Those baby blues may leave you more susceptible to the glare of the sun
Q. The iconic Statue of Liberty, at 93 metres (305 feet), including the pedestal, has towered over New York Harbor since 1886. A visitor can walk up a standard staircase to reach the pedestal, then a very narrow spiral staircase to access the crown. But the staircase leading to the torch and its wrap-around observatory beneath the 24-carat-gold-covered flame is closed. Why? A. The answer lies in an oft-forgotten attack on the U.S. on July 30, 1916, two years after the start of World War I, says Dan Lewis on his “Now I Know” website. The U.S., as you may remember, remained neutral throughout much of the war, but it maintained trade with Europe, and when the British blockaded German ports, “America became a ‘de facto’ munitions supplier to Great Britain and its allies.”
In an attempt to cut off this supply line, the Germans sabotaged a manmade island in New York Harbor known as Black Tom Island, a munitions storage site. According to Wikipedia, fragments from the resulting explosion — equivalent to an earthquake measuring 5.0-5.5 on the Richter Scale — lodged in the Statue of Liberty, and windows as far away as 25 miles were broken.
Four people died and hundreds more were injured, Lewis adds. As for Lady Liberty, her right arm leading to the torch was hit hard by the blast, and “fixing it fully proved impossible…. Access to the torch has been closed to the public ever since.” Q. Fifteen thousand species strong, at home on every continent but Antarctica, considered an aphrodisiac to some and a medicinal oil to others, operating as a cleanup crew of dropped food but sometimes being eaten themselves. What are these (almost) ubiquitous arthropods? A. They’re ants, of course, with most living in hierarchical colonies with a single egg-laying queen, mating males and worker females, reports Ashley Braun in “Discover” magazine. It’s been estimated that just along the road medians of 150 blocks in New York City, ants consume the equivalent of 60,000 hot dogs per year, and in Colombia, the fertilized queens of one species, brined and toasted, are considered a delicacy.
Researchers have discovered Argentine ants forming supercolonies around the world, the largest ever found spanning 2,500 miles from northwest Spain to northern Italy and containing tens of millions of queens and worker ants in the billions. Yet whether from a supercolony nest in Portugal, or one in France, they collaborate rather than compete. Concludes Braun, “That sounds like a social network we can all learn from.” Q. True or False: Blueeyed people have more troubling coping with dazzling sun than do those with brown-eyes. A. True, since “the bluer the eyes, the more light is likely to bypass the pupil and enter through the iris,” writes U.K visual scientist Ron Douglas in “New Scientist” magazine. Basically, eye color is determined by the amount of melatonin in the iris, making the iris opaque and preventing light from entering anywhere but the pupil. Melatonin-rich brown eyes absorb the most light, whereas blue eyes absorb less and scatter some of the shorter (blue) wavelength light. And this scattering can cause glare and reduce image contrast, meaning that “those with blue eyes will be troubled more by bright sunlight than those with brown eyes.”
On a personal note, Douglas says that with his blue eyes, he always has to wear sunglasses. His wife, however, “with her lovely hazel brown eyes, rarely has to bother with such eye protection.”