mental_floss » Matt Soniak

What Makes Bloodhounds Such Great Tracking Dogs?

Matt Soniak — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:56:09 +0000

Reader rccola20 wrote in to ask, “Are bloodhounds really that much better at tracking than other dog breeds?”

You always see them hunting down fugitives in the movies, but is that just Hollywood, or are bloodhounds really the best smellers around?

Bloodhounds are pretty much the best in the business. Sometimes called noses with paws, their skills as trackers come from the high number of olfactory receptors — or “scent cells” — tucked up in their wet noses, which detect odor molecules. A human’s olfactory membrane is about the size of a postage stamp and contains 5 million receptors. A large dog like a German Shepherd, meanwhile, has a larger membrane and about 225 million receptors.

The scent hounds, a group of dogs that includes foxhounds, beagles, catahoulas, blood hounds and other breeds, blow the rest of the pooches and their masters out of the water. These dogs have wide, deep nasal cavities that can accommodate sizable olfactory membranes and large numbers of odor-detecting cells. The little beagle, often no more than half the size of a German Shepherd, has the same number of olfactory receptors as the larger dog. The bloodhound is the grand champ of scent cells and weighs in with 300 million of them, the most in the canine family.

Scent cells aren’t the whole story, though, and the breed has a few other attributes that help when it comes to tracking. Their droopy ears and wrinkly skin help collect odor molecules and sweep them towards the dogs’ noses. Their muscular necks and shoulders let them keep their nose to the ground for long distances without getting fatigued. Bloodhound handlers also say that the breed is a joy to work with. The dogs interact well with people, are eager to please, and are focused in training and on the job.

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Which Came First: Orange the Color or Orange the Fruit?

Matt Soniak — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:48:07 +0000

Reader Erica wrote in with a question about oranges. Is the fruit named for its color, or is the color named for the fruit?

Crayon and orange images via Shutterstock

The citrus definitely got named first. The earliest recorded use of orange the fruit in English is from the 1300s and came to us from the Old French orenge, adapted from the Arabic nāranj, from the Persian nārang, from the Sanskrit nāranga (“orange tree”). The Sanskrit word’s origin is unclear, but it might come from a Dravidian word meaning “fragrant.”

The word’s use as a color name doesn’t crop up for another 200 years, in the early 1500s. English speakers probably didn’t have a specific name for the color until the fruit was widely available in their markets and inspired one. Before then, linguists believe people generally referred to orange as “yellow-red,” or ġeolurēad in Old English.

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The Big Squeeze: Scientist Catches Bear-Eating Snake in the Act

Matt Soniak — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:58:05 +0000

Burmese Python image via Shutterstock

Earlier this week a team of scientists from several universities and the US Geological Survey released a study documenting the dramatically declining numbers of small and medium-size mammals in Florida – including raccoons, opossums, white-tailed deer, bobcats, rabbits and foxes. These population drops all occur in the same areas where pythons and other large, non-native snakes have taken up residence after escaping from one stop or another in the wildlife trade supply chain.

Anyone who’s even heard only the most basic facts about constrictor snakes knows that they’re formidable predators and take down prey by grasping it in their powerful jaws, coiling their bodies around it, and squeezing until it suffocates. Devouring bunnies and possums isn’t even the half of it, though. These big snakes aren’t shy about going after much larger, more dangerous game, too. Like men. And bears.

Skin of a 22.6-foot reticulated python, shot by Kekek Aduanan (in hat) on June 9, 1970. Photo by Thomas N. Headland

In the 1970s, anthropologist Thomas N. Headland lived with and studied the Agta Negritos, the indigenous people of the Philippines’ largest island. When Headland interviewed the Agta about their run-ins with the pythons that shared the rainforest with them, 15 of 58 men and 1 of 62 women said they’d been attacked by a python at least once. Two of the men had been attacked twice, and the interviewees could collectively remember six people who were killed by pythons, including a man whose son found the snake, cut it open and retrieved his father’s body for a funeral (that snake is pictured above).

