Guinea worms grow up to a meter long inside the bodies of their victims, then escape by burrowing out of their skin. The only treatment, even now, is to speed the process of exit by winding the worms onto a stick as they emerge.
Thirst, curiously, is not a reliable indication of how much water you need. People allowed to drink all the water they want after getting very thirsty usually report feeling slaked after drinking only one-fifth the amount they have lost through perspiration.
Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it’s just 6 percent.
Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, so the thinking is that if you take a lot of them in the form of supplements, you can counter the effects of aging. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to support that.
A striking marker of just how confused nutrition advice can be was a finding by an advisory committee for the American Heart Association that 37 percent of American nutritionists rate coconut oil – which is essentially nothing but saturated fat in liquid form – as a “healthy food.” Coconut oil may be tasty, but it is no better for you than a big scoop of deep-fried butter.
Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about aging in his wife’s Ladies’ Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human aging. Harman’s idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year.
Commercial boot polishes didn’t become available until the 1890s.
Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn’t scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had “a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.” But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.
Donkin’s invention preserved foods beautifully, though the early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them.
Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives.
When more than one teenager is in a car, for instance, the risk of an accident multiplies by 400 percent.
Altogether it is thought – though it is really only a guess, based on extrapolating from cratering rates on the Moon – that some two thousand asteroids big enough to imperil civilized existence regularly cross our orbit. But even a small asteroid – the size of a house, say – could destroy a city. The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth-crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.
Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells – that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs. Breast cancers, for instance, don’t just grow randomly within the breast, but normally begin in the milk ducts.
In 1846, America had more than 650 whaling ships, roughly three times as many as all the rest of the world put together.
Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner – an action that I expect prompted my.
To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake – always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake – to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free.
Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand. In Norway, hoping to impress colleagues, he once tried to order a dish of raspberries and was brought twelve beers.
Two of the victims died. Mary fled but was recaptured and spent the remaining twenty-three years of her life under house arrest on North Brother Island in the East River until her death in 1938. She was personally responsible for at least fifty-three cases of typhoid and three confirmed deaths, but possibly many more. The particular tragedy of it is that she could have spared her unfortunate victims if she had just washed her hands before handling food.
The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus. A study in Switzerland in 2008 found that flu virus can survive on paper money for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot. Without snot, most cold viruses could survive on folding money for no more than a few hours.
I was pretty certain that the man in the seat across the aisle was a smoker – he looked suitably out of sorts – and even more sure that the young man ahead of me must be. I have yet to meet a grown-up reader of comic books who does not also have an affection for tobacco and tattoos.