Things That Surprised Me in 2020

• Eyes have evolved several dozen (approx. 40) times; echo location has evolved separately 4 times
• Most physicists think the concept of space-time is doomed, and must be replaced by something more fundamental and accurate (vide Donald Hoffman) 
• All vertebrates feature the blind spot, but cephalopods do not — an octopus has photoreceptors in front of the interneurons and blood vessels
• Arabidopsis thaliana, a small weed that looks like wild mustard, has eleven types of photoreceptors ... (some) cyanobacteria boasts twenty-seven different photoreceptors 

Things That Surprised Me in 2015

• From the time that it was discovered to the day that it was stripped of its planet status, Pluto had not completed one orbit around the sun.
• The water in Lake Superior could cover all of north and south America with a foot of water.
• When you get a kidney transplant, they usually leave the original kidneys in your body and put the third kidney in your pelvis.
• Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
• A speck of dust is half way in size between a subatomic particle and the earth. 
• If you could fold a piece of paper in half 42 times the combined thickness could reach the moon. 

Things That Surprised Me in 2013

• First census of fungi (fun-Ghee, fun-Jee, or fun-Jie) in human bodies very recent, reported in May 2013 "Nature" (very difficult to culture). Very few species of fungi anywhere on the body except for feet, where there are 80 to 100 types of fungus. Fungi = third type of multicellular organisms, not plants nor animals. Skin microbiome comprise fungi, bacteria and viruses.  One genus anywhere on head and torso, different species, e.g. in the crease behind your ear or on your forehead. Hands have very few fungal communities (tons of bacteria). 40 different varieties on toenails, 60 between your toes, and 80 on your heel. Feet are cooler than other parts of the body, which fungi prefer.

Things That Surprised Me in 2012

• The earth rotates on its axis 366 1/4 times per year, not 365 1/4.  (366 sidereal days, so we see stars rate 366 times, and we experience 365 noons or solar days, due to changing position relative to the sun in addition to rotation) (wallingfordclock)
• Plants do not produce a great majority of the oxygen in the atmosphere.  Approximately 50% of oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean killed by viruses (RadioLab 3/5/2012)
• If you fire a bullet from a gun level to the earth's surface, and someone beside you drops a bullet from the height of the gun at the same time, the two bullets will hit the earth at exactly the same time.
• The Milgram experiment did NOT show that people follow orders.  When *ordered* to shock the subject, 0% complied.
• Infants do NOT assume that hidden objects cease to exist, as demonstrated at two months, the earliest age at which they can be tested.  (Missouri.edu)
• Conservatives literally focus more on negative images, and liberals more on positive images.  "In a series of experiments, researchers closely monitored physiological reactions and eye movements of study participants when shown combinations of both pleasant and unpleasant images. Conservatives reacted more strongly to, fixated more quickly on, and looked longer at the unpleasant images; liberals had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the pleasant images compared with conservatives.  "It's been said that conservatives and liberals don't see things in the same way," said Mike Dodd, UNL assistant professor of psychology and the study's lead author. "These findings make that clear – quite literally."  To gauge participants' physiological responses, they were shown a series of images on a screen. Electrodes measured subtle skin conductance changes, which indicated an emotional response. The cognitive data, meanwhile, was gathered by outfitting participants with eyetracking equipment that captured even the most subtle of eye movements while combinations of unpleasant and pleasant photos appeared on the screen.  While liberals' gazes tended to fall upon the pleasant images, such as a beach ball or a bunny rabbit, conservatives clearly focused on the negative images – of an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet, for example.  Consistent with the idea that conservatives seem to respond more to negative stimuli while liberals respond more to positive stimuli, conservatives also exhibited a stronger physiological response to images of Democratic politicians – presumed to be a negative to them – than they did on pictures of well-known Republicans. Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger physiological response to the Democrats – presumed to be a positive stimulus to them – than they did to images of the Republicans.  (physorg.com)
• HIV/AIDS was transferred to humans late in the 19th or early in the 20th century, and entered U.S. around 1969.
• The decline in diversity of crops in the 20th century is a myth.  Overall varietal diversity of the $20 billion market for vegetable crops and apples in the U.S. actually has increased over the past 100 years.  (U of Illinois)

