Forward Ever Forward

Will Your Tongue Really Stick to a Frozen Flagpole?

December 19, 2007

The next time someone triple-dog dares you to stick your tongue to a frozen metal pole — don’t. Your tongue will be joined to the pole, and you’ll have plenty of time to ponder the thermal conductivity of metal while you await the rescue squad.

Your tongue is covered with moisture, which beings to freeze if its temperature drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Your body counteracts the freezing by pumping warm blood to your tongue.

Heat from your blood warms the moisture through a process called conduction. Heat energy from the blood excites atoms in your tongue. The atoms absorb energy and vibrate. The more they vibrate, the more their temperatures increase. This incites vibrations in neighboring atoms, which take the energy and pass it up the line like a hot potato and eventually warms the surface moisture.

So why is the Fire Department on its way?

“It’s because of the high thermal conductivity of the pole,” explains Frank J. DiSalvo, director of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future and co-director of the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute. “The metal is a much better conductor than your tongue (up to 400 times more powerful). The metal takes heat faster than your body can replenish it.”

The atoms in solid metals are packed tightly and transfer thermal energy more readily. They also have free electrons that boost conductivity. Free electrons are free to move from atom to atom. The electrons absorb heat energy and move through the flagpole, stirring up other atoms.

As your tongue touches the flagpole, the moisture on your tongue is robbed of heat. The temperature of the moisture drops. Water freezes inside tiny pores and surface irregularities on your tongue and the pole. You’re stuck.

So now your thinking, “Maybe if I just pull hard it will come off.” Yes, it will — a piece of your tongue, that is.

Kent Sperry is a 911 dispatcher at a place where people know about cold and snow — Boulder, Colorado. He offers a less painful alternative, assuming you happen to have the necessary remedy at hand: “Pour warm water on the area where the tongue meets the pole, and the tongue should come free.”

http://www.livescience.com/mysteries/071218-tongue-flagpole.html

Man Selling Soul On EBay For £500k
By Alex Watts Updated:13:54, Friday December 14, 2007

An American man is selling his soul on the internet for £500,000 - to raise money for Christmas.

He says the winning eBay bidder will receive his spirit in a glass jar as well as a contract “relinquishing ownership”.

He told buyers: “I’ve got no money for the Christmas holidays, and all I’ve got left to sell is my soul.

“I’m not really using it lately - and selling it on eBay is better than letting the Devil have it.”
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1296961,00.html

Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale: research

Oct 17 08:58 AM US/Eastern

Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.
Yehuda Baruch, a professor of management at the University of East Anglia, and graduate Stuart Jenkins studied the use of profanity in the workplace and assessed its implications for managers.

They assessed that swearing would become more common as traditional taboos are broken down, but the key appeared to be knowing when such language was appropriate and when to turn to blind eye.

The pair said swearing in front of senior staff or customers should be seriously discouraged or banned, but in other circumstances it helped foster solidarity among employees and express frustration, stress or other feelings.

“Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner,” said Baruch, who works in the university’s business school in Norwich.

Banning swear words and reprimanding staff might represent strong leadership, but could remove key links between staff and impact on morale and motivation, he said.

“We hope that this study will serve not only to acknowledge the part that swearing plays in our work and our lives, but also to indicate that leaders sometimes need to ‘think differently’ and be open to intriguing ideas.

“Managers need to understand how their staff feel about swearing. The challenge is to master the ‘art’ of knowing when to turn a blind eye to communication that does not meet their own standards.”

The study, “Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: when anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable”, is published in the latest issue of the Leadership and Organisational Development Journal.

Fake Toe on Mummy: Oldest Prosthesis?
AFP, AFP

type size: [A] [A] [A]

July 27, 2007 — An artificial big toe attached to the foot of an Egyptian mummy could be the world’s oldest prosthetic body part, British researchers said Friday.
The fake toe, which is made of wood and leather and is currently on display at the Cairo Museum in Egypt, dates from between 1000 and 600 B.C.

Researchers at Manchester University in north-west England hope to prove it was used to help someone who had lost their original big toe to walk.

If they do, it could mean that prosthetic body parts were in use up to 700 years earlier than was previously thought.

The oldest known prosthesis is a bronze Roman leg dating from about 300 B.C. which was kept at the Royal College of Surgeons in London but was destroyed during a German bombing raid in the Second World War.

A second false big toe, which is on display at the British Museum, will also be tested by scientists in Manchester.

“If either one is functional, it may be interesting to manufacture it with modern materials and trial it for use on people with missing toes,” said Jacky Finch, a researcher working on the study.

She added that the Cairo toe is the most likely to have been a prosthesis, because it shows signs of wear and is attached to a “well-healed” amputation site.

The London toe, by contrast, does not bend and is therefore more likely to have been cosmetic, she said.

