TEST YOUR IGNORANCE

The Australian Magazine

Think you know which creature can survive a nuclear war? Or what is the biggest man-made structure on earth? Think again. A new book sends us all back to school.

1. How long can a chicken live without its head?

About two years. On September 10, 1945, a plump young cockerel in Fruita, Colorado, had his head chopped off and lived. Incredibly, the axe had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem attached to the neck for him to survive, even thrive.

Mike, as he was known, became a national celebrity, touring the country and featuring in Time and Life magazines. His owner, Lloyd Olsen, charged 25c for a chance to meet "Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken" in sideshows across the United States. Mike would appear complete with a dried chicken's head - in fact, the Olsens' cat had made off with the original. At the height of his fame, Mike was making $4500 a month. His success resulted in a wave of copycat chicken beheadings, though none of the other victims lived long.

Mike was fed and watered with an eyedropper. In the two years after he lost his head, he put on 2.7kg and spent his time happily preening and "pecking" for food with his neck. Tragedy struck one night in a motel room in Phoenix, Arizona. Mike started to choke and Olsen, to his horror, realised he'd left the eyedropper at the previous day's show. Unable to clear his airways, Mike choked to death.

2. What colour is the universe?

a) Black with silvery bits b) Silver with black bits c) Pale green d) Beige

It's officially beige. In 2002, after analysing the light from 200,000 galaxies collected by the Australian Galaxy Redshift Survey, American scientists from Johns Hopkins University concluded that the universe was pale green. Not black with silvery bits, as it appears. Taking the Dulux paint range as standard, it was somewhere between Mexican Mint, Jade Cluster and Shangri-La Silk.

A few weeks after the announcement to the American Astronomical Society, however, they had to admit they'd made a mistake in their calculations, and that the universe was, in fact, more a sort of dreary shade of taupe.

Since the 17th century, some of the greatest and most curious minds have wondered why it is that the night sky is black. If the universe is infinite and contains an infinite number of uniformly distributed stars, there should be a star everywhere we look, and the night sky should be as bright as day. This is known as Olbers' Paradox, after the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers, who described the problem (not for the first time) in 1826.

Nobody has yet come up with a really good answer to the question. Maybe there is a finite number of stars; maybe the light from the furthest ones hasn't reached us yet. Olbers' solution was that, at some point in the past, not all stars had been shining and that something has switched them on.

In 2003, the Ultra Deep Field Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at what appeared to be the emptiest piece of the night sky, and the film exposed for a million seconds (about 11 days). The resulting picture showed tens of thousands of hitherto unknown galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of millions of stars, stretching away into the dim edges of the universe.

3. Where does Chicken Tikka Masala come from?

Glasgow. Britain exports chicken tikka masala to India. Invented in Glasgow in the late 1960s, chicken tikka masala, or CTM, is Britain's most popular dish. There is no standard recipe. In a recent survey, the Real Curry Guide tested 48 versions and found the only common ingredient was chicken.

Chicken tikka is a traditional Bangladeshi dish in which pieces of marinated chicken are cooked in a clay oven called a tandoor. This ancient style of cooking originated in the Middle East, the word deriving from the Babylonian tinuru, meaning fire. The first chicken tandoori on a British restaurant menu was at the Gaylord in Mortimer Street, London, in 1966. The recipe reached Glasgow soon afterwards and when, as the legend goes, a customer asked for some gravy to go with it, the chef improvised with tomato soup, spices and cream.

Masala means a mixture of spices, and the usual CTM contains ginger and garlic, tomatoes, butter and cream, spiced with cardamom, cloves, cumin, nutmeg, mild red chilli powder and paprika, fenugreek and turmeric. Turmeric turns it bright yellow, although the dye tartrazine is often substituted. (It is tartrazine that makes curry stains impossible to remove.)

One in seven curries sold in the UK is chicken tikka masala - 23 million portions each year.

4. How many legs does a centipede have?

Not 100. The word centipede is from the Latin for "100 feet", and though centipedes have been extensively studied for more than 100 years, not one species has ever been found that has exactly 100 legs. Some have more, some less.

The one with the number of legs closest to 100 was discovered in 1999. It has 96 legs, and is unique among centipedes in that it is the only known species with an even number of pairs of legs: 48. All other centipedes have odd-numbered pairs of legs ranging from 15 to 191 pairs.

5. How many people died in the Great Fire of London?

Five. Despite destroying 13,200 houses, 87 churches, 44 Livery Halls and more than 80 per cent of the city, fewer than half a dozen deaths were recorded. The dead were: the maid of the baker who started it; Paul Lowell, a Shoe Lane watchmaker; an old man who rescued a blanket from St Paul's but succumbed to the smoke; and two others who fell into their cellars in an ill-fated attempt to rescue goods.

The true death toll of the 1666 fire may never be known. John Evelyn wrote of the "stench that came from some poor creatures' bodies", and modern forensic evidence suggests that, given the intense heat, some corpses would almost certainly have been vaporised.

However, the leisurely pace of the fire (it burned for five days) made it relatively easy for people to evacuate, and the five cited remain the only definite casualties. The authorities' response to the fire wasn't overly speedy, either. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Bludworth, went back to bed on the first night claiming "a woman might piss it out", and Samuel Pepys found time to safeguard his valuables by burying a "large parmazan cheese" in his back garden.

In the previous Great Fire of London (in 1212), 3000 people died, and in the two years before 1666 the plague had killed 65,000. The fire stopped the plague by destroying the black rats and their breeding grounds but the cost of the damage was estimated at (pound stg.) 10 million. With the entire annual income of the City of London running at (pound stg.) 12,000, these costs would, theoretically, have taken 800 years to pay off.