It Poked the Bear

In July 1999, conservation biologist Gabriella Fredriksson was monitoring a female Sun bear and her cub on the island of Borneo via radio collar. One morning, the collar’s signal indicated that the bear hadn’t moved for more than four hours, a sign that either the bear had died or the collar had come off. Fredriksson investigated and tracked the signal to the stomach of a 23 ft python curled up in the brush. The bulge of the adult bear could be clearly seen in the middle of the snake, and as the snake fled into a nearby stream when Fredriksson got too close, she could hear the sounds of the bear’s bones snapping. No sign of the cub was ever found.

The radio collar remained functioning, so Fredriksson tracked the snake over several weeks as it digested the bear. The snake was eventually captured, escaped, captured again and, when it hadn’t passed the radio collar out by October, the equipment was surgically removed. The snake was released into the wild soon after.

Granted, Sun bears are the smallest bear species and a little less fearsome than their cousins, feasting mainly on insects and fruit. It’s not nearly as impressive as a python eating a polar bear (ignore the improbability of that for a second and imagine how awesome that cage match would be). That said, they’re still not an animal that one attacks, kills and devours with ease. They’re sizable, have long, sharp curved claws, strong jaws and sharp teeth. Anecdotal evidence from Borneon residents suggests that tigers will take the occasional Sun bear, but this snake attack is one of only a few recorded instances of any bear species being preyed on by animals other than humans or other bears.

For more on Florida’s python problem, see the study and the coverage at Not Exactly Rocket Science, which has a great discussion in the comments about how unlikely it is that the pythons were so successful in establishing themselves in their new home.

What Happens to the Losing Team’s Championship Shirts?

Matt Soniak — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:01:36 +0000

Reuters/Oswaldo Rivas/Landov

After a Big Game in any sport, fans and players are going to be clamoring for commemorative merchandise, often just minutes after the game ends. To meet this demand and cash in on the wallet-loosening “We’re #1″ euphoria, manufacturers and retailers produce and stock two sets of t-shirts, hats and other merchandise, declaring each team the champ. Based on strong sales after the Chicago Bears’ 2007 NFC Championship win, Sports Authority printed more than 15,000 shirts proclaiming a Bears Super Bowl victory well before the game even started. And then the Colts beat the Bears, 29-17.

Image credit: World Vision

That’s a lot of misprinted shirts that can’t hit store shelves, and seem like fine candidates for the incinerator, instead. And for a long time, that’s where they went, with all four major American pro sports leagues — MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL — requiring the destruction of incorrect post-season apparel.

Fortunately, the leagues have changed the way they do things and now all four – plus manufacturers and retailers like Reebok, Sports Authority, Dick’s and Modell’s — instead give the gear to a group called World Vision, which saves the merch from certain doom and puts it to use.

Image credit: World Vision

The international humanitarian aid group collects the unwanted items over the days following the game at their distribution center in Pittsburgh, then ships it overseas to people living in disaster areas and impoverished nations. After losing Super Bowl XLIII in 2009, Arizona Cardinals gear was sent to children and families living in extreme poverty in El Salvador. In 2010, after the New Orleans Saints defeated Indianapolis, the Colts gear printed up for Super Bowl XLIV was sent to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Image credit: World Vision

Last year, after Pittsburgh lost to the Green Bay Packers, the Steelers Super Bowl apparel went to Zambia, Armenia, Nicaragua and Romania.

Image credit: World Vision

A representative for World Vision said they’re not sure where the donated Giants/Patriots gear will be going this year. Once they get the product and take inventory, they’ll get in touch with their foreign staff and see who needs what where.

Image credit: World Vision

Of course, there are people right here in the U.S. who desperately need a fresh, clean t-shirt or jacket. Why not give it to them? Overseas distribution is part of the agreement between the leagues and World Vision. The leagues don’t want the donated items appearing on TV or popping up on eBay, so they get them out of the country. The farther away the clothing is, the less likely it is to offend a losing player (or heartbroken Texas Rangers fan).

Matt wrote portions of this story after the New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies in the 2009 World Series.

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Are Rabbits as Prolific as Everybody Says?

Matt Soniak — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:45:31 +0000

Rabbits image via Shutterstock

Is there any truth to the phrase “breed like rabbits”? Sort of. Bunny sex itself is nothing to write home to mom about. When a doe lets a buck know that she’s ready to mate, he circles her, shows off his tail, and sometimes urinates on her. This is what passes for foreplay. Then, the act itself last about 20-40 seconds. Isn’t nature glorious?