Things That Surprised Me in 2011

• If you anesthetize the arm, so that the flesh does not send signals that it is NOT being touched, mirror neurons will make you feel like you are being touched when you see someone else's arm being touched (and if you have pain in a "phantom" limb, massaging the other person's arm will relieve your pain).  V.S. Ramachandran, TED Talks
• While you cannot tickle yourself, a delay between (your own) action and stimulus of your skin by 0.2 seconds will result in being as ticklish as if a robot does the stimulation.
• Babies will recognize Dr. Seuss stories that were read to them repeatedly while a fetus, and the theme songs of soap operas that their mothers watch while pregnant.   (Annie Murphy Hall - TED Talks)
• Babies cry in accents of their mothers (e.g. ending going up in France, going down in Germany) - (Annie Murphy Hall - TED Talks)

Things That Surprised Me in 2010

• Most scientists now think that time did *not* begin with the Big Bang and that there probably has been an infinity of time (Michael Hanlon, 2/22 lecture, Town Hall)
• It was not until World War II that the POTUS was considered the "commander in chief" even during peacetime, and that military men began to salute him.  (Salute is for uniform and POTUS is never in a military uniform.)  (Garry Wills, Town Hall lecture)
• It is not true that the majority of household dust is dead skin cells (e.g. 60% is from outside)
• It appears that daylight savings time does not actually save energy.  (Established when light consumed most energy; now outweighed by use of air conditioning)  (Scientific American Podcast #34 
• Summer vacation in U.S. schools, which is when wealthy children leap ahead of poor children in school/intellectual experience, was started because of the 19th century notion that over-stimulation of children's minds was a leading form of childhood insanity (Malcolm Galdwell, Outliers)
• Athletic success is highly correlated with birth date (Gladwell, Outliers)
• If you blindfold a person or remove reference points and ask them to walk or swim or drive in a straight line they will go in circles (Krulwich Wonders 11/22/2010)

Things That Surprised Me in 2009

• A flipped coin is more likely to land with the same side facing up as before the flip -- at least 51% and 55-60% depending on the flipper   (Stanford study,)
• Smart people use less brain power for mental tasks -- i.e. they learn brain efficiency.  (One exception is for solving math problems -- smarter males (but not smarter females) use more of their brain to solve mathematical problems than males with less math abilities.)  (Scientific American Mind - Nov/Dec 2009)
• There are no accounts of any traditional people who survived on raw foods alone (NYRB 10/22/09); The human body is adapted to eating cooked food -- small mouths, weak jaws, small teeth, small stomachs, small colons -- less than 60% of expected for a primate our size (ibid)
• People and dogs have come out fine after several minutes in a room at 230 - 240 F (boiling point of water = 212 F)  (Krulwich on Science 7/23/09)
• Heat does not rise and you don't lose 45% of your body heat through your head. The amount of heat your body loses is proportional to the surface area. Hotter air rises, but "heat" doesn't rise. (SGU 12/27/08)
• We used to think that stress and too much stomach acid caused ulcers; now we think a bacterium causes ulcers.  (EBM) 
• It's not illegal to change lanes under the monorail.  (Seattle PI)

