be repeated and confirmed, as it would have a major impact on our understanding of physics.

I’ve been doing some reading to get a better grasp of what, exactly, a neutrino really is. It is a rather elusive particle, which adds an air of mystery (not to mention difficulty) to any observation experiments.

One thing I do know is that, at this very second, billions of neutrinos are passing straight through your body without even slowing down.

The existence of the tiny neutrino particle was proposed as a solution to some “missing energy” observed in radioactive decay. It was theorized that some sort of particle was carrying this energy away. Shortly thereafter Enrico Fermi worked out the specific role that the mystery particle needed to fill, dubbing it the neutrino due to it having no electromagnetic charge… the particle was neutral.

The fact that it is neither negatively or positively charged is what makes it so hard to detect. It has so little interaction with other particles that it can zip right through objects without stopping, slowing, or changing direction. All the neutrinos that are generated from our sun not only pass through your body, but right through the core of the earth and out the other side on their journey across the universe.

That’s the trouble. If they pass through the solid granite of the earth without a second thought, how can our scientists “capture” neutrinos in any sort of observation equipment? Studying neutrinos is a bit like trying to spot bigfoot… if bigfoot was also invisible and moving about the speed of light. All they have to go on is the footprints and broken branches left behind.

The original experiment that caught a glimpse of neutrinos occured in 1956. There was a big water tank. While the vast majority of neutrinos pass through silently, due to sheer volume they would sometimes collide and interact with protons in the water. This would create positrons, which would in turn create a pair of gamma rays if it collided with an electron. The gamma rays excited a scintillator, which is  a material that absorbs gamma rays and emits light. Finally, the tiny flashes of light were recorded by sensors inside the tank.

It was a Rube Goldberg machine on the atomic scale, but it worked. The experiments recorded about three light flashes per hour. More intricate, modern experiments can not only catch the existence of neutrinos, but capture information about the direction and speed of travel. The largest neutrino-catcher actually uses the solid ice of Antarctica as its water tank. Through this we are able to see evidence of cosmic explosions and supernovas far beyond the range of our telescopes.

The complexity required to observe neutrinos is why physicists are being extremely cautious about this new “faster than light” hypothesis.

Does this really explain what a neutrino is? Perhaps I should just leave it at the description by Frederick Reines, telling us that a neutrino is “the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being.”

• Source: All About Neutrinos – IceCube South Pole Neutrino Detector

Giraffes on the African plain primarily eat the leaves and buds of the Acacia tree. The tree has developed sharp thorns along its branches to try to fend off the herds, but the Giraffe has kept pace, evolving a long and dexterous tongue.

A giraffe’s tongue will be about 18 to 20 inches in length. It is prehensile, like a monkey’s tail, which means the muscles have adapted to be suited for grasping things. I’m quite confident that a giraffe might choose to gross out his friends every now and again by licking his own ear. I know I would if I could.

Their tongue is usually a greyish-pink or darker, perhaps to prevent the tongue from getting sunburn. When you spend 75% of your day in the African sun licking a tree, that would be a major concern.

A giraffe’s neck actually has the same number of bones as we do. Seven cervical vertebrae. (We mammals aren’t so different) However, each one of these individual bones is about 10 inches long.

The spots on a giraffe, while providing camouflage, also hint at an interesting pattern of blood vessels underneath the skin. Each brown spot corresponds with the outline of major blood vessels, with smaller offshoots that cover the inner area of the patches.

By moving blood through these veins, the giraffe can cool its internal system the same as a car’s radiator. As such, if you were to look at a giraffe through a infrared “heat-scope” you would see the same spot pattern shown in the hotter and cooler areas on its skin.

• Source: Giraffe: The Facts – Giraffe Conservation Society

The Paradox Frog, Pseudis paradoxa, is native to South America found in the warm tropical lowlands of the Amazon forest, and other regions in the neighbourhood.

It is considered a paradox after it thoroughly confused early biologists who happened upon it. They first decided that a young frog grew into an old tadpole, which would be the complete opposite of every other frog on earth. That, however, was just a misunderstanding of a very peculiar trait of this little froggy.

It’s babies are four times bigger than the parents.

