STRANGE BUT TRUE
Q: “Thou shalt not die,” the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen proclaims. What could they possibly mean by this and how would they enforce it?
A: With a population of 1,500 to 2,000, the village is one of the northernmost places on Earth with permanent residents, says Dan Lewis in his book “Now I Know.” It is well within the Arctic Circle, with polar bears roaming everywhere and temperatures never reaching what people would call “warm.” “That point led to the ban on dying,” Lewis wrote.
In 1917, a number of residents died after contracting a flu strain and were buried in the town cemetery. A decade later, it was discovered that the bodies weren’t decomposing because of the extreme cold, so unfortunately, the influenza strain was still alive. “Realizing that Longyearbyen, quite isolated from the rest of the world, had no way of handling its dead — and the risk to the living — its leaders simply declared that dying was not permitted in the town.”
How to enforce this “don’t die” dictum? Largely by prevention, it seems: The cemetery was closed to burials in 1930 and the village has no eldercare housing. In case of a life-threatening illness, “the local authorities will airlift you to the nearest regional hospital two hours away.”
Q: Your nose knows when you’re tired. How so?
A: Researchers have found that sleep deprivation seems to increase the brain’s sensitivity to food smells, says Laurel Hamers of Science News magazine. In a recent study, adults who’d had only four hours of sleep underwent functional MRI scans while inhaling food odors like those from potato chips and nonfood ones like fir trees. The same group was then tested later after eight hours of sleep.
Tellingly, people responding to food smells showed more brain activity in areas involved in olfaction when they were tired than when they were well-rested, reported Surabhi Bhutani of Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago. That spike wasn’t seen for nonfood odors. Perhaps, Hamers suggests, such heightened brain activity “might make snacks more enticing, helping to explain why people who burn the candle at both ends tend to eat more and gain weight.”