In 1851 the prominent American physician Samuel Adolphus Cartwright observed black slaves that fled captivity, and saw an illness. “Drapetomania, or the disease causing Negroes to flee” was the title to his paper explaining that black slaves didn’t want freedom, if they escaped they were ill. The cause was masters who treated slaves as something close to human beings, and slaves who considered themselves to be individuals of worth. Freedom was an illness, and Cartwright had the cure.
If a slave becomes “sulky and dissatisfied without reason,” then they may have drapetomania and be about to flee. Cartwright recommended “whipping the devil out of them” until they became submissive again, the state to which they belonged. An alternative remedy was to make running away impossible by having the big toe from both feet severed. Hence curing the disease.
Looking at it from what is technically “the future” we can easily see that something strange is afoot here. Instead of treating black slaves a people, Cartwright assumed that the place of a slave, was to remain a slave. He used the bible as evidence, taking sections talking about the faithfulness of a servant to master to justify his assertions that slaves should be treated as little more than children. Children to be whipped that is. This viewpoint led him to make some suspect, pseudoscientific contributions to the body of scientific racism. He even believed that lazy saves weren’t upset, they too were ill.
Leave a jellyfish out in the sun for long enough, and it will evaporate. Over 95% water, jellyfish are ludicrously simple creatures. They have no brain, no lungs and no eyes. Assemble some tentacles, a stomach cavity, an umbrella head and you are nearly done. For respiration they just have skin thin enough to let oxygen slip through. Yet in this simplicity there is variety, and in one case, immortality.
It moves onto a surface and grips on tightly. Then it slowly becomes a blob. As a blob it performs the special process, transdifferentiation. This is the way in which some animals, like crabs, regrow their limbs. Cells become simplified, then are remade as new types of cell, giving a crab a new arm, or a starfish a new tentacle. Turritopis nutricul is unique in the animal kingdom because it does this to its entire body.
From urinating on various grains and seeing what germinated in Egyptian times to burning ribbons in the 17th Century, pregnancy tests have historically been unreliable. Then the 20th Century came, and it brought science.
You may have heard that, “more Monopoly Money is printed each year than is printed by the United States.” This is utterly false, which is a shame, but at least you know now.
When Sony was busy creating the Compact Disc or CD, they had a problem to contend with: how much data should it store? The more data they could store, the more expensive it would be and so on. In the end they chose a limit; the average CD today can hold 74 minutes worth of music.
Antarctica is the only continent on earth that does not have an indigenous species of ant.
A memory of three seconds. That is what you may think of the goldfish, but goldfish are better than that.
Disney World lies in Orlando, Florida and is 122 square kilometres in area. That is a large area, surprisingly it is larger than some countries.