What If?

Carl Zimmer says that children who aren’t exposed to rhinoviruses have more immune disorders as adults. It’s possible that these mild infections serve to train and calibrate our immune systems.

On the other hand, colds suck. And in addition to being unpleasant, some research says infections by these viruses also weaken our immune systems directly and can open us up to further infections.

All in all, I wouldn’t stand in the middle of a desert for five weeks to rid myself of colds forever. But if they ever come up with a rhinovirus vaccine, I’ll be first in line.

These viruses take over the cells in your nose and throat and use them to produce more viruses. After a few days, your immune system notices and destroys it,3 but not before you infect, on average, one other person.4 After you fight off the infection, you are immune to that particular rhinovirus strain—an immunity that lasts for years.

If Sarah put us all in quarantine, the cold viruses we carry would have no fresh hosts to run to.

While colds are no fun, their absence might be worse. In his book A Planet of Viruses, author Carl Zimmer says that children who aren’t exposed to rhinoviruses have more immune disorders as adults. It’s possible that these mild infections serve to train and calibrate our immune systems.

Early in his jump, it was about minus 40 degrees, which is that magical point where you don’t have to clarify whether you mean Fahrenheit or Celsius—it’s the same in both.

Of the 28 people killed by lightning in the US in 2012, 13 were standing under or near trees.

We don’t know what astatine looks like, because, as Lowe put it, “that stuff just doesn’t want to exist.” It’s so radioactive (with a half-life measured in hours) that any large piece of it would be quickly vaporized by its own heat. Chemists suspect that it has a black surface, but no one really knows.
There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.

Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard in Norway—the highest-latitude city on the planet

“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, “Calculating how many rental helium tanks you’d have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft.”
Sorry, Wolfram.