To honor the start of a new school year, we bring to you the following Fermi problem: How long would a physics lecture have to be to actually kill you?
Or more precisely, from Physics Buzz:
Assuming you’re not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?
The mathletes at the Buzz make a few assumptions about the classroom, but in a 16-foot by 16-foot classroom with a 10-foot ceiling, packed with 34 bleary-eyed students and one Red Bull fueled professor the answer is…2 hours and 51 minutes!
Of course you’ll probably be brain dead long before that point.
Check their math here and then tell us why they’re right or wrong, or if you’ve ever survied such a physics marathon.
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Image: flickr / Rober S. Donovan
Ever wonder what your exact numerical risk of dying in the next year is? Feel free to satisfy your morbid curiosity at DeathRiskRankings.com, a tool developed by professors and students at Carnegie Mellon University. The site uses data from the CDC and the European Commission to calculate an estimated likelihood that you’ll kick the bucket, based on factors like your gender and geographic region.
According to Livescience:
Of course the results produced by the web site speak to groups of people and cannot predict with accuracy when you might actually kick the bucket. The timing of your own end is based on many uncharted factors, from heredity to lifestyle to untimely accidents….
The researchers found that beyond infancy, the risk of dying increases annually at an exponential rate. A 20-year-old U.S. woman has a 1 in 2,000 (or 0.05 percent) chance of dying in the next year, for example. By age 40, the risk is three times greater; by age 60, it is 16 times greater; and by age 80, it is 100 times greater (around 1 in 20 or 5 percent).
Maybe the tool can serve as a happy reminder that the clock is ticking. On that note, perhaps your precious time would be better spent doing something besides surfing the ‘net. [Ed note: No, please, surf away! And tell your friends!]
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Lazarus Syndrome was in the news a few months ago when a 23-year-old man was pronounced dead, only to have his heart start beating again a half hour later. While that story had a tragic end (the man eventually died) now there’s another Lazarus story, this time with a joyous outcome.
A baby born 16 weeks premature at a hospital in Paraguay was pronounced dead—that is, until he “woke up” right before his own funeral. MSNBC reports:
Dr. Ernesto Weber, head of pediatric care at the state-run hospital in the capital of Asuncion, said the baby weighed just 500 grams when he was born.
“Initially, the baby didn’t move, he practically didn’t have any respiratory reflexes, nor did we hear a heartbeat and, as a result, we declared a premature fetus of 24 weeks dead,” Weber told Reuters Television….
But when the family took him from the hospital to prepare him for his funeral, the unbelievable happened.
“I opened the box and took the baby out and he cried. I got scared and I said “the baby’s crying” … and then he started moving his arms, his legs and I got scared, we got very scared,” said one member of the family, Liliana Alvarenga
UPDATE: Unfortunately, the child died shortly after awakening. The medical staff at the Paraguayan hospital where he was born stated that his vital organs were not strong enough to survive.
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Despite their energy-saving efforts, wind farms have a bad rap for killing birds. And now there may be a bigger problem: The noise from turbines could be killing livestock as well—or, at least, playing a part in their deaths.
According to one Taiwanese farmer, Kuo Jin-shan, the turbines erected near his farm on an island in the Taiwan Strait have been keeping his goats awake at night. Now that 400 of Huo’s goats have died, he is blaming their deaths on the loud noise coming from the wind farms.
After eight turbines were installed on the Penghu archipelago four years ago, the farmer began to notice some marked changes in his goats—they weren’t as hungry, they were losing weight, and many had started to die.
It seems outlandish to suggest that hundreds of goats dropped dead from sleep deprivation, but local livestock inspector Lu Ming-Tseng has backed up the farmer’s claim. Apparently, unusual sounds can affect an animal’s appetite, disturb how it grows, and make it lose shut-eye, all of which cause serious disruption to the animal’s health.
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Internet junkies (which includes an increasing majority of humanity these days) now have one less reason to fear death: Sites like Eternalspace.com can preserve their online lives forever.
Virtual cemeteries and online memorials are springing up around the Internet, from companies that use funeral homes as middlemen. A virtual grave site can be purchased for a loved one, followed by digital amenities and individual accessories, such as a mausoleum, flowers, and religious icons (for $5 and up).
Entrepreneurial ideas like these have sprung largely from the role that Facebook and other social networks have nabbed when a death occurs in social circles. People often use social networks to let others in the network know of a friend’s passing, or distribute details of a funeral, for example. Facebook can also declare a deceased person’s page as in a “Memorial State,” which restricts access to approved family members and friends. Facebook usually requires an official death notice or news item before making the change.
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If you’re not feeling lucky, don’t venture into Wyoming, Utah, or Colorado. These states have some of the highest mortality rates caused by natural disasters, according to a new “death map” that plots where Mother Nature takes her heaviest tolls.
From 1970 to 2004, natural disasters killed some 20,000 people in the U.S. Surprisingly, the deadliest events aren’t the ones that make the headlines. More people died from heat/drought (19.6 percent), sizzling summers (18.8 percent), and freezing winters (18.1 percent) than earthquakes, wildfire, and hurricanes combined (less than 5 percent). And who would’ve thought that lightning accounted for 11.3 percent of deaths from natural hazards? The strikes were especially concentrated in the New England and southeastern states.
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The remains of an elderly man found in a Polish cathedral in 2005 have now been confirmed to be that of Copernicus, the 16th century astronomer famous for displacing Earth from the center of the universe. A team of Polish researchers have matched DNA extracted from a tooth and a femur bone to that of a strand of hair found in one of Copernicus’ old books.
For all his revolutionary ideas, Copernicus was never particularly famous during his lifetime, at least not enough to have a marked grave. (He didn’t publish his heliocentric treatise De revolutionibus until 1543, the year of his death, for fear of persecution.) Scientists knew he was one of the anonymous burials in a cathedral in Frombork, Poland, but they didn’t know which one. So they used radar to scan all the bodies to find one about 60 to 70 years old, the astronomer’s age when he died. The DNA evidence confirms that they got the right body.
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More than two dozen dolphins bit the dust in the U.K. on Monday by intentionally beaching themselves, and possible explanations for this bizarre behavior have been flying around ever since.
The morbid scene happened in Cornwall, the far southwestern tip of England. One of the leading researchers, Vic Simpson of the nearby Wildlife Veterinary Investigation Centre, said the dolphin disaster could have been a mass suicide, reminiscent of some kind of cryptic cult. According to the Daily Mail, some Cornwall residents helped a few of the 26 dolphins back into the water, only to see the suicidal marine mammals intentionally beach themselves again. The dolphins had inhaled mud that clogged their lungs and stomachs, but Simpson could offer no reason why they would do this, other than some kind of crazed panic.
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A hair trail has now shed light on a two-centuries-old historical question.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the famous dictator of France, died in exile on the island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean. While doctors at the time cited stomach cancer as the cause of death, some historians believe that arsenic did him in—high levels of the toxic substance were found in hair samples after he died. But not so fast, says a team of Italian scientists—the arsenic in Napoleon’s hair probably didn’t kill him.
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May has been a good month for detergent sales in Japan. Unfortunately, it’s also been a good month for gas masks.
The growing trend in Japan of committing suicide by cooking up a noxious brew of household chemicals has become a disaster for anyone caught upwind. People aren’t just killing themselves anymore; they’re making their neighbors sick as well.
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