Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? (8 page)

How
do dehumidifiers sense the humidity level in the air and “know” when to shut off automatically?

Not all dehumidifiers shut off automatically. But most that do work like this: Ambient air is drawn into a chamber or pipe via
a fan. The outside air passes over a sensor in the humidistat, the device that determines whether or not the air exceeds the humidity you’ve set as your standard. If the air meets with your requirements, the air will pass through. But if the air in the room exceeds your desired humidity level, the air is heated by a hot-air dryer (or, less frequently, a desiccant chamber) before it is sent back into the room.

How does the humidistat determine the humidity of the ambient air? J. C. Laverick, technical director of dehumidifier manufacturer Ebac Ltd., explains:

 

At the heart of the humidistat [behind the console] is a sensing element in the shape of an endless belt made from Nylon 6. This material has the characteristic of changing length in proportion to the amount of moisture it contains. At higher humidity levels its length expands, and it contracts at lower humidity levels. This change of length is converted into the force required to operate the [snap-action] microswitch and hence the dehumidifier.

 

Submitted by Alan Wright of Mansfield Center, Connecticut
.

 

What
do you call that little groove in the center of our upper lips?

Sorry, we can’t answer this question. It is hardly an Imponderable, since it has been answered in scores of trivia books. Heck, this question has been posed by so many stand-up comedians on bad cable television shows, we refuse to answer on principle.

 

Submitted by too many readers
.

 

What
is the purpose of the little indentation in the center of our upper lips?

If you rephrase your Imponderable in the form of a proper question, you can weasel just about anything out of us. How can we write about the indentation without mentioning its name? OK guys…it’s called the
philtrum
. You’ll be proud to know that we have a groove running down our upper lip for absolutely no good reason, as William P. Jollie, professor and chairman of anatomy at the Medical College of Virginia, explains:

 

The indentation in the center of our upper lip is a groove, or raphe, that forms embryonically by merging paired right and left processes that make up our upper jaw. It has no function, just as many such midline merger marks, or raphes, have no function. We have quite a few merger-lines on our bodies: a raphe down the upper surface of our tongues; a grooved notch under the point of our chins; and a raphe in the midline of our palates. There are also several in the genital area, both male and female.

Anatomically, the raphe on our upper lip is called the
philtrum
, an interesting word derived from the Greek word
philter
, which even in English means a love potion. I confess I don’t see a connection, but many anatomical terms are peculiar in origin, if not downright funny.

 

Speaking of funny, it is our earnest hope that after the information in this chapter is disseminated, every stand-up comedian, standing before the inevitable brick wall, will stop doing routines about philtrums. Enough is enough.

 

Submitted by Bruce Hyman of Short Hills, New Jersey. Thanks also to three-year-old Michael Joshua Lim of Livonia, Michigan
.

 

What
happens to an ant that gets separated from its colony? Does it try to relocate the colony? Can it survive if it can’t find the colony?

As we all learned in elementary school, ants are social animals, but their organization doesn’t just provide them with buddies—it furnishes them with the food and protection they need to survive in a hostile environment.

All the experts we consulted indicated that an isolated worker ant, left to its own devices, would likely die a week or two before its normal three-week lifespan. And it would probably spend that foreshortened time wandering around, confused, looking for its colony.

Ants help each other trace the path between food sources and the colony by laying down chemical trails called pheromones. Our hypothetical solitary ant might try following pheromone trails it encounters, hoping they will lead it back home. Worker ants in a given colony are all the daughters of the original queen and can’t simply apply for admission to a new colony.

Three dangers, in particular, imperil a lost ant. The first, and most obvious, is a lack of food. Ants are natural foragers but are used to receiving cues from other ants about where to search for food. A single ant would not have the capacity to store enough food to survive for long. Furthermore, ants don’t always eat substances in the form they are gathered. Cincinnati naturalist Kathy Biel-Morgan provided us with the example of the leaf-cutter ant. The leaf-cutter ant finds plants and brings leaves back to the nest, where the material is ground up and used in the colony’s fungus garden. The ants then eat the fruiting body of the fungus. Without the organizational assistance of the colony, a leaf does nothing to sate the appetite of a leaf-cutter ant.

The second danger is cold. Ants are ectotherms, animals that need heat but are unable to generate it themselves. When it is cold, ants in colonies will seek the protective covering of the nest. If left to its own devices, a deserted ant would probably try to find a rock or the crack of a sidewalk to use as cover, which
may or may not be enough protection to keep it from freezing.

The third problem our lonesome ant would encounter is nasty creatures that think of the ant as their dinner fare. Collectively, ants help protect one another. Alone, an ant must fend off a variety of predators, including other ants. Biel-Morgan compared the vulnerability of the ant, on its own, to a single tourist in New York City. And that is vulnerable, indeed.

 

Submitted by Cary Hillman of Kokomo, Indiana
.

 

Why
is the color purple associated with royalty?