The real wow factor of rabbit reproduction is how fast they get around to breeding, and how often they can do it. The average rabbit reaches sexual maturity at 3-8 months old, and they have the rest of their 9-to-12+ years to get it on (though egg/sperm production drops off at around 3 years). Their breeding season lasts three-quarters of the year, and the does don’t have an estrous or ”heat” cycle. They’re more or less ready to mate all the time. They don’t have a menstrual cycle, either, so there’s no special window during which pregnancy can happen. Does are actually induced ovulators, which means that intercourse stimulates ovulation. After 40 seconds of magic, the egg is emitted for fertilization.

Rabbits gestate for only 30 days, and usually have litters of between 4 and 12 babies (kits), depending on the breeds. Once the babies are born, the doe can mate and get pregnant again as soon as the following day. If they maintain a pace like that and all the kits survive, the large-litter breeds are looking at about 100 babies per season. Stretch that out over a lifetime, and you’ve got over 1,000 babies per rabbit.

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Why Do Drive-Up ATMs Have Braille on the Buttons?

Matt Soniak — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:16:30 +0000

This question was submitted by reader Lindsey. It also may have been part of a Starburst advertising campaign in the late-1990s.

ATM image via Shutterstock

So the visually impaired can use them, of course. People who are totally blind or severely visually impaired normally don’t drive, but they might have a friend drive them around to run errands, or take a cab. If a blind person is a passenger in a car, they ought to be able to take advantage of the convenience of the drive-up ATM, too.

That’s why the Americans with Disabilities Act’s Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities require the ”instructions and all information for use” of ATMs, whether they’re walk-up or drive-up, “be made accessible to and independently usable by persons with vision impairments,” and that the machines provide the visually impaired with the “same degree of privacy of input and output available to all individuals.” Braille on the drive-up ATM complies with the law and allows a visually impaired person who might be in the back seat to use the machine just like a sighted person — independently and privately.

How would a blind person use an ATM in the first place, though, if they couldn’t see the on-screen instructions? You’ll notice that language about accessibility and usability in the ADA guidelines is pretty vague. Braille keypads are an obvious part of accessibility, but when the guidelines were written, neither the banks nor the government really knew what else to do to make the machines blind-user-friendly. Eventually, the banks, the feds and the ATM manufacturers all agreed to leave the rules a little hazy until they could figure something out.

The two solutions most ATMs employ today are either a large block of braille that provide a user with instructions for completing transactions that they must follow very carefully (and hope that the instructions get updated along with the machine’s software), or a headphone jack (marked with braille) that provides a user with an audio equivalent of the on-screen prompts.

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Where Did the Term “Pink Slip” Originate?

Matt Soniak — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:25:39 +0000

Pink slip image via Shutterstock

The Short Answer: No one knows, but the search has been interesting.

The Long Answer: Getting a pink slip usually means you’re fired. It’s not something most people look forward to. Peter Liebhold, then, is an odd guy. He’s been searching for a pink slip for years, and he’s disappointed he keeps coming up empty.

Liebhold isn’t looking to get canned. Rather, finding a pink slip is his job. He’s a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and Chair of the Division of Work and Industry. The history of business culture is his business. The pink slip is a mystery he’s been chasing for a long time. Almost everyone is familiar with the phrase, but no one seems to know where it originated, or if there’s an actual pink slip out there to be had.

The usual line of reasoning is that the phrase was born when one or more companies started the practice of terminating employees by giving them notice on a piece of pink paper. The color was chosen so that the notice would stand out from the rest of the paperwork on the poor guy’s desk and he wouldn’t miss it. The catch, of course, is that Liebhold and other historians haven’t been able to track down an actual slip, or find any companies that actually fired people like this. The most they had to go on for a while was the Oxford English Dictionary citing the phrase’s first known appearance in a 1915 pulp novel about baseball.

The most promising lead Liebhold ever had, he told the Baltimore Sun, was the Ford Motor Company. While poring over an obscure history journal, he found a footnote that led him to another article in another journal that talked about the daily evaluations of Ford’s assembly line workers. The workers, the article went, all had lockers or cubbies where they kept their things, and at the end of the day they would find a slip of paper from management there. A white paper meant the day’s effort was acceptable. A pink slip, though, meant that they weren’t wanted back in the morning.

