Q&A, 2002

A. Yes, indeed. You could even make Jell-O right in the swimming pool, as long as you kept it cool.

I sent your question to gelatin experts all over the country (Jell-O is a brand name for flavored gelatin). Gelatin, they explained, is made from a chemical with long molecules, dissolved in water. If the water is cool enough, the molecules stick together, changing the soupy liquid into rubbery, wiggly stuff. To make a small batch of Jell-O, you usually put it in the refrigerator. But a swimming pool of gelatin would eventually jell at ordinary air temperatures, said Skip Rochefort.* "It would be better to be in International Falls, Minnesota, in winter," he added. "But no one in their right mind has an outdoor pool there!"

Zoe Anne Holmes** says a backyard swimming pool might hold about 28,000 gallons of water. To make that much water into Jell-O, you would need to add about 224,000 tablespoons of Jell-O powder and mix it well to keep it from getting lumpy. (Holmes thinks an outboard motor would do the job.) Chlorine in the water probably would help the jelling process, Rochefort said, but would ruin the flavor. "If it was my Jell-O pool, I wouldn't use chlorine because all the fun would be in being able to eat as you swim."

*Skip Rochefort is a chemical engineering professor at Oregon State University.

**Zoe Anne Holmes is a food science professor, also at Oregon State University.

Rosanne loves Jell-O more than almost anything else in the world. For years she was planning to write a Jell-O cookbook, then a novel about a short, funny California woman writing a Jell-O cookbook. Yet somehow Robert wound up answering the Q&A column's only Jell-O question.

"Jell-O diving" is a popular party stunt at some college fraternities, though the participants just flop around in children's inflatable swimming pools of the stuff. In August 2003 at the University of Minnesota, a chemical engineering professor named Ed Cussler did a (mostly) serious large-scale water-thickening experiment in an athletic swimming pool. Instead of making Jell-O, he poured in 700 pounds of guar, a thickener used in food and shampoo, to see how quickly students could swim through water with the consistency of honey. (Just as fast as in regular water, it turned out.) You can read the gooey details in the university's press release.

A. Not much, according to Steven Mackessy.* Cobras are immune to cobra venom.

Cobra venom, Mackessy told me, kills by clogging the parts of the body that allow a person or animal to breathe. Small molecules in the venom jam little triggers that fire the muscles that work your lungs, and because you can't breathe in, you suffocate. But the cobra's own muscles have evolved so that cobra venom doesn't affect them. A cobra can bite itself, or another cobra of the same species, without doing any harm.

In case you're wondering, other poisonous snakes, such as rattlesnakes, are immune to their own venom, too. Venoms work in different ways, though, and immunity to one kind doesn't help when a snake encounters another kind: if a cobra and a rattlesnake bit each other, Mackessy said, both snakes would die.

*Steven Mackessy is a biology professor and snake-venom expert at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

When I phoned Dr. Mackessy with Madeline's question, he said, "The man you really needed to talk to died two weeks ago." Joe Slowinski, a herpetologist at the California Academy of Sciences, had been the experts' expert on poisonous snakes. In September 2001, while doing field research in a remote part of the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, he was bitten by a krait, a small poisonous relative of the cobra. He told his teammates calmly what was going to happen to him. They tried to summon a helicopter, but rainstorms kept it away, and Dr. Slowinski died the next day. You can read the whole sad story here.

If Dr. Slowinski had reached a hospital in time, he almost certainly would have lived, Dr. Mackessy said. Unlike rattlesnake venom, which attacks a lot of body systems at the same time, the venom of kraits and cobras specifically targets the breathing muscles. Victims usually survive if doctors can put them on a respirator to keep them breathing long enough for their bodies to get rid of the venom. Dr. Slowinski had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and worse, he knew it.

Q. Why do diet sodas float and regular sodas sink? I was at a party and you had to reach all the way to the bottom of the cooler to get the good ones.

A. You weren't imagining things. The Coca-Cola Company told me that the ingredients in sugar-free Coke make it slightly lighter than the same amount of water, while plain Coke is slightly heavier. So in a cooler of partly melted ice, the diet drinks will wind up floating on top. I didn't check other soft drinks, but I'm sure it's the same story.

A. The hair that sprouts from your head grows about a half inch every month. Eyelashes, eyebrows, and body hair grow a little slower.

A. The shocking truth about watermelons is that they're not all striped. They can also be completely light green or totally dark green. And some green ones have whitish blobs splashed all over them (these are called mottled). How a watermelon looks on the outside is spelled out in its genes. We know of 300 watermelon varieties and are working to collect seeds and pedigree information on them, say Fred McCuistion and Todd C. Wehner of North Carolina State University's watermelon breeding program.

A. Watermelon breeders use an old plant breeding trick to create seedless watermelons: they breed plants with three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two copies. Amazingly, plants with three copies of each chromosome usually thrive but they do get mighty confused when they try to form seeds. So these watermelons end up seedless except for a few flimsy partial seed cases here and there.

Q. Do lightning rods really work? The reason I ask this is because you don't see them on houses as much as you used to.

A. They work very well when properly installed, says Ronald Standler, a patent lawyer, physicist, and former lightning researcher. Unfortunately, shoddy work by fly-by-night lightning-rod salesmen gave them a bad name long ago, so most homeowners nowadays skip the rods and buy insurance in case their houses get hit. You still often see them on remote buildings such as farmhouses and barns and on explosives warehouses, though, Standler says.

Q. You know that old saying, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear"? Well, my dad told me that a company actually did make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. How did they do it?

A. I've seen the purse! It was on display at the headquarters of the DuPont chemical company in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1979. I was taking a tour, and my guide explained that scientists at DuPont once took a pile of pig ears, extracted a chemical from them, spun the chemical into fiber, wove the fiber into silk-like cloth, and made the cloth into a purse—just to show that they could. When I phoned DuPont's historians and press office this May, though, nobody knew what I was talking about. I'll keep asking. The truth is out there. (Unless my guide was pulling my leg.)

In January 2003 an e-mail message to Muse cleared up the mystery of the sow's-ear purse and showed that nothing is more unreliable than memory. Now I think I must have seen the purse while college-shopping at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and later confused it with things I saw on my whirlwind tour at DuPont. Read on! —Robert

Because my children keep old copies of Muse and reread them and hand them around, I just ran across an item in the September 2002 issue (page 19). I believe I know why the people at DuPont did not know about the sow's ear made into a silk purse. This feat was conceived by a man named Arthur D. Little, a scientist from MIT who founded a consulting company in Cambridge, MA. and who personified Yankee ingenuity and the American can-do spirit. (Remember those?)

It was engineers from that company—Arthur D. Little, Inc., which has recently ceased to exist—who made a purse from a sow's ear in the manner you described. It was on display there when I worked there from 1977 to 1982.I am surprised that you saw it at DuPont in 1979 . . . unless there were two. The Arthur D. Little consulting engineers also made a fine helium balloon out of lead foil to disprove another dispiriting cliché.

What a great magazine you put out! My children have always loved it and I'm so glad they do.

February 2002

March 2002

September 2002