The fire started in the King's bakery run by Thomas Farynor in Pudding Lane. Farynor denied this at the time and a deluded French watchmaker named Robert Hubert claimed he did it. Although it was evident to judge and jury that he couldn't have done, they hanged him anyway. Justice wasn't finally done until 1986, when the Worshipful Company of Bakers claimed official responsibility and apologised for the fire.

6. Do marmots kill people?

Yes, they cough them to death. Marmots (below right) are benign, pot-bellied members of the squirrel family. They are about the size of a cat and squeak loudly when alarmed. Less appealingly, the bobac variety, found on the Mongolian steppe, is particularly susceptible to a lung infection caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, commonly known as bubonic plague.

They spread it around by coughing on their neighbours, infecting fleas, rats and, ultimately, humans. All the great plagues that swept through Eastern Asia to Europe came from marmots in Mongolia. The estimated death toll is more than a billion, making the marmot second only to the malarial mosquito as a killer of humans. When marmots and humans succumb to plague, the lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin become black and swollen (these sores are called buboes, from the Greek boubon - groin - hence bubonic).

Mongolians will never eat a marmot's armpits because "they contain the soul of a dead hunter". The other parts of the marmot are a delicacy in Mongolia.

Bubonic plague is still with us today - the last serious outbreak occurred in India in 1994 - and it is one of the three diseases listed in the US as requiring quarantine (the others are yellow fever and cholera).

7. What's the single largest man-made structure on Earth?

Wrong answers include the Great Pyramid, the Great Wall of China and (for clever-dicks) Mubarak al-Kabir Tower in Kuwait. Our answer is Fresh Kills, the rubbish dump on Staten Island, New York.

Opened in 1948, the landfill site (named after the Dutch word kil, meaning small river) soon became one of the largest projects in human history, eventually trumping (by volume) the Great Wall of China as the world's largest man-made structure.

The site covers 12 sq km and 20 barges, each carrying about 600 tonnes of rubbish, were shipped in every day. Had Fresh Kills stayed open as planned, it would have grown to be the highest point on the eastern seaboard. At its peak the dump was 25m higher than the Statue of Liberty.

Under local pressure, the site closed in March 2001, only to be reopened to cope with the debris created by the destruction of the World Trade Centre. It is now shut again, and the site is being flattened and landscaped into parkland and a wildlife facility.

8. What were Cinderella's slippers made from?

Squirrel fur. French writer Charles Perrault, who wrote the familiar version of the story in the 17th century, misheard the word vair (squirrel fur) in the medieval tale he borrowed and updated for the similar-sounding verre (glass).

Cinderella is an ancient and universal story. A Chinese version dates back to the 9th century, and there are over 340 other versions before Perrault's. None of the early versions mentions glass slippers. In the "original" Chinese story, Yeh-Shen, they're made of gold thread with solid gold soles. In the Scottish version, Rashie-Coat, they're made of rushes. In the medieval French tale, adapted by Perrault, they're pantoufles de vair - slippers of squirrel's fur. One source says the vair/verre error occurred before Perrault and he merely repeated it. Others think glass slippers were Perrault's own idea and that he intended them all along.

As well as polishing up Cinderella - adding the mice, the pumpkin and the fairy godmother - Perrault reduced the peasant blood-thirstiness. In the medieval original, the ugly sisters cut off their toes and bunions to try on the slippers, and after the prince marries Cinders, the king takes revenge on them and the wicked stepmother by forcing them to dance themselves to death wearing red-hot iron boots.

9. What is the most likely survivor of a nuclear war?

Cockroaches is the wrong answer. Why so many of us believe that cockroaches are indestructible is an interesting subject in its own right. Since the groundbreaking research of Drs Wharton and Wharton in 1959, we have known they would be one of the first insects to die in a nuclear war.

The scientists exposed a range of insects to radiation (measured in rads). Whereas a human will die at exposure to 1000 rads, they concluded that a cockroach dies at a dose of 20,000 rads, a fruit fly dies at 64,000 rads, and a parasitic wasp dies at 180,000 rads.

The king of radiation resistance is the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which can tolerate 1.5 million rads, and when frozen its tolerance doubles. Fondly known by its students as "Conan the Bacterium", it is pink and smells of rotten cabbage. It was discovered growing in a can of irradiated meat.

Its resistance to radiation and cold, and its ability to preserve its DNA intact under these extreme conditions, have led NASA scientists to believe it might hold the clue to finding life on Mars.

10. What does the Moon smell like?

Like gunpowder, apparently. Only 12 people have walked on the Moon, all of them American. Obviously, in their airtight space suits, the astronauts could not actually smell the Moon, but moondust is clingy stuff, and plenty of it was traipsed back into the cabin. They reported that moondust feels like snow, smells like gunpowder, and doesn't taste too bad. The dust is mostly made of silicon dioxide glass, created by meteors slamming into the Moon's surface. It also contains minerals such as iron, calcium and magnesium. NASA employs a team to sniff every piece of equipment that goes on its space flights. This is to ensure that no items that could change the delicate balance of the climate of the International Space Station make it onto shuttles.

The idea that the Moon was made of cheese seems to date from the 16th century. John Heywood's Proverbs (1564) says: "The Moon is made of greene chees." It is thought that, in this context, the word greene means new, as young cheeses would often have a mottled appearance, much like the cratered Moon.