The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (28 page)

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Up to this point I have emphasised links between flatulence, psychopathology and negative emotions. However, farting can also be a source of amusement. Flatulence is the focus of countless jokes and humorous stories. The act itself is often greeted with laughter and even elaborated into ribald contests and pyrotechnic displays, especially by pre-adolescent boys (and those developmentally arrested at that stage). Psychologists have paid little systematic attention to the ludic aspects of flatulence, but Lou Lippman has made a preliminary study. He presented a sample of college students with a description of a hypothetical fart that varied on four dimensions – relationship between the farter and witnesses (acquaintances or strangers), intention (deliberate or accidental), sound (loud or nearly silent) and odour (very rank or almost odourless) – and had them judge how humorous it would be. Farts were adjudged more humorous when deliberately, loudly, but odourlessly committed in the presence of acquaintances.

Lippman also asked participants to judge the politeness, maliciousness and obnoxiousness of flatulence under the 16 possible combinations of the four factors. Farts were judged most polite when accidental, silent, odourless and among acquaintances, and most malicious and obnoxious under the opposite combination: deliberate, loud, rank, and in the presence of strangers. Consistent with this pattern, in a second section of the study participants said they would be most likely to try to suppress an imminent passage of gas if it was likely to be loud, smelly and amid strangers, as well as when they could probably be identified as its source. Interestingly, then, farts are most humorous when they are halfway between politeness and obnoxiousness: odourless and in the presence of acquaintances, like polite breakings of wind, but also loud and deliberate, like malicious ones. They are potentially embarrassing but not outright shameful, the potential for humour being one of the elements that distinguishes
awkward embarrassment from toxic shame. In short, the humorousness of flatulence may derive from a controlled violation of social norms of propriety. As Bruce Merrill puts it: ‘Wit itself, Freud pointed out, is a sudden overwhelming of the superego. This … is the very essence of flatulence'.

Windy

Digestible

Thinking gut

Radioactive cigarettes: X-ray inhale

Karl Kruszelnicki

When I was a medical doctor in the hospital system, every now and then I needed to order chest X-rays for patients who were cigarette smokers. Quite often, they would (correctly) get nervous about the potential radiation damage from a chest X-ray. Yet when I told them that two packets of cigarettes gave them about the same radiation dose as a chest X-ray, they just would not believe me.

This raises two questions. First, how did cigarettes get radioactive? And second, why didn't they believe me?

Worldwide, we humans smoke about six trillion cigarettes each year – enough to make a chain that would easily reach from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then do the whole trip again, just for good measure. By the year 2020, cigarettes will be killing about 10 million people each year. They already knocked off 100 million people in the 20th century, and if things don't change they could kill one billion in the 21st century. Cigarette smoke is loaded with various chemicals that are well known to cause cancer. It's estimated that the radiation dose from the radioactive metal Polonium-210 (Po-210) in cigarettes accounts for about 2 per cent of cigarette-related deaths. That accounts for several thousand deaths each year in the USA alone.

Polonium-210 is extremely toxic – about 250 million times more toxic than cyanide.

Po-210 is so radioactive that it excites the surrounding air, giving off an unearthly blue glow. Weight for weight, it emits 4500 times as many alpha particles as does radium – which is notorious for being incredibly radioactive and dangerous. A single gram of Po-210 (a cube measuring about 5 millimetres on each side) generates more heat than an old-fashioned 100-watt incandescent light bulb. That is a huge amount of power. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko became the first person confirmed as dying from acute Po-210 Radiation Syndrome. He had previously been an officer in the Russian KGB. After accusing his superiors of ordering the assassination of the Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, he escaped prosecution in Russia and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. In a London restaurant, he was somehow given about 10 micrograms of Po-210 – roughly 200 times more than was needed to kill him.

Po-210 is always present whenever you have uranium. Developed countries use fertiliser that is manufactured from apatite rock, and this rock naturally contains uranium. The uranium decays to radioactive Po-210, which enters the tobacco plant through both the leaves and roots.

When a cigarette burns, it reaches temperatures of 600–800° Celsius – much hotter than the melting point of Po-210. As a result, Po-210 becomes airborne very easily. The microscopic droplets of liquefied Po-210 stick to tiny particles in the cigarette smoke. As this smoke is sucked into your lungs, the particles (carrying their toxic Po-210) then tend to land at ‘bifurcations' – locations in your airways and lungs where one pipe splits into two pipes. Po-210 is intensely radioactive, and sprays alpha particles into the surrounding tissues. These alpha particles have enough energy to cause mutations and cancers. Most people would definitely be worried if you suggested that they should
have a chest X-ray every day for the rest of their lives. But some of these people quite happily smoke – sometimes up to two packets of cigarettes every day.

