Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers Read Free Page A

discomfort is very similar to the permanent discomfort experienced by sufferers of carpal tunnel syndrome, which affects the ulnar nerve where it passes through the base of the hand.
     
No, It’s Not the Brain
    Which mostly useless body part is named after the beak of a bird?

     
No, It’s Not the Brain
    The coccyx , also known as your tailbone. The word comes from an ancient Greek word for “cuckoo bird” because the bone looks like the bird’s beak.
    It’s a strange fusion of bones, the coccyx. Your spine is probably the most important sets of bones in your body (it holds up your head, after all), but at the base of the spine, right above your bottom, the fusion of bones that makes up your coccyx doesn’t really do much for stability (except for when you’re sitting). It’s not entirely useless, though—the coccyx connects several important muscles and ligaments.
    In most mammals, the coccyx is very important: That’s where the tail begins—hence its other name, the tailbone . In humans and some other primates, the coccyx is nearly identical to that of other mammals; there’s just no tail. So could we conceivably grow tails? Yes, except that the gene that instructs a tail to grow is not turned on. What would it take to turn on that gene? A genetic mutation—which could possibly lead to a small group of isolated humans growing tails.
    That reminds us of one of the weirdest quotations of all time. Actor Christopher Walken once opined: “How great it would be if actors had tails! Because a tail is so expressive. On a cat you can tell everything. You can tell if they’re annoyed. You can tell whether they’re scared. I wish I had a tail.”
     
Wrap Stars
    What’s the main ingredient in the old-fashioned cure-all known as “Mummy Powder”?

The Host with the Most
    How many organisms are living on and inside you right now?

     
Wrap Stars
    Mummies…as in, the remains of dead people. By the 12th century, many doctors in Europe and Asia were grinding mummies into powder and using it as medicine. Not unlike other quack remedies, mummy powder was prescribed to heal all sorts of ailments: epilepsy, migraines, nausea, sore throat, fractures, and even paralysis. Used as a tea or a poultice, it remained popular through the 1800s (even Abraham Lincoln supposedly drank it). There are, however, no known healing properties of mummy powder, and the fad died out at the end of the 19th century. Unfortunately for archaeologists, the practice of grinding the remains into powder destroyed several thousand mummies—along with whatever information they could have provided about how ancient people lived and died.
The Host with the Most
    As many as two quadrillion bacteria microbes. We are made up of cells, approximately 100 trillion of them. Moving within, on, under, and between those cells are an incredible number of uninvited guests. In fact, for every one cell in the human body, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 times as many microbes, both healthy and unhealthy. That totals roughly 2,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria, concentrated in the places where microbial communities prosper: the nose, mouth, skin, digestive tract—and in females, the urogenital tract. Your skin alone is host to upwards of 500 different species of bacteria.
     
Baby Got Back
    When you were a baby, what did you have 100 more of than you do now?

He Had a Gut Feeling
    Why did Australian doctor Barry Marshall’s experiments give him an ulcer?

     
Baby Got Back
    Bones. You were born with around 350 of them. Over time, many of the bones—mostly in your spine—fused together into single, larger bones, reducing the number by nearly a third to 206 bones in an average adult. That doesn’t mean that you definitely have 206 bones. Not everyone’s baby bones all fuse together, so you may actually have a few more.
He Had a Gut Feeling
    Dr. Marshall gave himself the ulcer…on purpose. Until the 1980s, the prevailing notion was that ulcers are