Friday Fun Fact

Many of the earliest flight attendants were nurses

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Flight attendants make our journeys through the sky safer and more comfortable. Yet they do more than just serve peanuts and soda; they’re trained to respond to safety and medical emergencies, necessary skills for cruising at 35,000 feet. However, modern flight attendants don’t have to have in-depth medical training the way the first American in-air staff did — the earliest commercial airlines equipped with flight attendants required their staff to be registered nurses.

The first flight attendants to board U.S. commercial flights were led by Ellen Church, a nurse who was also a licensed aviator. Unable to find work as a pilot due to gender discrimination, Church found another way into the sky by pitching airlines the concept of the “flight stewardess,” who could use her nursing skills to aid sick or injured passengers while also easing nerves at a time when flying was still somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable for passengers. Boeing Air Transport tested Church’s idea in May 1930, hiring Church and seven other nurses for flights between San Francisco and Chicago (with 13 stops in between). In air, the attendants were tasked with serving meals, cleaning the plane’s interior, securing the seats to the floor, and even keeping passengers from accidentally opening the emergency exit door. After a successful three-month stint, other airlines picked up Church’s idea, putting out calls for nurses in their early 20s to join the first flight crews — standard requirements until World War II, when nurses overwhelmingly joined the war effort, leaving room for more women of all backgrounds to enter the aviation field.

Friday Fun Fact…..

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It can take two weeks to make one jelly bean

The next time you pop some jelly beans into your mouth, you may want to take a moment to appreciate just how much effort goes into producing these bite-sized delights. As explained by industry giant Jelly Belly, the process begins by heating a sugar, cornstarch, corn syrup, and water mixture, known as a slurry, and adding fruit purée, juice concentrate, or other ingredients for flavoring. From there, the mixture is squirted into cornstarch-coated molding trays, and left to solidify into the chewy jelly bean centers.

The following day, the bean centers are sent through a steam bath and a sugar shower to keep them from sticking. They are then loaded into a spinning machine for a process known as “panning,” in which sugar and syrup are manually applied over the course of two hours to slowly build each bean’s candied shell. Following another settling period, the candies receive an additional syrup coating, before being polished with confectioner’s glaze and beeswax. Upon earning a final thumbs-up by way of visual inspection and spot taste-testing, the beans are stamped with the Jelly Belly logo and shipped out into the world.

It’s a lot of shower, rinse, rest, and repeat for a process that takes seven to 14 days to complete. And while that might seem like an outsized increment of time for such a tiny edible, the Americans who gobble down an average of 16 billion jelly beans every Easter seem to think it’s worth it.

Tuesday Tutoring

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Oxford University is older than the Inca empire

While you might associate the development of modern universities with intellectual movements like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, the first universities predate those major periods in history — not by years but by centuries. One of the oldest universities in the world is Oxford University, where teaching began back in 1096. That’s much older than Harvard (established in 1636) or Yale (1701), and it’s even older than some well-known Indigenous civilizations in the Americas, including the Incas, who lived in the Andean region of South America from around the 13th century CE to the mid-16th century. (Other groups and empires have occupied the Andes since at least 10,000 BCE.)

The first universities were not like the sprawling campuses of today. Instead, they were more like guilds devoted to certain subjects or crafts. Slowly, the influence of these schools grew throughout the High Middle Ages (1000–1300), and many of them became hot spots during future intellectual movements. Meanwhile, as Europe was busy cementing the importance of its universities (and fighting in half-a-dozen Crusades), the Incas were building sprawling road networks and reliable postal systems — they even had highly skilled brain surgeons.

Monday Meanderings….

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Sharks have been on Earth longer than trees

Some species of trees that line city streets predate the dinosaurs by millions of years, but when it comes to the truly ancient, you need to look to the oceans. Sea-dwelling creatures have a many-millions-of-years head start on any terrestrial life-forms. Take, for instance, the shark: This apex predator of the sea has been stalking the world’s oceans for upwards of 450 million years. Meanwhile, the very first forests filled with Earth’s very first trees, in the genera Wattieza and Archaeopteris, likely didn’t sprout on land until the mid-Devonian period some 385 million years ago. However, it’s worth noting that the animals some scientists consider the first “sharks” likely didn’t look like the magnificent predators of today. First appearing in the Late Ordovician, these creatures sported shark-like scales, but likely didn’t yet possess the species’ most memorable trait — a terrifying set of teeth.

