The world in brief

Each week the Null’s very own Dr Andrew Impey will be keeping you up to date with all the latest gossip from the world of science and technology. All are interesting; most are thought provoking and some are just plain stupid.

This Week in the News

An American TV host recently flew to the Himalayas to make a documentary about the Yeti and within days of arriving, he’d stumbled across three suspect footprints. Was this a stroke of luck, or was it all just a little too convenient to be true? Well the locals have poo pooed his claim, saying his prints show five toes whereas the yeti has four – so there. And they see the yeti all the time so they should know.

The more people that are packed into a cinema, the more we’ll enjoy the film. This is because movie-goers influence one another and gradually synchronise their emotional responses. Apparently when we go to the cinema we don’t just look at the screen; looking at the expressions of people around us is just as important to our movie experience. And popcorn obviously.

If you bang your leg while hiking, the best way to relieve the pain is to encounter a grizzly bear. The stress hormone noradrenaline will flood into the bloodstream and disrupt the brain’s pain-processing pathway. The trouble is, if you’ve clobbered your leg on a rock, how are you going to run away from the aforementioned man-eating rug?

Chimpanzees have a memory far superior to humans. In a straight contest between chimps and university undergrads using a touch screen monitor, the little hairy fellas whooped the backsides of the students fair and square. Numbers briefly appeared on a screen and once they had disappeared, the subject had to touch the screen in the exact position, relative to ascending value. The results suggest that the chimps have a photographic memory allowing them to memorise patterns at a mere glance.

We don’t all possess green fingers in the garden so thank goodness for ‘super bulbs’. The bulbs of plants such as tulips or lilies are actually capable of adjusting their position in the soil until they reach the correct planting depth. This movement is brought about by contractile roots, moving the bulb in a phenomenon known as negative growth. Some bulbs have been shown to descend twelve inches in the soil over a period of ten years.

When Sonoran Desert toads get angry, they secrete venom which contains a hallucinogen called bufotenine. Now it isn’t illegal to keep one of these toads, but it is illegal to use them to get high, and that’s exactly what some people in Colorado are doing. The venom is extracted; heated to break down the toxins; dried and then finally smoked. People have chased the dragon, now kids are smoking the toad.

Finally, in a recent survey, 82 percent of adult Americans believe in God, while 79 percent believe in miracles. Equal numbers said they believe in Darwin's theory of evolution and creationism, whilst around one-third said they believed in UFOs, witches and astrology.

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