Dis Information and other Wikkid myths

260 Pages·2005·15.812 MB·English

by  Karl Kruszelnicki

Explicit use of deliberately
misleading information
NOT contained within

Dr KARL KRUSZELNICKI
ILLUSTRATED BY ADAM YAZXHI
mt HarperCollinsP«£/w/?ers
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2005
by W&rpexCoWmsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Dr Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd 2005
Illustrations and cover design copyright © Maxco Creative 2005
The right of Karl Kruszelnicki and Adam Yazxhi to be identified as the moral rights
author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth).
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored
in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPwMs/zers
25 Ryde Road, Pymble, Sydney NSW 2073, Australia
31 View Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, United Kingdom
2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada
10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Kruszelnicki, Karl, 1948-.
Dis information and other wikkid myths.
ISBN 0 7322 8060 5.
1. Science - Popular works. I. Title.
500
Cover photograph by Gerald Diel
Cover image art direction by Adam Yazxhi
Back image art direction by Adam Yazxhi and Caroline Pegram
Internal design and layout by Judi Rowe, Agave Creative Design
Bird’s nest on p 114 drawn by Max Addison Yazxhi (aged 2lti years)
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press on 80gsm Printspeed Offset
5 4 3 2 05 06 07 08
I dedicate this book to the Internet,
for its excellent role in disseminating
Dis Information ...
Contents
Alcohol and Antibiotics 1
Jetsetting Germs 8
Bullets Fired Up 16
Attack of the Killer Piranhas 21
Alien Autopsy — the Roswell Case 27
Was the Electric Chair Really Painless? 36
Can You Restart a Flatlined Heart? 45
Carrots and Night Vision 52
Ancient Cancer 58
Do Cats Really Purr When They’re Happy? 65
Breathing and Oxygen 71
Dead Before You Hit the Ground 78
Kirlian Aura Photography 82
Lie Detectors and Lying Eyes 90
Hail Caesarean Section 101
Abreast of the Times 107
A Bird in the Hand 112
Sleepwalking Awakening 117
Stomach Ulcers and Stress 123
Are ‘Natural Remedies’ Always Safe? 130
Not by a Long Sight (Galileo and the Telescope) 140
Myths of Titanic Proportions 146
Columbus and America 152
The Great Cash Crash of 1929 158
Cleopatra: Beauty or Beast? 162
Off Ya Banana Tree and Feeling Fruity 167
Oranges and Vitamin C - The Real Juice 173
Chewing Gum: the Sticking Point 177
Fit to Burst: Do Bodies Explode in a Vacuum? 183
The Amityville Horror Story - Boo! 189
Folding Paper - the Plane Truth 196
William Tell Tale 200
Water Down the Drain - Plughole Science 206
Gun Recoil - a Bulletproof Theory? 213
Vitamin OD 216
Shark Cartilage - the Great White Lie 222
The Reasons for Seasons 227
Tighten the Asteroid Belt 232
Hit and Myth 240
Acknowledgments 247
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/disinformationotOOOOkrus
Alcohol
and Antibiotics
Antibiotics are one of the greatest success stories of modern
medicine — up there with the discovery of vaccination, and the
discovery that you shouldn’t mix your drinking water and your toilet
water. Like all drugs, antibiotics can have their bad side effects,
but their benefits are enormous. Even so, some people wrongly
believe that antibiotics are so dangerous that they should never
be used. And, specifically, lots of people also wrongly believe that
you should not drink any alcohol while taking antibiotics.
History of Antibiotics
Antibiotics go back a long way. The Chinese first used antibiotics
about 2500 years ago. Back then they realised that the fungus
that grew on soybean curd could cure boils. This ancient wisdom
was known even earlier to the healers of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The soybean fungus was making a chemical (streptomycin), one of
the first antibiotics. If you ate this antibiotic, it killed the bacteria
that caused the boils. In fact, this same fungus today gives us
streptomycin, which is our main defence against the bacterium
Yersinia pestis that caused the bubonic plague.
Alcohol and Antibiotics
In 1910, Paul Ehrlich helped introduce Salvarsan (containing
arsenic) to successfully treat syphilis. The sulfonamide family of
antibiotics was introduced in 1932, and some of them are still
used today.
The first really powerful and widely used antibiotic, penicillin,
was discovered by Alexander Fleming way back in 1928. Once
again, it was made by a fungus. This fungus was called Penicillium
notatum. Fleming noticed that a chemical made by this fungus
would stop Staphyloccus bacteria from growing. Unfortunately he
was a bacteriologist, not a biochemist, so he could not purify this
mysterious chemical. Even so, he wrote about his discovery in the
British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929.
In 1938 the brilliant biochemist Ernst Chain read this paper and
managed to isolate and purify this mysterious chemical — not to
try to invent a wonder drug, but just out of scientific curiosity. He
called it ‘penicillin’, after its parent fungus. He worked in a
pathology lab at Oxford University, which was run by Howard Florey.
At first, Chain didn’t get much support from Florey. Chain wanted to
test his penicillin by infecting two mice with bacteria and then
injecting penicillin to see if it cured them — but he didn’t know how
to do injections, and Florey wasn’t interested in helping. Chain had
to get another colleague to inject the mice first with the bacteria
and then with his mysterious penicillin. The penicillin worked, the
mice recovered fully — and suddenly Florey was very interested.
The Golden Age of Antibiotics
The next step was to test pencillin on humans. It was
painstakingly difficult to get any penicillin at all, but eventually they
had enough. In 1940 a 48-year-old London policeman, Albert
Alexander, made a tiny cut in his skin while shaving. A bacterium
invaded his body through this cut and soon infected him. At
death’s door, he was rushed to the Radcliffe Hospital with a
temperature of 40.5°C. Florey and Chain gave him penicillin and
he began to recover. After five days they ran out of penicillin, and
Dis Information and Other Wikkid Myths