Surviving that long as a species is no easy feat. Only a few million years after the shark’s appearance on the world stage, these proto-sharks (along with the rest of life on Earth) suffered through the Late Ordovician mass extinction. This event was the first of five major extinction events in Earth’s history, and sharks survived them all; not even trees can add such an impressive accolade to their resume. So the next time you cross paths with a shark, whether behind the glass of an aquarium or on-screen in the act of devouring the residents of Amity Island, don’t forget to marvel at this amazing animal’s incredible story of survival. 

Friday Fun Fact

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Venus spins backward

There are entire websites devoted to whether or not Mercury is in retrograde at any given moment, and all the while Venus is spinning backward (compared to most other planets) while few of us on Earth even notice. As a result, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east on the second rock from the sun. Though no one’s entirely sure why our fiery neighbor rotates to the beat of its own drum, it’s been theorized that it originally spun in the same way as most other planets (counter-clockwise when viewed from above), but at some point flipped its own axis 180 degrees. So while its rotation appears backward from our earthbound perspective, it might be more accurate to say that Venus spins the same way it always has, just upside-down.

Some scientists think the flip might have been the result of a situation arising from the planet’s extremely dense atmosphere along with the sun’s intense gravitational pull, though the scientific community has yet to reach a consensus. For all that, Venus has often been referred to as Earth’s sister planet — even more so than Mars. We’re the two closest neighbors in the solar system, have similar chemical compositions, and are roughly the same size. One crucial difference: Venus probably cannot support life.

Tuesday Trolley Time

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The red trolley on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” traveled 5,000 miles annually

The beloved children’s television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood used signals to tell its audience when to get ready to listen and learn. At the start of every episode, host Fred Rogers entered his TV home and sang “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” as he changed from a sport coat and loafers to his signature sweater and sneakers. Next, he typically introduced a topic — sometimes veering into sensitive subject matter like divorce or depression — before beckoning the anthropomorphic Trolley to transport viewers into the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. In a given year of the show, Trolley’s commutes covered 5,000 miles, according to PBS, more than the length of the world’s longest river, the 4,123-mile Nile. 

Trolley’s precise origins are somewhat mysterious, but we do know the one-of-a-kind model was hand-built from wood by a Toronto man named Bill Ferguson in 1967, the year before Mister Rogers’ Neighborhoodpremiered. (Rogers likely met Ferguson when he was living in Toronto and taping Misterogers, which aired on CBC-TV from 1961 until 1964.) The TV host’s love for trolleys went all the way back to his own childhood; during one 1984 episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he visited the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum and remembered accompanying his dad on long trolley trips. Young viewers often wrote to Rogers with questions about the show’s trolley, such as why there were no people aboard, to which the host responded that the lack of passengers encouraged kids at home to visualize themselves aboard. Today, Trolley is on permanent display at the Fred Rogers Center at Saint Vincent College in Rogers’ hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Visitors to Latrobe will have no trouble spotting bumper stickers around town that read “My Other Car is a Trolley.”

Monday meanderings…..

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The earliest vacuum cleaners were horse-drawn

In early 1901, English inventor Hubert Cecil Booth traveled to Empire Music Hall in London to witness a strange invention — a mechanical aspirator designed to blow pressurized air to clean rail cars. Booth later asked the demonstrator why the machine (invented by an American in St. Louis) didn’t simply suck up the dust rather than blow it around. “He became heated,” Booth later wrote, “remarking that sucking out dust was impossible.” Unconvinced, Booth set about creating such a contraption, and later that same year he filed a patent for a vacuum machine he named the “Puffing Billy.”

This machine wasn’t quite as fancy as modern Dust Busters, Dirt Devils, Hoovers, or Dysons. Instead, the Puffing Billy was red, gasoline-powered, extremely loud, and big — really big. So big, in fact, that the machine needed to be pulled by horses when Booth’s British Vacuum Cleaner Company made house calls. Once outside a residence, 82-foot-long hoses snaked from the machine through open windows. Because turn-of-the-century carpet cleaning wasn’t cheap, Booth’s customers were often members of British high society; one of his first jobs was to clean Westminster Abbey’s carpet ahead of Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. By 1906, Booth had created a more portable version of the Puffing Billy, and two years later, the Electric Suction Sweeper Company (later renamed Hoover) released the “Model O,” the first commercially successful vacuum in the United States. House cleaning has sucked ever since. 

