Hot weather heightens the risk of suffering sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia

Q. If there’s a condition you’ve suffered from without being aware of its name, it may be “Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.” That’s a mouthful! Do you need to get yourself to the ER? A. Not to worry. According to a study in the “British Medical Journal,” a third of the population has been afflicted by “brain freeze” or “ice cream headache,” “the stinging sensation one feels at the top/front of the head after eating too much ice cream too quickly,” says Dan Lewis in his book “Now I Know.”

Your face has a trigeminal nerve that carries sensory information from your forehead to your brain or from the roof of your mouth to your brain. Here’s what happens: When you eat ice cream too quickly, the blood vessels in your face contract, then expand rapidly when the ice cream leaves your mouth. The trigeminal nerve in the roof of your mouth signals your brain that something’s wrong but the brain “mistakes” the source of the sensation and thinks the signal is coming from your forehead. (Called “referred pain,” it also occurs during a heart attack, when the brain incorrectly places the pain in the shoulder rather than in the chest.) In the case of brain freeze, “the brain reacts by turning that signal into a migraine-like headache, although a shortlived one, thankfully.” Q. You hear these blended words all the time… “brunch” (“breakfast” + “lunch”), “motel” (“motor” + “hotel”), “podcast” (“iPod” + “broadcast”), but did you know there’s a name for them: “portmanteau.” Can you identify the portmanteau here: “solunar,” “dripple,” “glocalize,” “judder,” and “masstige”? A. “Solunar,” you probably guessed, combines “solar” and “lunar” and relates to the sun and the moon, says Anu Garg on his “A.Word.A.Day” website. “Dripple,” first used in 1821, blends “drip” and “dribble” and suggests flowing in a small stream or falling in drops. “Glocalize,” combining “global” and “localize,” means making a product or service widely available but adapted for local markets. For example, the “Jewish Post” (Israel) in 2012 wrote: “Communications have also been glocalized. Facebook, the global power on the rise, is an expression of this.”

“Judder,” meaning to shake or vibrate violently, blends “jolt/jar/jerk” and “shudder.” Finally, did you see that “masstige” combines “mass market” and “prestige” and thus means products that have the perception of luxury but are relatively affordable and marketed to the masses. As “The Gold Coast Bulletin” (Southport, Australia) used it in February, 2017: …Treasury Wines had established its luxury and masstige wines in China to compete with French and Italian wines.” Q. Do your shoelaces tend to come undone at the most inopportune moments? Scientists have set out to discover why, with implications beyond personal inconvenience. A. According to Oliver O’Reilly at the University of California, Berkeley, the culprit is a combination of stomping and whipping, reports “New Scientist” magazine. He and his team took slow motion film of a jogger’s shoes to capture the details of the unravelling.

From a physics viewpoint, a knot is held together by the friction at its center, with each turn adding to the friction and making the knot stronger. “But the repetitive downward stomp of each foot while running exerts an acceleration at the base of the knot, while the laces whip back and forth with each stride, tugging at the ends like an invisible hand.” Over time, acceleration trumps internal friction, and then the knot comes undone all at once (“Proceedings of the Royal Society A…”).

Eventually, “this work could shed light on other knotty structures, such as knots used in surgery….”