When Your Beauty Routine is Nuts

The Ancient World 

The idea of beauty and fashion has been very changeable throughout time and different cultures. The ancient Egyptians were fond of perfume, but for them, this meant mixing fragrant leaves and oils with animal fat and dumping this mixture on-top of the head. The fat would then melt and run down over the hair, face and body and release a perfumed aroma.

In ancient Rome, bird poo was a common treatment for acne, and due to the high nitrogen content, may well have been effective.

European Royalty

Past royal figures of Europe did not favour bathing. In fact, Henri IV of France believed bathing to be downright dangerous. He probably only had about 5 baths in his whole life!

Body Modifications

Lip plating goes back to about 8700 BC; however, it has occurred in various cultures over time. And what about the Kayan people of Northern Thailand who regard elongated necks as a sign of beauty? To achieve this look they wear brass coils around their necks from about the age of five. An interesting fashion!

Artificial cranial deformation is a very old practice which predates written history and it still occurs in Vanuatu. It involves elongating the head, usually a very young child, often by using two pieces of wood and a binding cloth.

Foot Binding

Bound feet used to be considered highly attractive in China. The tortuous process required the breaking of toes, the arch of the foot, and the wrapping of the toes under the feet. Supposedly, this was sexually enticing to men.

'Lilly feet'

Books To Read


The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon, by David Almond, about a boy who climbs a ladder to the Moon and goes inside.

Building a Space Elevator to the Moon

The author Arthur C. Clarke described the construction of a space elevator in his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise. In more recent years, a space elevator looks like becoming a reality, as a firm called the LiftPort Group, founded by a former NASA researcher, Michael Laine, claim they will be able to build one to the moon by 2020.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first came up with the idea for a space elevator in 1895, inspired by the Eiffel Tower. Many have offered ideas, calculations and speculations about how such an elevator would work. But the good news is that, as the Moon's surface gravity is much lower than the Earth's, the lunar elevator system can be engineered using currently available materials and technology. Google, supposedly, is even in on the act, working on space elevators at their secretive Google X Lab, as well as other future technologies.

In September 2018, researchers at Japan’s Shizuoka University launched a tiny space elevator on an H-2B rocket from the island of Tanegashima, about the size of two matchboxes. Cameras monitored the attempts of the mini elevator to slide up and down a 10-meter cable, suspended in space between two miniature satellites. “It’s going to be the world's first experiment to test elevator movement in space,” a university spokesman said.

The LiftPort group has launched various fundraisers for the project, which is estimated to cost around $800 million. The technology will use a "ribbon" cable anchored to the surface and extending into space. The first step, however, will be to create a 2km elevator on earth, from which the moon elevator will launch.

Imagine taking an elevator to the moon.


Books To Read


Artemis is a 2017 science fiction novel written by Andy Weir. The novel takes place in the late 2080s and is set in Artemis, the first and so far only city on the Moon.

Why Humans Can Talk and Other Apes Can't

Scientists have found out why humans were able to break away from the apes, advance to a significantly greater degree and develop language.

It seems, that basically, it comes down to a duplicated gene SRGAP2, which appeared in our ancestors around 2.5million years ago. This duplication enables greater connections and a brain of greater complexity.

The research published in the journal Cell found that the second copy of the gene caused neurones to develop longer dendrites and this led to a larger brain.

Chimp Does Hamlet Flickr Riley and Amos

Professor Franck Polleux of The Scripps Research Institute in California said that this gene was one of about 30 genes which were duplicated in humans after separating from apes. (actually, Humans are classified in the sub-group primates, known as the Great Apes).

According to research, many genes which are present in humans, are absent in chimpanzees, or vice versa, due to duplications and deletions of gene regions. Since the evolutionary break between humans and chimpanzees, humans have gained 689 genes and lost 86. Chimpanzees have gained 26 genes and lost 729, that are still present in humans.

  (Demuth, J.P., De Bie, T., Stajich, J.E., Cristianini, N. & Hahn, M.W. (2006). The evolution of mammalian gene families. PLoS One 1, e85.


Books To Read


Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud, by Andrew Lane - Sherlock finds a dead body on the Holmes' estate.

They Were Not Dead, Actually

It is said that John Duns Scotus who fell into a coma and died in 1308, was buried alive. His tomb was opened after his death and his body was found outside the coffin, with hands that were torn and bloody.

In the 16th century, Matthew Wall, a man from Hertfordshire, England was being carried to his grave in his coffin, when one of the pall-bearers tripped. The coffin fell to the ground and there was a moment of stunned silence. But the faces of the onlookers soon changed to horror, as the sounds of a desperate knocking reached their ears. The knocking was coming from inside the coffin. The lid of the coffin was cracked open and Mr Wall was found to be still alive.

Nicephorus Glycas, the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Lesbos, awoke in his coffin in 1896. He had lay seemingly dead for two-days. He then sat up and scoldingly asked the terrified mourners what they were staring at.

Help!

In 2007 a man was involved in a car accident. The Venezuelan man was declared dead and prepared for an autopsy. Doctors realised their mistake when the man began to bleed and came to consciousness due to the unbearable pain of the scalpel. The man’s wife who arrived at the hospital in order to identify the dead body of her husband found him alive.

In 2011, an apparently dead man was put into a refrigerated mortuary in South Africa. But he awoke to find himself surrounded by dead bodies. He began screaming in terror causing mortuary workers to "run for their lives" in fear of a ghost. The elderly man was able to return home.

