STRANGE BUT TRUE
Q: Some of us terrestrial beings have a real fascination with all things extraterrestrial, including why a day on Venus is longer than its year, how the almost-million-pound International Space Station ever got into orbit, and why the Big Dipper will eventually become the “Big Spatula”?
A: Venus rotates so slowly that it takes 243 Earth days to complete one diurnal spin, says astronomer and columnist Dean Regas in his book “Facts from Space!” And because it is closer to the Sun than Earth is, the time it takes to orbit the sun once is only 225 days. In fact, Venus is the only planet in the solar system whose year is shorter than its day.
As to the International Space Station, a joint effort between the United States, Russia, and others — it was transported into space, piece by piece, starting in 1998. Currently weighing more than 900,000 pounds, it is 239 feet wide, 356 feet long and 66 feet tall — room enough for its six crew members and the replacement crew and even guests.
It won’t be until 75,000 A.D., but because the stars in the Milky Way are moving rapidly through space, the stars in the Big Dipper, for instance, will shift among themselves and look like a “Big Spatula.”
Q: For adult women, menopause can have its ups and downs. For rats, it may be all downhill. How so?
A: A new type of bait called ContraPest “makes rats infertile by triggering early menopause in females and impairing sperm production in males,” says Alice Klein in New Scientist magazine. It has no known side effects, and the rats eventually die of natural causes.
According to biotechnologist Brandy Pyzyna, one breeding pair of rats can produce 15,000 pups per year, but field trials with the bait in both urban and farm settings saw a one-third to one-half decline in rat population. So even a one-third reduction in a few months means “you’re already talking 5,000 fewer rats, and the population will continue to go down.” Also, she argues, fertility control is more effective than outright killing since with the latter, other rats will simply move in to the territory.
More research needs to be done to ensure that native rodents — some of which may be endangered — don’t eat the bait. Pyzyna and her colleagues are also working on a reformulation to target other pest species, including mice, feral pigs and even feral deer, dogs and cats.
Q: With round lenses set in super-thick frames, these eyeglasses are definitely not cool-looking but they’re indisputably state of the art. How so?
A: Their “smart” lenses are made of liquid glycerin encased in clear rubber and will automatically focus on whatever the wearer is looking at, says Stephen Ornes in Science News magazine. According to one of the designers, University of Utah graduate student Nasmul Hasan, an app downloads one’s eyeglass prescription to the frames, which then send out light pulses that bounce off whatever is in front of the wearer — say, perhaps, a smartphone screen — to calculate the distance. Finally, tiny motors bend the lenses as the prescription dictates. “Voila! The text will come into focus.”
University of Central Florida engineer Tracy Xu sees potential for these “tunable, liquid lenses to be turned into ‘instant prescription eyewear’ ... particularly useful in emergencies and in poor countries, where a whole family might use one pair as a backup for broken glasses.”
And, Hasan further explains, the team’s prototype can switch its focus from one object to another in just 14 onethousandths of a second, helpful for those who suffer multiple eye problems where a single pair of glasses isn’t sufficient. But given that these new glasses are three times as heavy as ordinary eyeglasses and rather ugly, next is to make them lighter and more fashionable.