10 Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Everyday Things - Listverse

7/20/2014 10 Baffling Scientific Mysteries Of Everyday Things - Listverse
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TROY MCCONAGHY JULY 19, 2014
How do bees fly? Why do some corals pulsate? What is ball lightning? Those
questions are now answered (or at least mostly answered). You might even think that all
everyday things are now well understood, with mysteries relegated to the rare, the remote,
and the recondite. Yet many everyday things still harbor their secrets.
10
Sticky Tape
If you peel certain kinds of sticky tape (including Scotch tape) in a vacuum, it produces
short bursts of X-rays. A group of UCLA scientists first noticed this crazy fact in 2008,
although Soviet scientists had observed something similar (producing high-energy
OUR WORLD
10 Baffling Scientific Mysteries Of
Everyday Things
electrons rather than X-rays) in the 1950s. It seems that no one believed the Soviet
findings. How could peeling tape generate such high-energy electrons? Since 2008, many
other scientists have produced X-rays with sticky tape, so it seems to be a real
phenomenonbut how does it happen?
We know that peeling the tape causes charge to build up, just like static charge builds up if
you pet a cat with a credit card. Its called the triboelectric effect. Once the charge (and
associated electric field) gets big enough, theres a sudden dischargea burst of electrons
jumps and gets going so fast that when the electrons hit some matter, they emit X-rays.
The problem is understanding how the electrons get going so fast. The 2008 paper
concluded: The limits on energies and flash widths that can be achieved are beyond
current theories of tribology.
9
Protons
Everyday objects are made of atoms and every atom contains one or more protons. The
simplest atomhydrogenconsists of one proton and one electron. A proton can be
modeled as a tiny ball with a constant radius. Using data from experiments with hydrogen,
scientists have estimated the radius of the proton. Their current best estimate (the
CODATA 2010 value) is 0.8775 femtometers, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 0.0051
femtometers. A femtometer (fm) is one quadrillionth of a meter.
Scientists wanted a smaller uncertainty than 0.0051, so Randolf Pohl and his colleagues
did experiments with an exotic form of hydrogen called muonic hydrogen. Its just like
regular hydrogen, except the electron is replaced with a muon, a particle similar to an
electron but with much greater mass. As expected, Pohl et al reduced the uncertainty
down to 0.00067 fm and a later experiment reduced it even further. But there was a
surprisethey got a much smaller value for the radius of the proton itself!
Heres an analogy. Suppose you had a cheap measuring stick and you used it to measure
the radius of a giant beach ball to be 1 meter, with an uncertainty of 0.1 meters. Then
suppose you got some fancy giant calipers and you used them to get a measurement of 0.5
meters, with an uncertainty of 0.01 meters. Whats going on? The ball shouldnt have a
different radius depending on how you measure it! Yet thats exactly whats happening
with the proton radius measurements.
Maybe the stated uncertainty in the CODATA 2010 value is too small? Maybe some other
values used in the calculations are wrong? Or maybe some new physical phenomenon has
been discovered? Its a mystery.
8
Women
Men have an X chromosome from their mom and a Y chromosome from their dad.
Women have an X chromosome from their mom and a (different) X chromosome from their
dad (other combinations of X and Y chromosomes can occur, but XY and XX are the most
common). Each cell in a womans body has copies of both X chromosomes. Starting in 1949,
a sequence of discoveries led to the realization that one of those X chromosomes is always
inactivemost of the genetic information on that X chromosome is ignored.
Suppose we have a cell from a woman where the X chromosome from her mom is inactive
and the X chromosome from her dad is active. Lets call that a dad-cell. Lets call the
other possibility a mom-cell. How does a cell decide whether to become a mom-cell or a
dad-cell? Scientists once thought it was completely randomthe cell did the equivalent of
a coin toss. But recent experiments with mice showed that an entire organ (an eye, for
example) can be mostly mom-cells or mostly dad-cells. Its not random! Its a mystery
how the cell decides.
7
Animal Magnetoception
Birds do it, bees do it, even ocean-roaming sharks do itsense magnetic fields, that is.
Its known as magnetoception (or magnetoreception). How do they do it? There are two
leading hypotheses.
The first (and oldest) hypothesis is that some animals have tiny bar magnets in some of
their cells. The idea is that those bar magnets line up with the Earths magnetic field like
compass needles, and their orientations are communicated to the brain. Its not a crazy
idea: Tiny bar magnets were found in pigeon beaks, for example. Unfortunately, the beak
cells with bar magnets turned out to be immune system cells, unable to communicate
with the pigeons brain.
The second leading hypothesis is that theres a protein in the eye which, when it gets hit
by blue light, splits into two pieces which are sensitive to magnetic fields. Of course, its
possible that some animals use both mechanisms. Its also possible that there are other
mechanisms entirely. The science of animal magnetoception is still young, so a lot remains
unknown.
6
Blushing
Blushing is an involuntary reddening of the face, usually due to strong emotion or stress.