It was first discovered that cigarettes contained radioactive polonium about half a century ago. So how come it's not general public knowledge? The answer is simple: Big Tobacco is excellent at cover-ups. These companies realised that there was radioactive Po-210 in tobacco and did their own internal, and very secret, research program. They even came up with ways to drastically reduce the amount of Po-210 in cigarette smoke. But there was no money in it. One notorious tobacco company memo about radioactive polonium read, ‘removal of these materials would have no commercial advantage'.

They also didn't want any bad publicity. By the early 1960s, it had already been scientifically proven that smoking was the principal cause of lung cancer. However, Big Tobacco played down the scientific truth for several decades. At the Philip Morris tobacco company, a scientist wrote in a memo to his boss, regarding research on Po-210, ‘it has the potential of waking a sleeping giant. The subject is rumbling […] and I doubt we should provide facts'. Big Tobacco's internal research showed that Po-210 was definitely harmful. But a 1982 internal Philip Morris document advised that as long as they kept their internal research secret, they could maintain that any suggestion of a link between Po-210 and lung cancers was ‘spurious and unsubstantiated'. Big Tobacco companies had yet another reason for not publishing their research. Their infamous motto, as observed by a tobacco company executive in 1969, was (and still is) ‘Doubt Is Our Product'. They used any tiny variation in the research to support the misleading claim that even the experts didn't really agree that smoking was harmful. For example, suppose that Scientist A said that the link between smoking and lung cancer was 99 per cent certain, but Scientist B said it was 98 per cent. Big Tobacco would
claim that even the scientists could not agree – and, therefore, how could anyone believe there was a link between smoking and lung cancer? Big Tobacco plays the same deadly game today. Perhaps it's time Big Tobacco X-rayed their own internal research, so they can see through their own smoke screen.

Drug habits

Vested interests

Martyrs to Gondwanaland: The cost of scientific exploration

Chris Turney

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the

Ranges –

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.

Go!

– Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

On 11 February 1913 England woke to the
Daily Mail
headline ‘Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached. Disaster on the return'. Just a day before, the press had reported that the British Antarctic expedition leader was back in New Zealand after succeeding in his goal to reach the South Geographic Pole; the Royal Geographical Society had even prepared a telegram congratulating him on his success. The palpable sense of anticipation and excitement now turned to despondence.

A few days later a hastily organised memorial service was held in St Paul's Cathedral, London. The numbers attending were staggering, exceeding those at the service for the 1500 lives lost on the
Titanic
in the same year. ‘The presence of the king',
The Times
declared, ‘conveyed a symbolism without which any ceremony expressive of national sentiment would have been inadequate'. The Empire grieved.

The details of what had happened in Antarctica appeared contradictory. The five men had last been seen heading confidently towards the Pole. They were well provisioned, and fit and strong. What had happened did not make sense – but the latest reports from Antarctica had a frightening ring of truth.

These accounts described a team returning in deteriorating weather conditions, the likes of which had never been seen before. Pushing on in the bitter cold the expedition had continued its scientific program, making observations and collecting geological samples as it travelled back to the Cape Evans base. And yet the journey proved fatal.

Petty Officer Edgar Evans (not to be confused with Scott's deputy, Teddy Evans) was the first to die, apparently from the effects of concussion at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. Later, suffering from frostbite and exhaustion, and recognising his ever-slowing pace was threatening the others, Captain Lawrence ‘Titus' Oates famously walked out into a blizzard with the words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time'. Struggling forward with limited food and fuel, in plummeting temperatures, the remaining three men continued their trek to base.

In late March 1912 a nine-day blizzard pinned down Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry ‘Birdie' Bowers in their tent. There would be no escape. All three wrote messages for loved ones until the end, which came sometime around 29 March. Scott's diary reads:

Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now we are getting weaker, of course, and the
end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people.

They died disappointed men, 150 days out from base and a mere 18 kilometres from salvation at One Ton Depot.

In his ‘Message to the Public', Scott wrote one of the finest short pieces of English prose:

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly cared for.

Scott wrote to his ‘wife' – a word he later struck out and changed to ‘widow' – and said of their two-year-old son and future conservationist, Peter: ‘Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games'.

On 12 November a search party from Cape Evans came across the frozen remains of the three men. Apsley Cherry-Garrard later wrote, ‘We have found them – to say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it – it is too bad for words.' But Cherry-Garrard was amazed: