Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn't Know About....

Discover Magazine | 20 Things You Didn't Know About...

• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Viruses
  

  Image: Wikimedia commons

  1  Viruses are not alive: They do not have cells, they cannot turn food into energy, and without a host they are just inert packets of chemicals.

  2  Viruses are not exactly dead, either: They have genes, they reproduce, and they evolve through natural selection.

  3  Scientists have been debating this issue since 1892, when Dmitry Ivanovsky, a Russian microbiologist, reported that an infection in tobacco plants spreads via something smaller than a bacterium. That something, now called the tobacco mosaic virus, appears on this page (magnified and colorized).

  
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Light
  The first light in the universe, the light used to push spacecraft, and the light produced by kicking the head of a walrus.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Digestion
  #15: In which painful condition does your body literally start eating yourself from within?
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Computer Hacking
  What's the connection between Steve Wozniak, the Pope, and Henry Kissinger? That's right, it's hacking.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Sugar
  Did you know that most of the sugar you eat comes from beets? And that sugar in deep space may be a chemical precursor to life on Earth? Find out these and more sugary facts.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hurricanes
  A typical hurricane releases some 600 trillion watts of heat energy, equivalent to 200 times the world’s total electrical generating capacity.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Eclipses
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Movies
  4) Some things never change: Edison’s early film loops included one showing “cooch” dancers; another reenacted the decapitation of Mary, Queen of Scots—the first porn and horror flicks.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Tunnels
  New York has a forgotten one, Texas has a $2 billion wasted one, and Switzerland's building the longest.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Money
  11) In a study last year, researchers found more cocaine residue on U.S. bills than on any other currency. Also found on money: staphylococcus bacteria and fecal matter. 17) The world’s first ATM accepted only checks laced with identifying traces of radioactive carbon-14. The inventor claimed users “would have to eat 136,000 checks” for the radioactivity to have any dangerous effects.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Time
  3) Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. 19) Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Television
  What did the world's first TV look like? How big is the largest plasma TV in the world? Which mission did NASA lose the video recordings of?
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Fat
  Body fat can kill you, keep you warm, or power your boat.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Elections
  5) On election night in 1952, TV viewers saw Walter Cron­kite sitting beside UNIVAC 1, which famously called the race for Eisenhower after only 7 percent of the vote had been tallied. 6) But it was a lie: Cronkite sat beside a cardboard panel with blinking Christmas lights. The real computer was projecting returns in Pennsylvania.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Genius
  7) Many 19th- and 20th-century creative geniuses acquired a reputation for promiscuity. Examples include Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell. 8) One theory suggests that male geniuses are unusually endowed with enthusiasm for risk taking, which is notoriously testosterone-linked.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Telescopes
  From Galileo to the Hubble, viewing space has come a long way.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Sports Technology
  From luge suits to computerized tennis ball trackers, sports technology has chartered a path for modern athletes to move faster, go higher, and stay safer.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Oil
  16) In oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan, villagers could once dig a hole in the ground with their hands, drop in a live coal, and start a fire. 17) In the United States, when people first noticed oil, they bottled it, slapped a label on, and sold it as a health tonic.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... The Summer Solstice
  10) Due to continued shifting of Earth’s axis, the Tropic of Cancer is now misnamed. On the current June solstice, the sun actually appears in the constellation Taurus. 8) Modern-day druids gather at England’s Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Many still don Celtic attire, even though a civilization known as the Beaker People finished Stonehenge a millennium before the Celts turned up.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Recycling
  Happy Earth Day! Now help fix the planet.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Sex
  10) The spiny anteater, an egg-laying mammal native to Australia and New Guinea, has a penis with four heads, but only two fit into the female at once. 17) Only a few vertebrates besides humans copulate face to face. Among those that sometimes do this: hamsters, beavers, and some primates, such as bonobos and orangutans.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Relativity
  1) Who invented relativity? Bzzzt—wrong. Galileo hit on the idea in 1639. 8) Although Einstein was a teetotaler, when he finally completed his theory of relativity, he and his wife drank themselves under the table—the old-fashioned way to mess with your space-time continuum.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science Fiction
  19) After Philip K. Dick’s death, fans built an android likeness of him that mimicked his mannerisms and quoted his writings. 20) In 2005, the Dickbot was misplaced by a baggage handler. It remains at large.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Snow
  11) Don’t eat the red snow, either: “Watermelon snow” smells like fresh watermelon and gets its ruddy color from a species of pigmented algae. The snow tastes great, but eating it will give you the runs. 17) Inuit cultures probably don't have hundreds of words for snow. Many linguists say there are so many Inuit dialects and so many ways to parse a word that it’s like counting how many words Europeans have for love.
  
  
• 20 Things You Didn't Know About... Gold
  10) Gold is virtually indestructible and has been highly valued throughout history, so humans have always recycled it. Upwards of 85 percent of all the gold ever found is still being used today. 12) For more than 70 years, the standard treatment for rheumatoid arthritis was regular injections of a liquid suspension of gold, which acts as an anti-inflammatory. Doctors still don’t know why.