Image of the Baghdad Batteries courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

In 1936, a series of artifacts were discovered in the village of Khuyut Rabbou’a near Baghdad. At first glance, it appeared to be more of the same: terracotta pots. Not exactly a unique find in that part of the world. But two years later, in 1938, Wilhelm König, Director of the National Museum of Iraq , suggested an alternative explanation: the pots, made some 1,000 years before Alessandro Volta supposedly invented the device, were batteries.

Unlike most ancient pottery, the Baghdad or “Parthian” Batteries are each filled with a iron cylinder wrapped in copper sheeting. Fill it with an acidic liquid — anything from vinegar to lemon juice — and it would produce an electric current.

What were the Baghdad Batteries used for? Adding gold plating to silver objects (a process known as “electroplating”)? Acupuncture? Early magic tricks? Scholars are divided, and many of them disagree with the allegation that these are batteries at all. For what it’s worth, the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters dedicated an episode to the question, and decided that the Baghdad Batteries could very well have produced an electric current. If so, it was an amazingly advanced discovery on the part of the world’s oldest civilization.

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Yawning remains one of the enduring minor mysteries of life. Why do we yawn? Is yawning contagious? Despite a lot of research, the causes of yawning still remain unknown. A yawn is a reflex of simultaneous inhalation of air and stretching of the eardrums, followed by exhalation of breath. Yawning is associated with sleepiness, stress, lack of stimulation and boredom. Yawning is notable for its mysterious infectious quality- seeing a person seeing a person yawning, talking to someone on the phone who is yawning. Hell, I just yawned a second ago just thinking about yawning.

It is estimated that between 40-60% of people will automatically yawn if they see someone else do it. Scientists still do not definitively know why yawning is contagious, but they certainly have a lot of theories….
Some researchers believe that the proximate cause for contagious yawning may reside with mirror neurons, i.e., neurons that fire both when we perform an action and when we see someone else doing it.

The theory is that by simulating action even when watching an act, these neurons help recognize and understand other people’s actions and intentions. They have also been proposed as a driving force for imitation, which facilitates much of human learning, including language acquisition. These scientists believe yawning may originate from the same imitative impulse. In fact, a 2007 study found that young children with autism spectrum disorders do not increase their yawning frequency after seeing videos of other people yawning, in contrast to typically developing children. This supports the claim that contagious yawning is related to empathic capacity.

However, other researchers suggest that the purpose of yawning is to cool the brain so it operates more efficiently and keeps you awake. Thus, they believe that contagious yawning is not rooted in copying another person’s sleepiness, but is unconsciously triggered by empathic mechanisms which function to maintain group vigilance and cohesion. Still others propose that contagious yawning could be a result of an unconscious herding behavior – a covert way to signal to others, similar to when flocks of birds take flight at the same time. Another theory suggests contagious yawning might have helped early humans communicate their alertness levels and coordinate sleeping times.

The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is the fact that the phenomenon of contagious yawning is real. Hopefully, this research may point the way to where to look for more clues about this interesting and unconscious human behavior.

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Chloroform is a colorless, sweet-smelling, dense liquid that was once a popular anesthetic; its vapor depresses the central nervous system of a patient, allowing a doctor to perform various otherwise painful procedures. At normal temperature and pressures, chloroform is a highly volatile, clear, colorless, heavy, highly refractive, non-flammable liquid. It was discovered in July 1831 by American physician Samuel Guthrie (1782-1848); and independently a few months later by Frenchman Eugene Soubeiran (1797-1859) and Justus von Liebig (1803-73) in Germany. Chloroform was named and chemically characterized in 1834 by Jean-Baptiste Dumas (1800-84). Its anaesthetic properties were noted early in 1847 by Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794-1867).

In 1847, the Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson first used chloroform for general anesthesia during childbirth. The use of chloroform during surgery expanded rapidly thereafter in Europe. In the United States, chloroform began to replace ether as an anesthetic at the beginning of the 20th century; however, it was quickly abandoned in favor of ether upon discovery of its toxicity, especially its tendency to cause fatal cardiac arrhythmia analogous to what is now termed “sudden sniffer’s death”. Ether is still the preferred anesthetic in some developing nations due to its high therapeutic index (~1.5-2.2) and low price. Acute poisoning is associated with headache, altered consciousness, convulsions, respiratory paralysis and disturbances of the autonomic nervous system: dizziness, nausea, and vomiting are common. Chloroform may also cause delayed-onset damage to the liver, heart and kidneys. When used in anaesthesia, insensibility was usually preceded by a stage of excitation. This was followed by loss of reflexes, diminished sensation and loss of unitary consciousness.

Suffice it to say, chloroform is now most commonly associated with network prime time television portrayals of psychopaths, hell-bent on subduing their victims before spiriting them away to isolated places for the inevitable torture/murder ritual they just can’t seem to get enough of….

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What non-electrical, no-battery-required, low-tech toy has sold more than 300 million units since its debut in 1945? The Slinky, of course! For those readers that were raised by wolves, the Slinky is a toy consisting of a helical spring that stretches and can bounce up and down. It can perform a number of tricks, including traveling down a flight of steps end-over-end as it stretches and re-forms itself with the aid of gravity and its own momentum.

The Slinky was accidentally invented by naval engineer Richard James in 1943, when he was attempting to develop a meter designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. James was working with tension springs, when one of the springs fortuitously fell on the floor. He was fascinated by the fact that the spring kept moving after it hit the ground, and the idea for the Slinky was born. He spent the next two years figuring out the best steel gauge and coil to use for the toy. His wife Betty found the name for the new toy after discovering in the dictionary that the word “Slinky” is a Swedish word meaning traespiral – sleek or sinuous.