Friday Fun Fact

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Taste buds are replaced every two weeks

The human body is an amazing powerhouse fueled by important organs like the heart, lungs, and brain. However, some of its most vital work is done by a body part you might not expect — our taste buds, a set of microscopic organs that do more than help us savor our food. Scientists believe human taste buds also have a bigger purpose: protecting us from poisoning. These microscopic sensors tell our brains that food is safe to eat based on flavor, encouraging us to consume sweets (potential sources of calories and energy) and alerting us to spit out bitter or unpalatable substances that could make us sick. 

Taste buds are such hardworking organs that their cells die off quickly. As they work, they age and lose sensitivity, which is why the body regenerates them about every two weeks. However, taste buds aren’t all replaced at once; on any given day, about 10% of the sensors expire, while 20% to 30% are in the process of developing, leaving us with 60% of the buds active to analyze the food we consume. 

Want to examine your taste buds? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not as easy as sticking out your tongue. That’s because the visible bumps aren’t sensors themselves; instead what you see are the papillae, which cover the taste buds. Each papillae can house hundreds of taste sensors, with the average adult having between 2,000 and 10,000 — a number that generally decreases with age. However, there’s one upside to losing some taste sensitivity as we get older: Foods we once avoided in childhood, like Brussels sprouts, become a bit more palatable.

Wednesday Whinging

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One family has served in Congress continuously since 1933

(this explains a LOT)

You’d be forgiven for thinking this distinction belongs to the members of the Bush or Kennedy clans, but it’s actually claimed by the lesser-known Dingell family, which has served southeast Michigan for 90 years and counting.

The political dynasty began with the election of Democrat John Dingell Sr. from Michigan’s 15th District in 1932. Along with co-authoring legislation that led to the Social Security Act of 1935, the paterfamilias was best known for introducing a national health insurance bill before his death in 1955. John Dingell Jr. picked up the fight after winning a special election to fill his father’s seat, notching a victory with the passage of the Medicare and Medicaid Act in 1965. He went on to craft a legacy that dwarfed that of John Sr. and nearly all of his colleagues, by way of his longtime chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. He retired in 2015 after a record 59 years in the House.

The seat then passed into the hands of his wife, Debbie, who set about making her own mark as a sponsor of environmental and health care legislation en route to winning a fifth term in 2022 in the brand-new 6th District. Not yet 70, Debbie could keep the uninterrupted lineage going for several more years, though she’ll likely need help from a yet-to-be-determined successor if the Dingells hope to push past the century mark as representatives of the Great Lakes State. 

Tuesday Tidbit

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Why do we call them the “dog days of summer”?

The “dog days of summer” are named after the star Sirius

When things heat up around July and August, you’ll inevitably hear the phrase “dog days of summer.” No, this doesn’t have anything to do with canines lying around panting in the heat — instead, the phrase is a celestial reference. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, is nicknamed the “dog star” because it makes up the “eye” of the constellation Canis Major (Latin for “Greater Dog”). In Greek mythology, Canis Major is said to be a hunting dog who belongs to the legendary huntsman Orion. Cosmologically speaking, this relationship is fitting, because the three stars that make up the asterism Orion’s belt point to the “dog star” in the southern sky.

The phrase “dog days of summer” actually refers to a specific period on the calendar, from July 3 until August 11. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed these “dog days” occurred when Sirius appeared to rise with the sun, which always occurred during the summer. The idea was that the immense luminosity of Sirius along with the sun’s heat somehow created summer’s scorching temperatures. Of course, we now know this doesn’t make much sense. For one thing, Sirius is much farther away from Earth than the sun is — like 50 trillion miles farther — so the star has absolutely no effect on Earth’s climate. For another, the dog days of summer are relative to where you live on Earth, appearing earlier in the year for those living farther south and later for those in the north. Also, the position of Sirius is subject to Earth’s wobbly rotation — meaning that in 13,000 years, Sirius will instead rise in midwinter rather than midsummer. So no, “dog days of summer” isn’t an allusion to our cuddly canines, but a vestigial phrase derived from some 2,500-year-old astronomy.