| 1401/
The word 'autism' - meaning aloneness - was first used in
1912 by Swiss psychologist Eugene Bleuler to refer to the
inner world of schizophrenics. It was chosen as the name for
the disorder that we know as autism by the scientist who first
identified the condition in 1943 - Leo Kanner at the John
Hopkins Children's Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore, USA.
1402/ Most neuroscientists
estimate that some form of autism is found in every five or
six hundred people. This means that in the UK more than a
hundred thousand people have autism, and almost six hundred
thousand in the US.
1403/ Researchers at
the University of Chicago investigated eighty-six children
with autism and found that all of them had an abnormal version
of a gene that is responsible for the transportation of serotonin
around the body.
1404/ About five percent
of the fathers of non-autistic children are employed in some
kind of engineering, compared with about twelve percent of
the fathers of children with autism.
1405/ It is estimated
that the global damage wrought by the 1982-1983 El Nino and
related climactic anomalies cost over $13 billion. The cost
of the 1997-1998 El Nino is much more.
1406/ The storm of October
16th 1997 in Britain (the worst since 1703) toppled over 15
million trees in southeast Enland alone.
1407/ The average human
brain consumes just 12 Watts of power - one-tenth of what
it takes to burn an ordinary light bulb.
1408/ The human retina
is made up of about 120 million rod cells.
1409/ A single second
of video tape contains about 22 megabytes of data, the very
rough equivalent of about thirty copies of a 200 page book.
1410/ There are roughly
3500 hair cells and 30,000 nerve fibres found in the cochlea,
a bony structure shaped like a snail's shell that's located
deep within the inner ear.
1411/ Artificial speech
became more fluent around 1835 with the Euphonia - or the
Amazing Talking Machine, as it was also known - made by Joseph
Faber, a German immigrant to the United States. The Euphonia
sported a tongue and a throat whose shape could be altered
to produce different sounds. The apparatus was controlled
via a keyboard, while the bellows was operated by a foot pedal.
This talking machine was truly amazing because it could not
only speak several European languages, but also sing, once
treating astonished listeners in London to a rendition of
'God Save the Queen'.
1412/ Talking machines
really hit the commercial mainstream in 1978, when Texas Instruments
released Speak and Spell, the first device in which the human
voice was electronically duplicated on a single chip.
1413/ Of the roughly
6500 languages now spoken, up to half are already endangered
or on the brink of extinction. Linguists estimate that a language
dies somewhere in the world every two weeks.
1414/ It is estimated
that three-quarters of the world's mail and up to 80 percent
of e-mail is currently (2002) written in English. How long
this will remain true with the rise of Chinese use of the
internet is open to debate.
1415/ In the 1950's,
Swiss professor Hans Laube invented Smell-O-Vision, a machine
installed in movie theatres that emitted puffs of specific
odours in synchronisation with the action on the screen. These
aromas were pumped into the theatre through a network of hidden
plastic tubes attached underneath each seat. The problem was
that the smells lingered, and the cinemas would end up smelling
of a disgusting cocktail of apples, garlic, gunsmoke, cheese
etc; and so it never really caught on. A company in Germany
called Aerome is however currently trying to resurrect the
idea with the benefit of more subtle delivery mechanisms.
So watch out! It could soon be coming to a cinema near you!
1416/ The average person
is able to detect and distinguish between about 10,000 different
smells, using approximately 400 receptors.
1417/ Smell and taste
are both intimately related. More than 90 per cent of a meal's
flavour - apart from the four basic tastes of sweet, sour,
bitter and salty - is actually fragrance, which rises up from
food during chewing and is forced across the olfactory epithelium
through the nasopharynx at the back of the throat.
1418/ There is a medical
condition called Anosmia, where the sufferers have no sense
of smell at all. They can still sense sweet, sour, bitter
and salty tastes; but flavour, which is virtually all smell,
is totally gone. So that for example they would not be able
to savour fine wine, or enjoy lemon meringue pie. Hell indeed!
1419/ The average cup
of coffee contains more than 1000 different chemical components,
none of which is tasted in isolation but only as part of the
overall flavour.
1420/ About one in every
2000 people automatically sees colours when hearing words,
letters or numbers The vast majority (roughly 90 per cent)
are female. Other forms of synaesthesia (derived from the
Greek word syn - together - and aisthesis - to perceive) eg
associating both taste and touch, are much rarer; maybe 1
in 15,000 for this particular case. Interestingly, in some
cultures, such as the Dogon people of Mali, synaesthesia seems
to be more common.
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