Discovory Channel

Dinner guest finds host’s wife, son in freezer
Sat Jul 7, 2007 10:28 PM ET

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Belgian man appeared in court on Friday after a woman at his dinner party found the bodies of his wife and stepson in the freezer as she put away the leftovers, prosecutors said.

The woman went to the police after discovering the 46-year-old woman and her 11-year-old son and officers arrested the man in the town of Verviers, near Liege in east Belgium, on Wednesday.

“She went to the freezer and that is what she saw. She then alerted the police,” said Georges Lahaye of the local public prosecutors’ office. Prosecutors want the suspect, aged 43, to be remanded in custody to allow more time for an investigation into the deaths.

Lahaye said the suspect had not made a confession. He added that the couple argued a lot.

Muggers leave their own pictures behind
Thu Jun 28, 2007 9:13 AM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) - Two German teenagers robbed a girl but accidentally left their own pictures behind for police on a discarded mobile phone.

After stealing a 15-year-old’s shoes, money and mobile phone, the two older girls gave her an old mobile phone, police in the western city of Bochum said on Wednesday.

But the two 17-year-olds had forgotten the phone had their own photos, striking smiley poses, which police published online on Tuesday in an effort to find the culprits.

The two muggers turned themselves in almost simultaneously when the pictures appeared on the evening news.

“One girl was brought down by her father after he saw her on the television,” said police spokesman Frank Plewka. “Today the pictures were in the papers, so the father’s phone has been ringing all day, because everyone recognized them.”

Neither of the two had been in trouble with the law before.

Barber stabs second client with scissors
Mon Jun 25, 2007 9:42 AM ET

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - An Amsterdam barber has been arrested for stabbing a client with scissors, the second such incident involving the barber, Dutch police said on Saturday.

The client was stabbed and seriously wounded after a fight broke out earlier this week at the barber’s shop, police said.

The barber stabbed another client with scissors in 2000. The man later died of his wounds, although the barber was cleared of any charges after a court found he had acted in self-defense.

Police said they were holding the man, 42, and investigating whether attempted manslaughter charges should be brought against him.

NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) - An India couple have been accused of trying to get their 15-year-son into the Guinness Book of World Records by allowing him to perform a caesarean operation, local newspapers reported on Thursday.

The parents, both doctors from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, screened a video recording of the operation on a 20-year-old woman to other doctors in the hope of attaining the record as the world’s youngest surgeon, newspapers reported.

Family members said the boy was only helping out in the operation, handing his father medical instruments. Indian medical authorities are investigating the case and could revoke the couple’s medical licenses.

Does any one else remember this game?

I think these folks spent way to much time playing it:

PROVO, Utah (AP) - A man accused of planning to rob a credit union and get away by floating down the Provo River was sent to prison for 27 months. “What in the world were you thinking?” U.S. District Judge Dee Benson asked Patrick Burr, 46.

Patrick and Heather Burr had acquired large tire tubes as they planned to rob Utah Community Credit Union on Dec. 1, federal prosecutors said.

But the car with the tubes inside was impounded for an insurance violation days earlier.

While discussing other ways to rob the credit union, their conversations were recorded by an informant.

The Burrs pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bank robbery. Heather Burr will be sentenced next week.

It turned out that one of the tubes had a hole. A getaway car would have been faster. The Provo River in late fall was flowing at 4 mph.

“You should write a book on this,” the judge said.

Good call judge.

All of those wasted oreos could have been avoided. If I just had this information sooner!

Five-second rule for dropped food? Try 30

CTV.ca News Staff

Updated: Tue. Jun. 12 2007 10:16 PM ET

A man drops a brownie on the floor. If he picks it up within five seconds, should he still eat it? Two U.S. students claim the answer is yes.

In fact, they say he could wait half a minute.

The students, who are seniors at Connecticut College, studied the five-second rule as part of their microbiology class.

“It is an eye-opener,” student Molly Goettsche told ABC News. “There may be a little more time than just seconds.”

First they dropped Skittles candy and apple slices on the school’s dining hall floor for different lengths of time.

Then they swabbed the food for samples and checked for any bacteria.

Their conclusions may be a relief to those who rescue fallen food: it took more than 30 seconds for bacteria to cultivate on the apple slices, which represented wet food.

As for the Skittles, which stood in for dry food, it took longer than a minute.

But despite their findings, the students said they would never eat anything that’s hit the ground.

“I don’t know if I would ever eat off that floor,” said Goettsche.

High school student Jillian Clarke conducted a more exhaustive study in 2003, and her research earned her an Ig Noble award — a parody of the Nobel Prize — the following year.

She traced the five-second rule to Genghis Khan. But the Mongol leader, known more for his military tactics than passion for science, thought food could be left on the floor for half a day.

Like the Connecticut College students, Clarke found that dry food dropped on clean floors did not pick up a noticeable amount of bacteria.

However, when she dropped food on floors contaminated with E. coli, the bacteria latched onto the food in less than five seconds.