There’s nothing funny about hitting your ulnar nerve at the wrong angle
Q. On August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in western Cameroon erupted, killing 1,700 residents settled near its shores. They had all suffocated. Can you explain what happened? A. Called a “limnic eruption” or “lake overturn,” “the science behind it is a lot like what happens when a shaken can of soda opens suddenly — it explodes, with carbon dioxide (CO2) bubbles rapidly escaping,” says Dan Lewis on his “Now I Know” website. Likely volcanic gas from an extinct volcano leaked CO2 into the deeper water, which like the canned soda, is both cold and generally stable until some disruption occurs. For reasons that are unclear, at Lake Nyos “the CO2, which is heavier than air, flooded the surrounding area and crowded out the breathable, oxygenrich air.” Some 1,700 people died.
If you live near a lake, do you need to worry? Almost certainly not, Lewis explains, since “the lake would need to have a gas source, be very deep, and also very still. And that’s only true for three lakes in the world — the aforementioned Nyos and Monoun in Cameroon, and Lake Kivu on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.”
Regarding Lake Kivu, scientists have tried to remove a lot of the risk by degassing a lot of the methane gas in the water. The roughly 2 million people who live near the lake can breathe a little easier. Q. Ouch! You just hit your funny bone, and the pain is anything but funny. What’s the cause of it? A. Blame it on the anatomy of the elbow and the ulnar nerve, a string of sensitive fibers that run from your neck down to your hand, reports “How It Works: Book of Amazing Science.” That sharp pain comes not from a bone at all. Layers of bone and muscle mostly protect the nerve, but at the elbow it passes through the cubital tunnel covered only by skin. “When you hit your arm at just the wrong angle, the nerve is compressed between the skin and a knob of bone called the medial epicondyle, causing it to send a shooting pain down your arm and into your fingers.” As the book explains, “The term ‘funny bone’ is thought to derive from the name of the humerus bone in the upper arm.” Q. “Oh, no! The star football/soccer player on your favorite team has just been carried off the field with a game-ending injury.” Can anything be done to help predict and prevent such injuries? A. Enter artificial intelligence (AI) and a machinelearning algorithm developed at the University of Pisa, Italy, that recently predicted nine out of the 14 injuries sustained by an elite football team during a single season, says Alice Klein in “New Scientist” magazine. During the training season, the University’s Alessio Rossi and his team fitted 26 players in the Barcelona football club with GPS sensors that measured “how far and fast they ran, how often they accelerated and decelerated, and the impact they had with the ground and other players.”
By detecting patterns between multiple variables and actual injuries, the algorithm was able to predict about 60% of injuries, up from the previous forecaster’s typical rate of less than 5%. Additionally, it reduced the number of false alarm rates, says Rossi.
Last year, Microsoft launched its own learning injury forecaster, now being used by the NFL Seattle Seahawks, US football team Seattle Reign, the Australian cricket team and Spanish football team Real Sociedad. Though the results are largely confidential, “Seattle Reign says only one player got injured in the season after the team adopted the technology.”