Although pagans once believed that purple dye was the creation of Satan, we actually have the Phoenicians to thank for the association of purple with royalty. Somehow, and we always wonder how anyone ever stumbles upon this sort of stuff, an anonymous Phoenician discovered that the spiny shell of the murex sea snail yielded a purple substance perfectly suited as a dye base. Phoenicians, the greatest traders and businessmen of the ancient world, soon developed purple cloth as one of their most lucrative trading commodities.

Since purple cloth was more expensive than other hues, only aristocrats could afford to wear it. But the Romans codified the practice, turning the color of clothing into a status symbol. Only the royal family itself could wear all-purple garments. Lesser aristocrats wore togas with purple stripes or borders to designate their rank—the more purple on the clothing, the higher the status.

The original “royal purple” was a different color than what we call purple today. It was a dark wine-red, with more red than blue. Many written accounts liken the color to blood. Indeed, the Phoenician dye was prized because it symbolized the unity, strength, and bonding of blood ties, and the continuity of royal families based on bloodlines. The spiritual quality supposedly
imparted by the purple color is suggested by its Roman root,
purpureus
(“very, very holy”).

The association of purple with royalty crossed many cultures and centuries. Greek legend explained royal purple as the color of Athena’s goatskin dyed red. Kings in Babylonia wore a “lanbussu” robe of the same color. Mark’s Gospel says that Jesus’ robe was purple (although Matthew describes it as scarlet). In many churches, purple became the liturgical color during Lent, except for Good Friday. Consistently, in the succeeding centuries, the color purple was always identified with blood, as late as the time of Shakespeare, for the Bard himself referred to the “purpled hands” of Caesar’s assassins, “stained with the most noble blood of all the world.”

Curiously, marketing research indicates that today, purple is one of the least popular colors, which helps explain why it is so seldom used in packaging. Is the current aversion to purple stirred by a rejection of the patrician origins of the color, its close approximation to the color of blood, or a rejection of our contemporary purple royalty, Prince?

 

Submitted by Raymond Graunke of Huntersville, North Carolina. Thanks also to Sharon M. Burke of Los Altos, California; and Brian Dunne of Indianapolis, Indiana
.

 

Was
Ben Gay?

We don’t have the slightest idea. But we do know how the product got its name.

Ben-Gay was created by a French pharmacist, whose name was, conveniently enough, Dr. Ben Gué. He introduced his product in France in 1898, and called it
Baume Gué (baume
means “balm”
en français
).

When the analgesic was launched in the United States, it was decided that the unwashed masses of North America couldn’t contend with a French word like
baume
or pronounce
one of those nasty accent
acutes
. So marketers settled on naming their product after an Anglicization of its creator’s name.

 

Submitted by Linda Atwell of Matthews, North Carolina
.

 

Why
are haystacks increasingly round rather than rectangular?

Everything old is new again. Round stacks were the fashion in the early twentieth century, as Oakley M. Ray, president of the American Feed Industry Association, explains:

 

Fifty to one hundred years ago, it was the usual practice for the wheat farmer to “thresh” wheat (separate the grain from the straw). The threshing machine discharges the straw in one location for a given field so that the result was normally a round stack of straw.

Some years later, the hay baler was invented, which compressed either hay or straw into a much smaller space, much as a household trash compactor does in many houses today. The bales were commonly three feet or so in length, perhaps eighteen inches wide, and perhaps eighteen inches high. They were held together by two wires or two strong pieces of twine. Each bale would weigh fifty to one hundred pounds, with the baler set in such a manner that all of the bales in a given field were essentially the same size.

 

Obviously, the uniform, rectangular shape made it easier to stack rectangular bales neatly and efficiently, first lengthwise in the wagons used to pick up the stacks, and then later in boxlike fashion in warehouses or barns.

But in the last fifteen to twenty years, “swathers” have gained popularity. These machines feature a sickle in front that cuts the hay and a belt that dumps the fodder in nice neat rows—a separate machine rolls it up—where it is left out in the sun to dry. The swather produces “wind-rowed” hay, which rarely
blows away, a great advantage, considering the fact that wet hay gets moldy if moist. The ability to allow hay to cure before baling reduces spoilage.

Round bales are much larger than square ones, often about a thousand pounds, ten to twenty times heavier than rectangular bales, so they must be picked up by machine. Still, there are economies of scale achieved by assembling larger units of hay, and mechanically, there are fewer technical problems—there are fewer moving parts in the machinery that produces round bales. Kendell Keith, of the National Grain and Feed Association, told
Imponderables
that the wire and twine used to secure each bale of rectangular hay and the labor involved in packing and securing it were costlier than those for producing round haystacks.

Perhaps the most important advantage of “round hay” is that it weathers better than its compressed rectangular counterpart, as Gary Smith, of the University of Maryland’s Agricultural Engineering department explains:

 

The round bales shed the weather better. They reduce the need for storage space indoors, depending on what part of the country you are in, they can be left outdoors with minimum loss. Out West there is virtually no loss. In Maryland, there is about a 15% loss. This is cheaper than having to build storage for rectangular bales.

 

Submitted by Rosemary Arseneault of Halifax, Nova Scotia
.