Do plants and trees communicate?

 

How do insects manage to fly in the rain?

 

Why after eating asparagus does your urine smell so strong?

 

Do white blood cells multiply by mitosis?

 

Is it really possible to drive a car onto a moving trailer like Knight Rider did?

 

When fireworks are released into the air they turn into smoke and dust. Is there any danger from this?

 

How many different things can we memorise, what is the most anyone could memorise?

 

Where does the microwave background radiation come from, how was it made and why is it still around?

 

Why is memory triggered by smells and music etc?

 

When I got towards retirement age, I started to get hairs growing out of my nose and my ears. Why?

 

Why do genetic diseases sometimes only develop in later life?

 

Is gravity around the planet constant? If you have a spinning ball and put a penny on it, it will be thrown off at the equator but not at the pole.

 

 

It's True - According to published tables, the force required to withdraw a 5 cm nail from a piece of hardwood is the same as lifting 26 kilos. This is why it is so difficult to pull a nail out using a pair of pliers and why a claw hammer is so useful - because it turns the handle into a lever, meaning you only need apply a force equivalent to 1kg to get the nail started.

It's False - Famous Cambridge scientist Isaac Newton was the first to calculate the thickness of a soap bubble in his 1704 book Opticks. He realised that the rainbow colours on a bubble surface must be related to the thickness of the soap film. By comparing the bubble colours to the colours produced by two very closely-positioned pieces of glass he worked out that the soap film must be about 100nm or one ten-thousandth of a millimetre - that's a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

It's False - The earliest examples of waterproof clothing date from 1600BC; the meso-Americans used to mix latex from the rubber tree with the sap of the morning glory vine to make it workable and able to waterproof fabrics. But it was us Brits who took it a step further thanks to the efforts of Glaswegian inventor Charles MacIntosh. He patented his recipe for waterproof clothing in 1823. It consisted of the same rubber latex, called caoutchouc (pron. Kou-Chuk), dissolved in coal oil, a by-product of coal-gas production. The result was smeared onto cotton fabric. It was heavy, it leaked, but it worked!

It's False - The wheel first rolled onto the scene about 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia - what's now Iraq. It was based on the idea of using rollers - usually logs - to move things around. The first wheels were just slices of tree trunks, then came the idea of bolting planks of wood side by side. But the real masters were the ancient Greeks, who invented wheels with spokes.

It's False - Not even close. New York has a population of 8 million, on par with London (7.5 million). Both are miniscule compared with Tokyo, officially the world's largest city with 35 million.

It's True - And 96 million of them are made with the help of tea bags, which, legend has it, were invented in 1908 by New Yorker Thomas Sullivan.

It's False - According to a bit of kitchen science carried out by TV presenter Adam Hart-Davis, when filled with an identical volume of hot water, a stainless steel teapot loses heat much less quickly than a thicker ceramic equivalent. This is because the stainless steel teapot is shiny and therefore a poor conductor of heat because it is a poor radiator. Also, the specific heat capacity (how much energy it takes to warm up the material) of a thin steel teapot is much lower than the ceramic equivalent, so less heat is wasted.

It's True - When we go to bed at night and lie flat we become longer. But standing upright during the day causes our tissues, mainly in the spine, to become slightly squashed and so we lose about 1.25cm (half an inch) in height.

It's False - Actually the sperm whale has the record for largest mammal brain at 7.8kg. That's compared with 1.5 kg for the average human. So why aren't whales all geniuses? Because they have a huge body and hence need a large brain to control it.

It's True - This is true and it's an effect of gravity distorting "space-time" - the closer you are to a centre of mass, the more slowly time passes. So a clock at the top of a mountain (further from the Earth's centre) will run slightly faster than one at the bottom of the mountain.