STRANGE BUT TRUE

Q: It’s been estimated that worldwide there are about 10 million species, but, as yet fewer than two million of them have been classified. In what unexpected places might some of these unnamed species be found?

A: Rather than trekking into the wilderness, try rummaging in the drawers of museums’ forgotten and neglected collections, where specimens remain “lost in time until someone opens that drawer or takes the lid off a jar and sees something unknown inside,” says Christopher Kemp in New Scientist magazine. Perhaps as many as 75 percent of newly described species are already part of a collection somewhere on the planet.

Consider the size of the collections of just a few large, established museums — The London Natural History Museum: 10 million beetles filling 22,000 drawers; the American Museum of Natural History: 25,000 bats; the California Academy of Science in San Francisco: 300,000 reptiles and amphibians; Duke University herbarium in North Carolina: 160,000 specimens in the moss collection alone.

Yet the process of identification and classification is a painstaking one, with an average shelf life between collection and description (across all orders of organisms) being about 21 years. And even after a specimen is examined, it is often misidentified and wrongly named.

And now for the almost mind-boggling numbers: “All told, U.S. natural history collections contain an estimated 1 billion specimens. Across the world, the number probably exceeds 3 billion,” far too many to be accurately identified and named.

Q: Tired of all that ironing? Why do clothes wrinkle anyway? And how does ironing work? What about wrinklefree clothes?

A: Plant-based fabrics such as cotton, linen and hemp are mostly made of the natural polymer cellulose, whose molecules bond weakly with each other, says chemist Mark Lorch in American Scientist magazine. While the many bonds make the fabric strong, they continuously break and reform — especially in the presence of water, like in a washing machine — so the fabric tends to adopt whatever shape it has when it dries. If the fabric is scrunched up while it dries — like in a clothes dryer — the wrinkles are locked in. The heat and moisture of an iron quickly breaks the bonds, and the pressure gives the fabric a smoothness that gets locked in as the fabric cools and dries.

Now consider wrinkle-free clothes: Starch is also a polymer but it’s branched in such a way that it stabilizes cellulose to prevent wrinkling. However, since starch is water soluble, it just comes out in the wash. So if you want permanently wrinkle-free clothes, you need non-water-soluble “starch” — the secret of wrinkle-resistant fabrics.

Q: “Healthy See, Healthy Do.” Sounds good, but is it true? A: Actually, it is, as seen in grocery store purchases where the location of store displays can influence shopping choices, says Rachel Nuwer in Scientific American magazine. The hot spot for sugary and salty snacks is the checkout area, and a few studies have suggested that swapping healthier options for junk food there could shift customer behavior.

To see for itself, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been working with over 1,000 store owners to stock and promote nutritious foods. Testing this idea out in the city’s dense urban checkout areas, research scientist Tamar Adjoian and her colleagues enlisted three Bronx supermarkets to give one checkout lane in each store “a healthy makeover,” replacing processed snacks like candy and cookies with fruits, nuts and other lower-calorie foods. While only 4 percent of the 21,000 tracked shoppers bought anything from checkout, Adjoian found that those in the healthy lines “purchased nutritious items more than twice as often as those in the standard lines — and they bought unhealthy items 40 percent less often.”

Stay tuned as department officials work to expand healthy options at checkout aisles throughout the city. — Bill Sones and Rich Sones, for The Oklahoman