Liebhold thought he’d finally found his elusive slip, but when he tracked down the source of the story, a California-based management consultant, he learned it was just an anecdote overheard in college. The consultant had been repeating it ever since. Neither the consultant, nor anyone at Ford who Liebhold talked to, had any evidence that the story was true.

Swing and a miss.

Liebhold’s search hasn’t been in vain, though. He’s found a few other bits of workplace history during the hunt, like the first American filing cabinet and some red twill that secretaries used to use to bundle documents together — apparently, the inspiration for bureaucratic “red tape.”

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What Legal Authority Does Judge Judy Have?

Matt Soniak — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:10:30 +0000

Judge Judy reportedly makes $45 million a year. What kind of legal power comes with it?

JIM RUYMEN/UPI /Landov

While Judith Sheindlin was a real, live judge — New York City Mayor Ed Koch appointed her to criminal court in 1982 and then made her Manhattan’s supervising family court judge in 1986 — she’s not acting as one on her show. Neither are any of the other daytime TV judges (whether they passed the bar and served as actual judges or not).

TV court show sets are designed to look like courtrooms and the judges wear robes, sit on benches, and use gavels. But they’re not court rooms and they’re not real trials presided over by real judges (though they are real cases — the producers often contact parties who have pending litigation in small claims court and offer them the opportunity to appear on TV instead). What you’re seeing on these TV court shows may look like small claims court and quack like small claims court, but it’s really just arbitration playing dress up in small claims court’s clothes.

Arbitration is a legal method for resolving disputes outside the court. The disputing parties present their cases to a neutral, third-party arbitrator or arbitrators who hear the case, examine the evidence, and make a (usually binding) decision. Like a court-based case, arbitration is adversarial, but generally less formal in its rules and procedures.

The power that Judge Judy and the rest of the TV arbitrators have over the disputing parties is granted by a contract, specific to their case, that they sign before appearing on the show. These contracts make the arbitrators’ decision final and binding, prevent the disputing parties from negotiating the terms of the arbitration, and allow the “judges” wide discretion on procedural and evidentiary rules during the arbitration.

From one of Judge Judy’s old contracts: “The Arbitrator’s Decision and her interpretation and application of laws and principles she uses in arriving at the Decision, shall be final and binding upon the parties hereto.”

Court Costs

With jurisdiction over the dispute signed away to them, the TV judges make their decision on the case and either decide for the plaintiff, in which case the show’s producers award them a judgment fee, or with the defendant, in which case the producers award both parties with an appearance fee. This system seems to skew things in favor of the defendants, and gives them an incentive to take their case from court to TV. If they have a weak case, appearing on the show absolves them of any financial liability, and if they have a strong case, they stand to earn an appearance fee along with their victory.

If one party or the other doesn’t like the arbitrator’s decision, that’s too bad. They already signed the agreement. The decision can really only be successfully appealed if it addresses a matter outside the scope of the contract. In 2000, Judge Judy had one of her decisions overturned for that reason by the Family Court of Kings County. In the case B.M. v. D.L., the parties appeared in front of Sheindlin to solve a personal property dispute. Sheindlin ruled on that dispute, but also made a decision on the parties’ child custody and visitation rights. One of the parties appealed in court, and the family court overturned the custody and visitation part of the decision because they weren’t covered by the agreement to arbitrate.

While these court shows can be entertaining, social scientists and legal scholars worry about their effect on viewers’ perception of how courts work and apply justice. In a survey of litigants in small claims court in 1988, the height of popularity of The People’s Court, researchers were shocked by how often the show was mentioned when talking about expectations of the justice system, and suspected that the show may have had a major influence on some people’s decision to even go to court and on the way they prepared their case.

Thanks to reader Marty for suggesting this Big Question.

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Why Don’t You Hear Someone’s Accent in a Song?

Matt Soniak — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:33:29 +0000

Reader Jared wrote in with this question: “Why do singers I perceive as having accents (i.e. Adele, Bono, etc.) have those accents when they talk, but not when they sing?”

Microphone image via Shutterstock

I hear what Jared is saying. Or, rather, I don’t hear it. While there are certainly exceptions, I’ve heard a thick accent on many European singers when they give interviews, but they sound as American as apple pie – which, to American ears, means “no” accent – when belting out their songs. (Except maybe these guys.) If I’d only heard Eric Clapton or Bono sing instead of speak, I’d believe you if you said they were from the States.

