Brain sweat
How can 6 be half of 11?
Verbatim
As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind – every part of this capsule was supplied by the lowest bidder.
– JOHN GLENN
Just asking
What happens to the holes when the Swiss cheese is eaten?
Fried fish
In St. Malo, France, fishermen once poured wine down the throat of the first caught fish of the season. Then they would toss it back in the sea. The idea was that the drunken fish would tell its friends about the free wine and the fish would soon gather for more, making for an easy catch.
Brain sweat answer
Using Roman numerals, 11 is XI. Cut this in half horizontally and you get VI, which is 6.
'True facts'
The billionth digit of pi is 9.
A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.
An iceberg contains more heat than a match.
Prime numbers
1 in 3 – Number of people worldwide who are currently enduring water scarcity, in one form or another
1/10 – Fraction of a second in which people unconsciously decide, when looking at a new face, whether the person is attractive and trustworthy
3 – Number of months the crucian carp can keep its brain functioning in oxygen-starved water (It uses stored glycogen as fuel.)
SOURCES: INTERNATIONAL WATER MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE; ALEX TODOROV, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; VESA PAAJANEN, UNIVERSITY OF JOENSUU
Feathered fiends
Long before Alfred Hitchcock, people may have had good cause to be worried about birds. A new study by Ohio State University anthropologists suggests that ancient raptors probably viewed early humans as just another kind of prey.
The observation is based upon examinations of 669 modern-day monkey bones collected from beneath the nests of African crowned eagles, fierce carnivores roughly the size of the American bald eagle that live in the Ivory Coast's Tai rain forest.
The bones indicate that monkeys make up a surprisingly substantial part of the eagles' diet, said lead author W. Scott McGraw. Indeed, roughly a third of the bones came from ground-dwelling mangabey monkeys, which weighed up to 24 pounds when alive.
“It appears that the crowned hawk eagle specifically targets these large, relatively rare monkeys,” said McGraw. “When we consider the density of the average mangabey population, the odds of an eagle encountering one of these monkeys should be small. But these mangabeys are turning up more often than chance alone would predict.”
The finding, he said, makes it more probable that the eagle's ancestors also dined on primates, including smallish early humans.
And researchers may have actual evidence: In 1924, the skull of a hominid child was discovered in a South African cave. The skull of the “Taung child” featured marks and punctures that scientists assumed were caused by a predatory cat. McGraw, who has compared the Taung skull markings to the skulls of monkeys killed by eagles, says they are similar.
“Eagles leave very distinctive beak and talon punctures around the face and in the eye sockets. The skull of the Taung child has these same kinds of puncture marks.”
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