Things That Surprised Me in 2008

• "The claim that "almost all mutations are harmful" is false. In fact, most mutations have no noticeable effect, mainly because most mutations do not occur within coding or regulatory regions of the genome. One study gives the average number of mutations that arise in a human conception to be around 128, with an average number of harmful mutations per conception of 1.3. However, most mutations that have an effect on phenotype are indeed detrimental to the organism" WikiPedia List of Common Misperceptions
• "The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is completely false. They have been trained to navigate mazes and can recognize their owners after an exposure of a few months." WikiPedia List of Common Misperceptions
• Arbitrary Coherence, e.g. Having people write down the last two digits of their social security number, and which of a number of items they'd be willing to buy for that much in dollars, has a large effect on prices given when you follow by simply asking what is the most they'd pay for each item. (Ariely blog)
• Beer tastes better to most people if you add a bit of balsamic vinegar -- and do not tell them before they taste it
• People who lie more are happier, better at business, and better at athletics. (RadioLab 2/29/2008)
• 'Simply removing the cork to allow the wine to "breathe" has no effect whatsoever. APPLICATION: The waiter, sommelier, or "expert" is wasting your time by simply removing the cork without decanting the bottle. It has been scientifically proven2 that the narrow space of the bottle neck where the wine can contact air is inadequate to produce any change within a period of even 24 hours, let alone a few minutes.' WinePros
• Dizygotic twins (about 1/125 pregancies) will sometimes have different fathers
• Most cells inherited from your mother are not genetically transfered
• Christmas songs written by Jews: "White Christmas" (Irving Berlin), "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)," "I'll be Home for Christmas," "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."
• Bill Miller - Fund manager beat the S&P 15 years in a row (by chance, likelihood about 75% given 6,000 fund managers over 40 years) ( DW p186,188)
• To have a 75% chance of the better team winning when one team is ten percent better than the other (i.e. the probability is 55/45 for better/worse team to win), they would need to play a 45-game series. (Leonard Mlodinow, Town Hall lecture 5/14/2008)
• Rats outperform humans in guessing whether a red light or green light will flash in random ordering of 75% red and 25% green. Rats will simply go with more common color every time whereas humans will try to detect pattern. In split brain patients, the isolated right brain will emulate rats. ( DW p6)
• If a woman has two children and one is a girl, the chance that the other child is also female has to be 50-50, right? But it's not. Cardano again: The possibilities are girl-girl, girl-boy and boy-girl. So the chance that both children are girls is 33 percent. (Mlodinow)
• Coin flip trick based on Benford's Law: Tell students to either flip a coin 200 times or just fake the results; any series that doesn't have a run of 6 is declared a fake.

Things That Surprised Me in 2007

• Color/Number synesthesia has been clearly demonstrated and exists in approximately one in 200 people - SynesthesiaNotes
• 95-98% of people pick the same shapes to fit the names BoobaAndKiki
• The relative effect of genes upon intelligence and personality grows as you get older. I would have assumed the opposite -- i.e. that the relative effect of environment would grow, since your genes stay pretty much the same but you get more and more input from your environment. Instead, using IQ as an example, genetic differences account for 20% of IQ differences in infancy, 40% in childhood, 50% in adolscence, and 60% in adulthood (non-shared environments accounts for 30%). (Segal, p49)
• You can't get the flu from the flu vaccine (inert/dead)
• Throwing a bowling ball from a canoe into the water makes the water level go down.
• Experiments show that scientists can detect with high accuracy where a person has a cancer that has metastacized just by looking at their hand. (They use lasers to look for cancerous cells as blood flows -- ergo more accurate than blood samples.)
• There are millions of different ways that DNA sequences could encode exactly the same protein (EvolutionDna)
• Jimmy Carter did not see a UFO (in the extraterrestrial sense) (see 7/25/2007 interview on SGU)
• Yawning has nothing to do with respiration and is not a result of being tired
• Adding a scientist critiquing the belief to a television show about a paranormal claim increases the extent that people believe the claim ( Glenn Sparks - SGU - 10/12/05 )
• DNA researchers believe that Ghengis Kahn has 16 million identifiable descendents
• Study finds that 74% of Chinese children had perfect pitch (tonal language)
• If a sound comes into the brain as a regular electrical signal (e.g. a perfect 5th), it is pleasing, if it arrives as an irregular, jagged electronic signal (e.g. a minor 2nd) are displeasing
• The more you recall a specific memory, the less accurate that memory becomes
• There was no standard time or time zones in 1880. Each town, each clock would be set by the owner's assessment of when the sun was straight overhead. (See also Sanford Fleming)
• In the oldest existing version of the verse containing the number of the beast, an Oxyrhynchus fragment, the number is 616.
• Woodland Park = birthplace of the modern zoo revolution; locals warned by zookeepers from around the country against creating a natural setting for gorillas (RadioLab)
• Most animals (with exception of terrestrial mammals) sleep with one brain hemisphere at a time

Things That Surprised Me in 2006

• Most cells in your body are not human cells. Most cells from your mother were not transfered genetically. There are 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. If all human cells were removed from your body, you would still look very much the same and remain recognizable.

Previously

• Primary colors do not exist. Color Questions
• We can conclude with high confidence that we perceive the same colors as most other human beings. (Ibid)
• 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth ("As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth?") Gallup