There are two main reasons, from what I can tell, for this perceived loss of accent. One is technical. As Billy Bragg — a guy who’s never had difficulty letting his accent shine through — explains, “You can’t sing something like ‘Tracks of Your Tears’ in a London accent. The cadences are all wrong.” Different accents are often defined by their rhythms, intonation and vowel quality and length. For many accents, the tune and the rhythm of a song can constrain these qualities to the point where the accent seemingly disappears.

This is true even for certain qualities of the General American accent and regional American accents related to it. GenAm is a rhotic accent, which means speakers pronounce the letter r at the end of words like car and lover. But if most Americans sang those words the same way they said them, they’d sound like pirates. Instead, many songs force American singers to push the r more towards a vowel ah sound, the same way many Brits might pronounce it. (See Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher” for examples of both sounds. In some performances he pronounces the r fully, and in others he holds back on it.)

Of course, it is possible for a variety of accents to maintain their unique characteristics within the constraints of song. There’s no mistaking where The Beatles, The Proclaimers or The Pogues were from. So, if you can sing with your accent, why wouldn’t you?

There also seems to be a social factor to the Incredible Disappearing Accent. I’m just speculating here, but if they have a very thick regional or working-class accent, some singers may want to drop it on their way to music superstardom in favor of a more fashionable or mainstream accent (the exception being American country and western music, where a down home Southern drawl gets you major street cred). Still others might have masked their accent’s particular eccentricities in an effort to imitate the sound of their musical idols. This might help explain why the “British Invasion” bands, whose appeal to Americans was their very Britishness, largely kept their accents in their songs, but acts like Led Zeppelin, Cream and the Rolling Stones, heavily influence by African American blues musicians, had more American-sounding vocals.
* * * *
While we’re on the topic, here’s a question I’d love to see some input on in the comments: Is this apparent accent loss peculiar to foreign ears? That is, can Brits still detect the accent on Adele when Americans can’t? Do foreign ears just miss the subtleties of Bono’s accent still shining through when he sings? What about the differences in two regional accents? In that vein, even though I’m not from the South, I listen to a lot of country music, and can tell the difference between a singer from Texas and one from Tennessee. To my friends who aren’t country fans, however, they both just sound “Southern.”

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Why Can’t Some People See Magic Eye Pictures?

Matt Soniak — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:23:42 +0000

Earlier this month, I explained how Magic Eye pictures work. A lot of people commented about how they can never see the hidden image. So what gives? Is there something wrong with these people’s eyes? Are they cursed? Are there really no hidden pictures? Is this all a hoax?

Most Magic Eye problems have to do with the way the eyes work with each other and the brain. To view 3D stereo images, your peepers have to work together as a coordinated team. If they’re not pulling together, you’re going to have some glitches in your binocular (two-eyed) vision or stereo vision (where the two slightly different views from your eyes are combined in the brain). A number of things can cause binocular and stereo vision impairment — most commonly, deviations or misalignments of one or both eyes (“crossed eyes” or “wall eyes”), situations where one eye is dominant because visual stimulation either transmits poorly or not at all from the other, astigmatism or cataracts. If you think you have an eye problem, go see an eye doctor who can test and treat your stereo vision.

If your eyes are fine, then your Magic Eye problems could just be a matter of technique. The makers of Magic Eye offer this advice:

Hold the center of the printed image right up to your nose. It should be blurry. Focus as though you are looking through the image into the distance. Very slowly move the image away from your face until the two squares above the image turn into three squares. If you see four squares, move the image farther away from your face until you see three squares. If you see one or two squares, start over!

When you clearly see three squares, hold the page still, and the hidden image will magically appear. Once you perceive the hidden image and depth, you can look around the entire 3D image. The longer you look, the clearer the illusion becomes. The farther away you hold the page, the deeper it becomes. Good Luck!

They also invite people to email them if they’re having trouble wrestling the hidden image from the pictures. Plenty of flossers also threw their own techniques in in the comments of the Magic Eye explainer.

[Special thanks to my friend Molly, who can't see 3D movies and encouraged me to steal her story idea for a Big Question Post.]

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