And Then You're Dead Read online

  On the Justin O. Schmidt sting pain index, a bee sting ranks as a mere 2 out of 4. Schmidt knows of what he speaks: He’s allowed himself to be stung by more than 150 insect species, turning him into a connoisseur of pain and allowing him to create the world’s first all-insect-sting pain scale.

  At the low end of the rating scale, clocking in at a mere 1.0, is the sweat bee—with a sting described by Schmidt as “light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”

  The honeybee, yellow jacket, and bald-faced hornet are all 2s. The bald-faced hornet’s sting, if you haven’t had the pleasure, feels “rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.”

  The yellow jacket is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

  Among the stings that rank above the yellow jacket is the red harvester ant, found in the southwest United States (different from the fire ant), whose sting is a 3 and feels “bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.”

  One of the fiercest stings in the insect world comes from the tarantula hawk. It’s found all over the world, including the United States, and it rarely stings people.* But if you should be so unfortunate, its sting is “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath.”

  The title of world’s worst sting belongs to that of the legendary bullet ant, found in the tropics of Central and South America. It bests the tarantula hawk’s sting not only with its intensity but with its endurance as well.

  According to Schmidt, the bullet ant provides a “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.”

  The bullet ant may have the most painful sting, but because it doesn’t attack in large numbers, it isn’t the most dangerous. That distinction falls to the honeybee. A lethal dose of honeybee stings is eight to ten bee stings per pound of body weight.

  Since each honeybee can sting you only once, if you’re 180 pounds you would need something like 1,500 bee stings to get a heart-stopping dose of their nerve toxin (assuming, of course, you aren’t allergic, in which case it may take only one).

  Note, however, that 1,500 is only a guideline. There have been outliers. Some have been stung by more and survived. In one notable instance a man survived despite doctors finding more than 2,200 stingers in his body. He was swarmed so aggressively that he dived under water. Unfortunately, the cloud of bees continued hovering over him and was so dense that he was forced to swallow bees in order to get a breath when he surfaced.

  He survived, probably because the stings were spread out over some minutes, but by the time the bees decided he was sufficiently punished, his face was black with stingers.

  No word on where that ranks on the Smith index.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Were Hit by a Meteorite?

  THE NEXT TIME you are stargazing, keep an eye out for the brightest objects in the sky. Excluding the moon, the brightest “star” you see shouldn’t be a star at all but the planet Venus. If you see something brighter, keep watching. You might have a problem. If the object gets brighter than the moon and then brighter than the sun, then you definitely have a problem—a meteorite* is headed straight at you. At that point, there’s no ducking or covering, so you might as well sit back and enjoy the show.

  Let’s say the speeding space rock you are standing under is one mile wide. That means that even though its devastation would be enormous, it would not be a planet killer.

  From your perspective the meteor would look like a star that kept getting brighter. First it would shine brighter than the sky’s brightest star (Sirius), then it would outshine Venus, then it would become even brighter than the moon—and then, surprisingly, you would die.

  “Surprisingly” because you might expect to live a few more seconds than you actually would. You might expect to be squashed, but you would actually die some tens of seconds before the rock hit you.

  As the meteorite plummeted toward Earth somewhere between 25,000 and 160,000 miles per hour, it would hit our atmosphere and start squeezing the air itself. Compressed air heats up. When you pump up your bike tire you might not notice, but the air inside the tire becomes just a tiny bit hotter.* The meteorite is doing the same thing, only it’s compressing a lot of air and it’s doing it quickly.

  Because of the compressed air below it, the meteor would become your own personal sun. The air around you would go from a cool 70 degrees to a scorching 3,000 in a matter of seconds. In that heat you would steam and blacken but probably not have time to ignite.

  If you were left in a 3,000-degree oven the heat would eventually turn you into an expanding gas, but, mercifully, you would spend only tens of seconds in that heat before the meteorite thudded on top of you, so at least there would be something of you left, even if it were only a lump of coal.

  It is not all bad news, though. You would have the distinction of being the first person to die by meteorite. However, you would not be the first person hit by one. That honor, as far as we can tell, belongs to Ann Hodges of Alabama, who was sitting on her couch in 1954 when a melon-size meteorite crashed through her roof, destroyed her radio, and hit her in the hip, resulting in a sizable bruise.

  The second confirmed meteorite victim was Michelle Knapp’s 1980 cherry-red Chevy Malibu. In 1992, Michelle heard a loud commotion in her garage, rushed out to investigate, and discovered her newly purchased $300 Malibu destroyed by a 26-pound, 4½-billion-year-old space rock.*

  Fortunately for Michelle, Ann, and the rest of humanity, these meteorites were relatively small. It takes a rock the size of a fist to even make it to Earth intact—everything smaller gets burned up in the atmosphere—and fist-size rocks carry so little momentum that the atmosphere slows them to roughly 100 miles per hour. If a fist-size meteorite landed near you it would only be good news—meteorites can go for $100 per ounce.*

  The largest meteoroid to hit Earth in modern times was the Tunguska strike that hit Russia in 1908. That rock was estimated to be 100 yards wide and hit with 300 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. It made the loudest sound in recorded history and was deafening 40 miles away. It happened to land in northern Siberia and no one was killed, although 80 million trees were blown down by the shock wave, and a farmer who was 40 miles from the impact was thrown through the air by the blast.