In January 2012 a woman named Michalina Lewandowska was tasered, bound and gagged, shoved in a box and buried in a shallow grave. She heard the sounds of the shovel and the dirt falling as she lay underground. Amazingly, the woman used her engagement ring to cut the cords binding her wrists. She then used the ring to cut and slash the box. As the dirt fell on her face and into her mouth, she began kicking and pushed her way up through the earth. The man who attempted to murder her was the father of her 4-year-old son.

Super Gran

In March 2012, in a remote area of China, a 95 year-old woman who had taken a fall, was found motionless and not breathing. The family placed the woman in a coffin, with the lid off and family and friends came to view the body according to local tradition. The day before the funeral the coffin was found empty. A desperate search ensued, but the elderly lady was soon found cooking in the kitchen, because she felt hungry.


Books To Read

The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber set in Victorian England.

The Earliest Written Laws, Long Before the Bible

Legal codes were common in the ancient Middle East, with the first known example of a legal code in recorded history being the Code of Urukagina (2,380-2,360 BC). Urukagina was a ruler of the city-state Lagash in Mesopotamia, who assumed the title of king. His legal code instigated reforms which meant that "The widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful man". He did claim to be divinely inspired, however.

Fragment of an inscripted clay cone of Urukagina

Another legal code, dating back to about 1772 BCE, is the Code of Hammurabi.
The more than 282 laws were carved on the stone pillar by order of the sixth Babylonian King Hammurabi, who ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E.

Hammurabi, was the chief lawmaker responsible for these laws, which provided a code for people to live by. And because this city-state conquered many diverse tribes, these rules helped the different groups live together in unity. However, members of different classes received different punishments.

The laws are extensive and relate to such matters as property, rights of landowners, merchants and slaves. Some rules were harsh:

If anyone is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death

and some were incredibly reasonable:

If anyone owe a debt for a loan, and a storm prostrates (kills) the grain, or the harvest fail, or the grain does not grow for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain; he washes his debt-tablet in water and pays no rent for this year.

Other things covered in the code are matters like marriage and divorce, wages for work and how much doctors should receive as payment. Another famous law of Hammurabi was "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth".

There is evidence that the Code of Hammurabi is based on a more ancient system of laws which were updated and expanded by Hammurabi's orders. There are also some similarities between the later Ten Commandments and the laws of Hammurabi.


Books To Read

The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule, by Michael Shermer on ethics and evolutionary psychology.

The Amazing Universe and Us

As Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff. This means that the raw materials of which we are made once existed inside a star.

• All the hydrogen in the universe was created during the Big Bang around 14 billion years ago.
• All the calcium that is present in our bones was forged inside stars that died a long time before our solar system existed.

• The water and hydrogen in our bodies and the rest of the universe are about 14 billion years old.
• We are the descendants of ancient stars; that's where our atoms came from.
• The majority of the oxygen that we breathe was made by giant red stars.
• When blue-white stars explode as supernovas, heavy metals like, copper, silver, mercury and lead are created.

"The Earth and everything on it including the oceans, atmosphere, and life itself, are composed largely of material that was once stardust, and later incorporated into the solar system as it formed." (May 8, 2006) ― David Morrison.

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”― Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

"Humans are genetically connected with life on Earth, chemically connected with life on other star systems and atomically connected with all matter in the universe." ― Neil de Grasse Tyson.


Books To Read

Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, by Michael Shermer.

Would you Visit a Human Zoo?

In the late 1800s, human zoos were popular places to visit in various countries. One of the earliest-known human zoos was located at Moctezuma in Mexico, where there was not only a huge collection of animals but also dwarves, albinos, hunchbacks and other "unusual" examples of humanity.

Charles Sherwood Stratton, with his wife Lavina Warren

The Medicis ( political dynasty, banking family, later royal house and also four Popes of the Catholic Church) during the Renaissance, had a zoo at the Vatican in Rome, of different "races" of people, like Moors, Tartars, Indians, Turks and Africans.

Human zoos could be found in Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York, and Warsaw, during the 1870s. Samoan, Sami and Inuit people were collected and displayed in "natural" settings.

Poster advertising the Somalian Park at Jardin Zoologique Paris in 1890 

The1878 and 1889 Parisian World's Fair presented a Negro Village. The 1889 World's Fair exhibited 400 indigenous people. The Cincinnati Zoo in the USA encouraged one hundred Sioux Native Americans to establish a village at the site and they lived there for three months.

Thankfully, times have changed.


Books To Read


Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids. Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero.

Exploding Lakes of Death

Exploding lakes are also known as a limnic eruption. This type of natural disaster, which is rare, occurs when dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) erupts from deep lake water, causing the suffocation of wildlife, farm animals and humans. These eruptions can be triggered by landslides, volcanic activity, high temperatures, rainstorms or explosions. The eruptions then, in turn, can cause tsunamis.

Lake Nyos after a limnic eruption

Lake Monoun in Cameroon, exploded on August 15, 1984. The release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide killed 37 people and gave them a strange type of skin damage resulting in discolouration. Lake Nyos, also, in Cameroon, however, suffocated 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock, after a landslide.

Cow killed by the limnic eruption at Lake Nyos

For such lake explosions to occur, the lake must be fairly saturated with gas, like carbon dioxide. This may be due to the lake being a volcanic crater emitting volcanic gas, or due to decomposition of organic material.


Books To Read


Skeptoid 3: Pirates, Pyramids, and Papyrus eBook, by Brian Dunning - debunking popular myths and legends with scientific method.