Q: What can your brain do that even the best robotic device would find daunting?
A: In a flash, we can recognize scores of faces of parents, friends, colleagues, pets -- whether in daylight or darkness, viewed from above or from the side. It's "a task the computer-vision system built into the most sophisticated robots can accomplish only haltingly," say Tobi Delbruck and Terry Sejnowski in Scientific American.
Plus, we can multitask effortlessly, such as driving a car as we follow a game on the radio. "Yet designing an electronic brain that would allow a robot to perform this simple combination of behaviors remains a distant prospect."
Also, our brains are better than Google and show a complexity of networking that rivals the Internet, with billions of nerve cells intersecting to create trillions of synaptic junctures.
Adds Steve Furber in IEEE Spectrum, it's a little sobering how much power the average human brain packs into a space the size of a cantaloupe, while consuming a paltry 20 watts, much less than a typical incandescent light bulb.
"Simulating this mess of wetware with traditional digital circuits would require a supercomputer 1,000 times as powerful as the best ones today. And we'd need the output of an entire nuclear power plant to run it."
Q: What's the scoop on dogs wearing collars?
A: About 5,000 years ago, according to ancient Egyptian artifacts and wall paintings, dogs wore leather collars during training for hunting or guarding, sometimes labeled with names like "the brave one" or "the useless one," reports scienceillustrated.com. Greeks and Romans also used collars, but more for protecting the throats of guard dogs from wolves and other predators.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, small dogs became popular as lap dogs, serving as status symbols for the European nobility who adorned pets with gem-studded silver and gold collars. As the middle class grew during the Renaissance, more people could afford to have dogs, and the demand for cheap leather collars increased.
Q: Try to imagine one of your most pleasurable experiences lasting for an entire nychthemeron? How sweet would that be?
A: "Nychthemeron," from the Greek "nykt" for "night" and "hemera" for "day," means a period of a day and a night, or 24 hours, says Anu Garg in "The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two."
And if you've ever wondered why day and night are divided into 12 hours, consider there are 12 moons in a year, a number conveniently divided into halves (6 + 6), thirds (4 + 4 + 4) and quarters (3 + 3 + 3 + 3). Also, "some cultures counted in base twelve: three joints on each finger (thumb as the counter)," Garg writes.
Q: "Not only has the horse been outgunned by the car, but it faces the further indignity of not being able to keep up with itself," says one Discover magazine writer. What might he be driving at here?
A: First, let's talk horsepower. In 1760 outside London, King George III housed about 30 horses, or only about one-fifth the horsepower of the typical 150-horsepower-engine in today's compact car, says Discover's Corey S. Powell in "20 Things You Didn't Know About Cars."
"By the formal definition of horsepower, which is the power needed to lift 33,000 pounds by 1 foot in 1 minute, a real horse musters only 0.7 horsepower." Wow! It really can't keep up with itself.
And some other surprising car facts: In an accident that didn't live up to the victim's name, H.H. Bliss of New York City became the first documented U.S. auto fatality, on Sept. 13, 1899, after exiting a trolley car. Fortunately, the average fatality rate per mile of driving has dropped by 80 percent over the past 50 years, largely due to seat-belt use. Yet all the accelerating, cornering, braking and more that your four wheels do happen on a tire area of only about 100 square inches for a typical sedan, barely bigger than your own two feet.
Brothers Bill and Rich Sones are Cuyahoga County residents who research and write Strange But True. Send questions to email@example.com.