  Even if you weren’t standing under it, a mile-size rock would be significantly worse news. If it entered the atmosphere at a low angle, the heat would incinerate everything below it as it passed overhead, leaving a clear path of scorched Earth.

  Next would be the shock wave. A mile-wide rock would probably break up as it burned through the atmosphere, but the pieces would still hit with the same combined energy—the equivalent of a 500,000-megaton bomb (the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated was 50 megatons).

  And if it landed in the ocean? The water would hardly slow the supersonic, incandescent rock before it struck the bottom. Then the waves would form. The first wave from a mile-wide meteor would be more than 1,000 feet high and travel at Mach 1.* And that would be a small one. Much bigger waves would follow, with the largest arriving a few minutes later, after the displaced water reverberated back into the crater.*

  All that being said, a mile-wide meteor is enough for incredible destruction, but probably not enough to extinguish life on the planet. While the dust and smoke it would kick up would cool the globe and cause widespread crop failure and famine, most likely it wouldn’t wipe out all human life.

  Given the danger meteoroids represent, lots of resources are dedicated to spotting them early, although there’s still nothing we could do if we saw one coming. If we’re lucky, we’ll see any potential planet killer a year or two out. If we’re unlucky and the meteoroid comes from an unexpected an
gle, we’ll have no warning at all, which is something to keep in mind if you find yourself underneath a twinkling star that keeps getting brighter.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Lost Your Head?

  IF YOUR BRAIN were snatched out of your head, you would die. Doctors decide whether you’re dead by measuring your brain’s electrical signals, and you need to have a brain to have any signals. So without one, you’re kaput. Not surprising.

  What is surprising is how much of your brain you could lose and keep functioning. You’re probably thinking your brain is crucial, but remember, that’s your brain doing the thinking—not exactly an unbiased source.

  If you’re a chicken, not only is your brain unimportant, you could do without your entire head. How do we know? Look at Mike the Headless Chicken, born in 1945 in Fruita, Colorado.

  On September 10, 1945, Mike the chicken was headed for the dinner plate. His owner, the farmer Lloyd Olsen, took him to the backyard and chopped off his head with an ax. Much to farmer Olsen’s surprise, Mike shook off the injury and carried on exactly as before—pecking at the ground for food (or at least trying to). Mike toured the country for two years before finally choking to death (he had to be fed with an eye dropper). How did he survive the ax?

  Doctors at the University of Utah determined the blade had indeed removed his head but left Mike’s brain stem intact. The brain stem controls basic functions like heartbeat, breathing, sleeping, and eating, which, if you get down to it, is about all a chicken does. Mike’s arteries clotted before he could bleed to death and he was free to go about his business.*

  In chickens as well as humans, the brain stem plays a crucial role in life from moment to moment, because without it you wouldn’t be able to breathe or control your heartbeat. Damage any other part of the brain, and the results are less certain. The brain is malleable and can transfer jobs to other undamaged regions. It’s also split into left and right hemispheres, and if the damage is isolated to one side it can withstand a shocking amount, as we can see in the case of Phineas Gage.

  Railroad construction had somewhat lax safety standards in the early 1800s, particularly for the dynamite crew. Phineas Gage’s job, as a part of that crew, was to pour gunpowder into holes bored in rock and then tamp it down with a 1¼-inch-thick, 3½-foot-long metal rod—but before striking the gunpowder he had to make sure to add a bit of sand so that he wouldn’t ignite it.

  On September 3, 1848, Phineas Gage forgot to add the sand.

  When he hit the gunpowder it exploded and fired the metal rod through his jaw, behind his left eye, through the left hemisphere of his brain, and out the top of his head before landing a few hundred yards away.

  Not only did the bar not kill him, Gage never even lost consciousness. After a month he had almost entirely recovered, although according to his friends his personality did seem to change. The consensus, post-bar-through-head, was that he was more irritable. After the accident Gage left the railroad and went on a publicity tour with his bar and lived for another twelve years.

  Gage was, of course, lucky. Though the bar passed through his brain, the damage was contained to the left hemisphere, and because some of the most critical functions have backups in the opposing side, if you are going to shoot a rod through your head it’s much better to go front to back or top to bottom and destroy only one hemisphere than it is to fire the rod ear to ear and destroy both.

  Another reason Phineas survived is that large chunks of the brain don’t seem to be doing much of anything, or at the very least are redundant. If the damage happens slowly, you can afford to lose even more than Phineas did, as in the case of a student of the British neurologist John Lorber.

  In the late 1970s, Lorber was a professor at Sheffield University in England and noticed that one of his honor students had a remarkably large head. He recommended the student get a CAT scan. The scan didn’t just reveal a problem with the student’s brain, it showed he barely had one at all—95 percent of it was cerebro-spinal fluid, with only a thin crust of gray matter pinned against his skull.

