WEIRD SCIENCE NEWS
This year’s edition of scientific oddities features toenails, toilet paper, hot dogs, sick llamas, and zombie deer.
NAILED IT
In 2018 the medical journal JAMA Dermatology published a study about a woman experiencing onychomadesis—the slow separation of a nail from a toe or finger, before it eventually falls off altogether. The patient’s case baffled doctors because in the months leading up to the toenail loss, she’d suffered no infection or skin problem, hadn’t taken any medications with onychomadesis as a known side effect, and suffered from no autoimmune or hereditary medical conditions. Then the woman remembered something she did six months earlier that might have caused her nail to fall off: she’d had a “fish pedicure”—a novelty procedure in beauty parlors and health spas in which the customer rests their feet in a tub of water inhabited by many small Garra rufa fish. The fish normally eat plankton, but they’ll also nibble on dead human skin. They eat away the bad skin, providing a unique foot treatment. Scientists aren’t sure how the procedure could spread infections, although it’s likely microbes that remain in a fish’s mouth after it chomps on one customer’s feet could get transferred onto the feet of the next customer.
IMPLICATED BY HOT DOG
In February 2019, police in Minneapolis arrested 52-year-old businessman Jerry Westrom at his office. The charge: murder. They’d scientifically linked him to the death of 35-year-old Jeanne Ann Childs…whose body was found at her apartment more than 25 years earlier, in June 1993. The investigation had long ago gone cold. Detectives had been unable to identify a viable suspect, even after recovering DNA from a bedspread, towel, and washcloth in Childs’s home. But then in 2018, as home genealogy and DNA kits were becoming a popular fad, police decided to enter the DNA from the Childs murder into an online database. It resulted in two matches, and one was for a man with a criminal record who lived in Minneapolis in 1993—Westrom. Detectives located Westrom and followed him to a hockey game, where they observed him as he ate a hot dog, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and then threw away that napkin. After he walked away, the detectives dug through the trash to retrieve the napkin, tested it for DNA…and it was a match with the stuff found in 1993.
First major U.S. movie star to enter the service in World War II: Jimmy Stewart…
Hundreds of large hospitals around the world these days are equipped with surgical robots. Matching the hand movements and directions of a surgeon in control, robotic arms and fingers can make finer cuts and perform procedures with greater precision than even the most delicate of doctors. Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, England, has a surgical robot, which operated without incident until November 2018. The incident: robots are machines, and machines malfunction. Freeman’s surgical robot, programmed to repair patient Stephen Pettitt’s damaged heart valve, instead went haywire, flailing every which way with its sharp surgical tools. In the melee, it “attacked” a nurse and inserted stitches “in an unorganized fashion” into Pettitt’s heart. But robots only do what they’re programmed to do, so the fault ultimately rests with the physician in charge, which in this case was lead surgeon Sukumaran Nair. In a hearing addressing the incident, he admitted that he missed multiple mandatory training sessions in which he would’ve learned to properly operate the robot. Even worse, during the procedure, the overseeing surgeons assigned to assist Nair should anything go wrong had left the operating room to go on a coffee run. It’s not like it would’ve mattered anyway, because at one point the robot punctured Pettitt’s aortic septum, which splattered so much blood on the camera that those doctors wouldn’t have been able to see anything on their monitors. Pettitt, who already had a weak heart, then had to endure more surgery—stitch removal, followed by the procedure that the robot was supposed to do, but this time with human surgeons. He did not survive.
A TIP FROM UNCLE JOHN
If you want job security in the age of robots, experts say these are some of the jobs least likely to be usurped by an automaton:
1. Emergency management director
2. Substance abuse social worker
3. Occupational therapist
4. Lodging manager
5. Dietitian
6. Choreographer
7. Physician or Surgeon
8. Psychologist
9. Elementary school teacher
10. Police supervisor
YOU LLOSE, FLU
The reason you should get an annual flu shot is because each year brings a few new strains of influenza. The flu virus is adept at mutating itself, which means neither last year’s flu shots nor the body’s built-up immunities will fight off next year’s flu. But scientists at the Scripps Institute in California have created synthetic, flu-fighting, tough-to-trick antibodies…out of stuff they extracted from llamas. They infected llamas with 60 different flu strains (those poor llamas) to provoke an immune response and ramp up antibody production. Then they observed which antibodies attacked the most kinds of flu, and took elements from the four best to genetically craft a synthetic super-antibody. Once they had their secret weapon, the scientists gave mice fatal doses of flu, and treated them with the super-antibody. Result: it neutralized all the flu strains but one…and that one doesn’t infect humans.
…who joined the army in March 1941, 9 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is also called “zombie deer disease,” but it also affects elk and moose, not just deer. The “zombie” part is accurate, though. Turning its victims into creatures resembling the ambling undead from a horror movie, CWD deteriorates an animal’s brain and spinal cord, leading to sudden weight loss, a lack of coordination, drooling, and violent behavior. Scientists first identified the disease in the 1960s, but infection rates are on the rise…and so are venison consumption rates among humans. In 2019 scientists identified CWD in at least 24 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. They estimated that 15,000 infected animals are eaten every year. While there are no reported cases of humans contracting it (yet), the virus has jumped to primates.
GO FOR ONE-PLY
Also called the taiga or “snow forest,” the coniferous boreal forest covers nearly two-thirds of Canada, the second-largest nation (by area) on Earth. That’s enough forest to absorb the carbon dioxide emissions of 24 million cars annually. The wood in that forest is a precious, nonsustainable natural resource, and it’s what’s used to make that extra-soft and cushiony toilet paper that’s become the TP of choice over the last two decades. According to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, more than 28 million acres of Canadian forest—an area about as large as Pennsylvania—has been cut down since 1996; most of that provided the raw materials to make luxury toilet paper. The biggest market for that soft stuff: the United States, which buys 20 percent of all TP worldwide, despite making up just 4 percent of the population. The NRDC cites Americans’ desire for thick toilet paper to be “worse than Hummers” as far as environmental damage is concerned.
RANDOM FACT
When Google went down one afternoon in 2013 for one to five minutes (depending on where the user lived), worldwide internet usage dropped 40%.
Typically, the fingernail that grows fastest is the one on the middle finger of your dominant hand.