Its well-known that the reddening is due to widened blood vessels (vasodilation), but what
triggers the vasodilation?
The first hint came in 1982, when Mellander et al found that facial veins have beta-
adrenoceptors in addition to the usual alpha-adrenoceptors. Those receptors can be
triggered by adrenaline and similar molecules associated with emotional response. Maybe
the beta-adrenoceptors in the facial veins are what trigger blushing?
In the 1990s, Peter Drummond, a professor of psychology at Murdoch University, did some
experiments to find out. Some of his test subjects were given drugs to block alpha-
adrenoceptors and others were given drugs to block beta-adrenoceptors. He then had
them perform stressful mental arithmetic, sing, or do moderate exercise (things which
typically cause blushing) and measured their response. As expected, blocking alpha-
adrenoceptors didnt affect blushing. Blocking beta-adrenoceptors caused a decrease in
blushing, but it didnt prevent blushing altogether. There must be something else
triggering blushing (vasodilation)but what? It remains unknown.
5
Glass
Glass is everywhere in modern life: smartphone screens, soda bottles, coffee mugs, kitchen
windows, you name it. Surely scientists and engineers understand glass. But in reality,
glass is still deeply mysterious.
The mystery is in how glass forms. You can make glass by heating up a glass-forming
substance like silicon dioxide until its liquid and then letting it cool. Unlike, for example,
salt, which changes from a liquid to a crystalline solid at a specific temperature, glass gets
more and more viscous as you cool it. If you get the temperature low enough, glass gets so
viscous that it becomes solid, even though its molecules arent neatly arranged. In 2007,
the American physicist James Langer wrote: We dont know what kind of transformation
occurs when a liquid becomes a glass or even whether that familiar change of state is
actually a thermodynamic phase transition like condensation or solidification, or
something completely different. The mysterious glass transition is still a topic of active
research.
4
Peanut Allergies
In the United States, the number of children with a peanut allergy has risen dramatically in
recent years. One study found that the prevalence in children rose from 0.4 percent in
1997 to 1.4 percent in 2008. Similar results were found in the United Kingdom, Canada,
and Australia. Why? There are lots of theories.
Probably the most common idea is the hygiene hypothesis. Some modern children grow
up in very clean environments, where theyre not exposed to the same bacteria, fungi,
pollen, viruses, etc. as the children of previous times. The hypothesis is that their immune
system develops differently as a result, so it responds differently to peanuts.
Another possibility is that peanuts are processed differently now (theyre roasted) which
could conceivably make them more allergenic. Or perhaps modern kids arent getting
enough vitamin D? Maybe peanuts are being introduced too late? There are lots of
possibilities, but not many answers.
3
Black Widow Venom
Black widow spiders are found in temperate places all over the world. When they bite
humans, the venom often causes awful, body-wide pains and blood pressure fluctuations
which can go on for days. According to Gordon Grices The Red Hourglass, Some
[victims] have tried to kill themselves to stop the pain. How does the venom work? This is
where things get mysterious:
A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high
molecular weightin fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen under an ordinary
microscope. How do these few molecules manage to affect the entire body of an animal
weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds? No one has explained the specific
mechanism.
Somehow, the neurotoxin must trick the body into attacking itself. Understanding how it
does that might provide insights into autoimmune disorders and other conditions where
the body attacks itself.
2
Ice
Hockey players and figure skaters glide across the ice because its very slipperybut why
is it so slippery? The same skates wont glide across asphalt, glass, or steel plate.
The old answer was that the skate exerts pressure on the ice. The increased pressure
lowers the melting point of the ice, causing it to melt and create a thin layer of liquid water,
which is slippery. The problem with that answer is that the pressure isnt big enough to
explain the observed slipperiness.
Two other answers have been proposed. One is that friction melts the ice. The other is that
the ice/air boundary always has a thin layer of liquid water. Theres experimental
evidence for both of those answers, so it might be a combination, but the relative
contribution of each isnt known. There might also be other mechanisms at work. The
slipperiness of ice isnt waters only weird propertythere are many more. For example,
it has an unusually high melting point.
1
The Dominance Of Matter
Almost everything around us is made of matter, not antimatter. When antimatter does
manage to get produced (in the radioactive decay of certain atoms, for example, or in
some thunderstorms), it usually runs into some matter and quickly vanishes in a burst
of high-energy gamma rays.
The problem is that the current best model of fundamental particle physics, the Standard
Model, predicts that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced
by the Big Bang. Yet there seems to be more matter than antimatter. Why?
One possibility is that the Standard Model needs to be revised so that the revised version
predicts a slight preference for producing matter over antimatter. Another possibility is
that the Standard Model is fine, but somehow the antimatter and matter became
separated, with empty space between them. But what mechanism would separate them?
Gravity would pull them together, not push them apart.
This problem is known as the baryon asymmetry of the universe. It remains one of the
big unsolved mysteries of modern-day physics.
Troy McConaghy is a researcher and writer from Canada. @TroyMc on Twitter.
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