The Slinky made its debut at the at the Gimbel’s Department Store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the 1945 Christmas season and then at the 1946 American Toy Fair. The toy was an immediate smash hit, selling its entire inventory of 400 units in an impressive ninety minutes. The James’ were adamant that the Slinky remain inexpensive so that everyone could afford one (it was originally retailed for $1), and true to their word, the toy has remained modestly priced throughout its history.

It would be a mistake to think that the Slinky is merely a tangle-prone diversion that looks really cool undulating down a flight of stairs. It has become an indispensible staple in every High School Physics classroom, as its action demonstrates a variety of physical forces and principles, including the way waves work. (The Slinky, like all objects, tends to resist change in its motion). American troops during Vietnam used them as mobile radio antennas, and NASA has used them in zero-gravity physics experiments in the Space Shuttle. Slinky’s have also been used to make cool ‘laser gun’ sound effects by holding up a slinky in the air and striking one end, resulting in a metallic tone which sharply lowers in pitch. The Slinky has even made inroads in the fashion world, when “crazy eyes” were debuted in the 1980s (surprise, surprise), consisting of a pair of glasses that uses slinkies over the eyeholes attached to bloody-looking plastic eyeballs.

“What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, everyone knows it’s Slinky…
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, it’s fun for a girl and a boy.

ALL HAIL THE SLINKY!

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Have you ever wondered what the dreams of the blind are like? The answer depends on if and how long a blind person could ever see.

In REM phase sleep, blind people show little or no rapid eye movement. The longer they’ve been blind, the fewer the movements. It is generally thought that those who are congenitally blind or who have lost their sight at an early age (up to 3 or 4 years) do not dream with visual images. However, they report that the content of their dreams are rich with sounds, smells and tactile sensations. One man who had been blind since birth described his dreams thusly:

“In my dreams I never see, but I can hear, speak and also smell. Also, I very rarely dream that I am walking along the street with a cane. However, in real life, I do it very often.”

However, those who have lost their sense of sight as slightly older children (after about 7 or eight years old) report that at first they were able to dream with visual images, but gradually began to lose these images with time. In some cases, visual images eventually disappeared altogether. Those who have lost their sight at an adult age usually can dream some days with visual images, and other days without them.

Both sleep laboratory studies and home dream reports have reached the conclusion that individuals blinded before the age of about 5 report no visual imagery in dreams as adults, whereas those blinded after about the age of 7 are likely to retain visual imagery in dreaming. These studies have theoretical implications beyond the issue of blindness because they suggest that the mental imagery necessary for dreaming develops between the ages of 4 and 7. This helps to explain why preschool children rarely report dreams and that the reports are uneventful and static on the few occasions on which they do recall dreams. Thus, the findings on blind dreamers seem to lend support to a cognitive theory of dreaming.

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The much-parodied Rorschach inkblot test is a psychological evaluation technique that was developed in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach that was designed to determine the personality and emotional functioning of the test taker. During the test, the subject is shown a series of designs or inkblots and asked to provide his or her perception of what they might “mean”. The test taker’s observations are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex scientifically derived algorithms, or both.

Within twenty years of developing the inkblot test, Rorschach had become the Prom King of psychological testing, and continued to be hugely popular and influential through the 1950s. Alas, Rorschach and his inkblots finally fell from grace when a few intrepid psychiatrists dared to point out that “results” of the test were not only unverifiable, but also way too subjective to pass scientific muster.

While Rorschach testing has all but disappeared from contemporary therapeutic practice, it is still heavily relied on during court-ordered psychological evaluations; one study even found that use of the test in courts has increased by three times in the decade between 1996 and 2005 when compared to the previous fifty years. This has elicited considerable criticism from skeptics who believe that the test is woefully outdated and has no place in the high stakes context of a courtroom.

In July 2009, Wikipedia found itself at war with an outraged cadre of mental health professionals after it published the 10 original Rorschach plates on their website (as well as the most commonly cataloged subject responses). These diehard inkblot loyalists have accused Wikipedia of being “unethical” and “irresponsible” for publishing the plates, and even compared it to posting the answer sheet of next year’s SAT questions online. Moreover, they are afraid that the test plates will eventually be rendered meaningless if the test becomes widely disseminated.

Those who are interested in gerrymandering a perfect bill of mental health should start studying these contraband inkblots ASAP, before the furor gets bigger and the answers taken down. But then it may still be too late, since compromised tests are often shelved when people know the answers in advance…..

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“In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings – initially a blank slate – could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early ‘naive’ theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains.” Howard Earl Gardner’s, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

The theory of Multiple Intelligences was proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983 to more accurately define the concept of intelligence and to address the question whether methods which claim to measure intelligence (or aspects thereof) are truly scientific. The theory of Multiple Intelligences maintains that there are many different types of “intelligences” ascribed to human beings. In response to the question of whether or not measures of intelligence are scientific, Gardner suggests that each individual manifests varying levels of different intelligences, and thus each person has refined in subsequent years. It suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited. Instead, Dr. Gardner proposes eight different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These intelligences are:

Linguistic intelligence (“word smart”);
Logical-mathematical intelligence (“number/reasoning smart”);
Spatial intelligence (“picture smart”);
Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence (“body smart”);
Musical intelligence (“music smart”);
Interpersonal intelligence (“people smart”);
Intrapersonal intelligence (“self smart”); and
Naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”).

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