While the adult Paradox Frogs are 7 centimeters (about 2.7 inches), which is pretty standard for frogs, the young tadpoles can be up to 25 cm (9.8 inches) from tip to tail. To put that in perspective for my human readers, that’s a 20-foot-tall teenager!

As the tadpoles go through their metamorphosis, sprouting legs, they will shrink down to adult size.

• Source: Psuedidae – Animal Diversity Web – Univ. of Michigan, Museum of Zoology

Dear LSNED,

I have a “microfiber” cloth in my kitchen that was advertised as a miracle. What is so special about it? After use, should I have it blessed or can it be cleaned normally?

-John Paul

Hey JP,

Technically, a microfiber is any fiber (as in a single strand of a textile) that is less than 1 denier. A denier is the mass, in grams, of a 9000 meter length of the fiber in question. The reason it is based on 9000 meters is because standard silk fibers created the standard weighing in at 1 denier. (The metric unit, based on a 1000 meter length, is called a tex.)

Microfibers are not particularly new. The first synthetic microfibers were developed in Japan in the early 1970s.  In 1989 the first commercial microfiber hit was launched as Ultrasuede, an easier to manufacture, easier to clean alternative to leather suede.

Since the 1990s, many households in Europe have picked up microfiber cloths as an effective cleaning tool, requiring fewer chemicals. Only recently have they been hitting store shelves in North America.

There is no big magic, mystery, or miracles about it. The fibers themselves are usually polyester. Just regular old plastic. The microfiber’s cleaning prowess comes from one simple concept; more surface area.

Your average cotton fiber is at least 40 times larger than a microfiber. With that alone, a microfiber cloth would have the same surface area as a cotton cloth four times as large. When microfibers are manufactured for cleaning, the fibers are further split giving each microfiber deep crevices in it’s surface and dramatically increasing the surface area even further.

When this cloth comes in contact with water, the physical forces come into play at a molecular level. Through a combination of things such as surface tension, capillary effects, and the Van der Waals force, water and particles are forcibly sucked into the fibers.

A dry microfiber cloth, made from polyester, will also build up a negative electrostatic charge that will have dust leaping into its snuggly clutches. They are often used for glasses and cameras because of their dust-trapping ability. It pulls abrasives away from the lens as opposed to rubbing them around and causing scratches.

For a cotton cloth, some sort of soap is used to attract and hold dirt and grease. Microfibers can do much of the same work without the soap.

Much of the trapped fibers can be rinsed away from the cloth, and again due to surface area, the remaining water will evaporate quickly. The cloths can be machine washed, but best left to dry on their own. Most especially do not use fabric softener, as we learned earlier it will leave a coating on your microfibers that will clog up much of the effective surface area.

Spotlessly yours,

• Source: What is Microfiber? – Microfiber.com

Dear LSNED,

Why do cats go crazy over catnip? Also, “a cat I know” acted strange after getting into some olives. Are they related?

-Percival Fluffington

Dear Percy,

First off, not all cats react to catnip. It appears to be genetic. Up until a kitten is three months old, they don’t care for catnip at all. After that, only about half of cats go ga-ga for it. If a cat’s parents are sensitive to the ‘nip, than the kitten likely will be as well. If only one parent delights in catnip, the offspring have a fifty-fifty chance of acquiring the taste.

Sadly, that seems to suggest that catnip as a source for human entertainment will fade out over the generations.

Catnip is a plant closely related to oregano, basil and spearmint. What makes it special is the presence of nepetalactone, a compound found within the oils that burst forth from catnip when it is rubbed or chewed. The scent of the nepetalactone is what drives cats nuts.

There is no conclusive study to say why cats have the reaction they do, but the flopping acrobatics of a cat rolling around the floor seems to be a common occurrence.

Bonus fact: Nepetalactone is also a strong insect repellent, ten times more effective than DEET. It can be found in some natural products to save you from bugs. Unfortunately, the compound degrades quickly and the repellent only lasts a couple hours.

Now, as for olives, which is a well documented cat stimulant,  it is most likely caused by the presence of oleic acid in the olives. This is a main ingredient of the pheremone that cats spread around when they rub their chin on something. For the same reason, cats have been known to go wild over squished ants, which also contain the oleic acid.

Floppingly Yours,

• Source: Catnip – Chemical & Engineering News
• Source: Quote from a research paper – Biology Notes