  This condition isn’t totally remarkable—it’s called hydrocephalus, and it’s basically like having a leaky pipe in your brain. The leaking fluid gradually pushes your brain outward against your skull. If it happens when you’re young and your bones are still malleable, the pressure pushes out your skull as well—hence the large hat size.

  What was remarkable about this student was that he had an IQ of 126 (a score of 100 is average), which might tell you something about the IQ test, but it also means that when it comes to brains, size doesn’t matter all that much.* We have three pounds of brain stuffed into our heads while he was working with a quarter pounder and doing just fine.

  For a while scientists believed the bigger the brain the smarter the animal (and that we had the biggest). Then someone took a look inside an elephant’s skull and saw its twelve-pound brain, and the theory had to be amended. Perhaps it was the brain-size-to-body-weight ratio that dictated intelligence? That sounded good until someone did the math and realized it puts us on par with the field mouse.

  In the end, the key to intelligence is probably how many neurons there are in whatever size brain you do have, and judging an animal’s intelligence by the size of its brain is like judging the speed of a computer by its size (and remember, the phone in your pocket is many, many times faster than the room-size computers of the sixties).*

  Basically, if we’re ever invaded by pea-brained aliens—do not underestimate them.

  What Would Happen If . . .

  You Put on the World’s Loudest Headphones?

  WHAT IF YOU put on the world’s loudest pair of headphones and cranked the volume to eleven? Would the death metal rattle your skull and liquefy your brain?

  Fortunately, the answer is no. If you put on a pair of 190-decibel headphones, your eardrums would instantly rupture and you would be permanently deaf, but your brain can withstand more energy than music can deliver.

  However, the same does not go for some of your other organs. Headphones keep the sound focused on your head where everything but your eardrums is resistant to acoustic energy, but if you unplug the earbuds and listen to speakers you will expose your whole body—and your eardrums are not the only cavity that’s a little vulnerable to sound waves.

  Before we get to that, though, it’s important to understand what’s going on when you’re listening to music. Sound is a series of pressure waves moving through the air. You interpret those pressure waves as music because of wiggling bones in your ear that set off a Rube Goldberg–like system between eardrums, membranes, “hairs,” bones, and electrical nerves.

  A higher pressure wave of sound equals more wiggling and a louder noise. So sound is actually pressure waves moving through the air, which is why it can cause damage.* The most dangerous sounds are caused by shock waves, which result from major events like bomb blasts where the pressure goes from one atmosphere to many atmospheres in one or more pulses. While these are sounds, they don’t qualify as music because the pressure wave is a single spike, whereas music is an oscillation of pressure. Because the loudest possible oscillation is between 0 and 2 atmospheres; the maximum decibels music can reach is 194. Anything louder would be a shock wave. Therefore the question “Can you be killed by music?” can be translated to “Can you be killed by a sound of less than 195 decibels?” Which begs the question, what is a decibel?

  Decibels are used to measure volume and they are logarithmic, which means an increase in 10 decibels equates to a sound with 10 times more energy.

  At 120 decibels—equivalent to standing next to a chainsaw—sound begins to get painful.

  At 150 decibels you would feel as if you were standing next to a jet engine. The sound would resonate so intensely in your inner ear, it would blow out your eardrum. That would solve the too-loud problem, but if the decibels increase it could still do more damage.

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bsp; If you released 190 decibels of sound out of speakers you could be in trouble.* Luckily that’s not a practical concern. The loudest man-made speaker is a horn in the Netherlands used to test whether satellites can withstand the noise of a missile launch. The horn produces 154 decibels, which is enough to burst your eardrums but probably not enough to kill you unless you stuck your head in it for a while (scientists aren’t sure because nobody has tried this yet).

  Of course, the satellite horn is only the loudest one that we know of.

  The U.S. military has experimented with sonic weapons since the 1940s but as far as we know has been frustrated by the results. In concept, the ears make for an inviting target. You can’t close them, turn away, or refuse to pay attention. But in practice sound is difficult to control. It bounces off objects, can be amplified by buildings, and is ineffective for crowd control, where those near the speaker could be instantly deafened while people in the back would barely be annoyed. Perhaps worst of all for the military, a sonic weapon can be countered by a five-dollar set of earplugs.

  But let’s say you’re attending a death metal concert, where they have cranked up the speakers to 190 decibels and you have a front-row seat. The sound would immediately blow out your eardrums and leave you permanently deaf, so the noise would not be heard so much as felt.

  Sound waves actually compress air as they pass through the atmosphere, but since your body is mostly liquid, it’s almost immune to this compression. We say “almost” because not all of you is liquid. There are some hollow parts, such as your lungs and GI tract, and it’s those hollow spots that you need to be concerned about.

  Your intestines, luckily, are tough. It would take more than two atmospheres of pressure to rupture them. To break those open would require the shock wave from an explosion. Your lungs, unfortunately, are far more delicate.