Tidbits of Grand Forks - September 22, 2022

The word “spider” comes from the Old Eng lish words “spithra” and “spinnan” meaning “to spin.” Come along with Tidbits as we admire spider webs!

AN AMAZING SUBSTANCE

• Spider silk is incredibly elastic, able to stretch up to 130% of its original length. It’s five times stronger than a similar strand of steel. It’s chemically inert, stable at high temperatures, waterproof, and non-allergenic.

• Silk starts out in the spider's body as a sort of liquid protein. As the spider squirts it out, it passes through a narrow tube which forces all of the protein's molecules to align in the same direction, which turns the silk strand into a solid, rod-like, semi-crystalline thread as soon as it hits the air. Look at a thread of silk under a powerful microscope and you will see that some of the protein rods are straight and some are curved. Together they act like links in a chain. When the silk is stretched, the curved sections straighten out. When the stress is released, they snap back to their original curved shape. The structure of the thread is so incred ibly sturdy that the only thing that will frag ment it is to boil it in acid.

starred in the 2006 movie Charlotte’s Web

Who starred in the 1990 movie Arachnophobia? Which song by the band The Cure, references the word “spiderman” several times? Which band from the 1990s wrote a song called “Spiderwebs”?

AMAZING WEBS

• Some types of webs last for years, such as fun nel webs built by house spiders which can shelter many generations of spiders.

• Other webs such as the iconic wheel-shaped webs built by orb weaver spiders are fragile and eas ily damaged by wind and rain, while their sticky properties are affected by pollen and dust. Orb weavers often rebuild their entire webs every single night, requiring that they manufacture 20 yards of silk.

• Some species, such as tarantulas, use their silk to build trap doors, and to line their underground lairs with silk tubes. When an insect gets too close, tarantulas can spring out, grab the prey, and drag it inside.

• The diving bell spider spends its entire life un derwater—the only spider known to do so. It survives underwater because of its waterproof airtight bell-shaped web, which it anchors to aquatic plants, with lines of silk extending up toward the surface. The spider climbs these lines of silk and lifts its rear out of the water to collect air bubbles around the tiny hairs that line its legs and abdo men. Carefully holding the air bubbles between its back legs, it descends back to its bell-shaped web and places the bubbles inside to form one large bubble. The bell can also take up dissolved oxygen from the water.

• The female Darwin’s bark spiders build enor mous webs—some extending more than 80 feet —across rivers and lakes. By building their su per-strong web across the water like a bridge, they can catch large insects like dragonflies that quickly swoop and rise along the water’s surface. The female will spend days building and reinforcing the bridge lines that she casts across riv ers to anchor the web on each bank, and repairing damage to the center caused by large insects.

COLLECTING SILK

70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers used hand-powered machines to carefully extract about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids before letting it go. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot cape is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spi der silk existing in the world today. By the end of the project, they had extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders. No one has been able to produce commercial quantities of spider silk. Silkworms are much easier to work with because they are docile and slow, whereas spiders are quick and independent. In addition, silkworms eat mulberry leaves which are easier to attain than live flies.

WEB FACTS

• Spiders have been observed changing the size and shape of their web depending on what prey is available. They build small webs with a fine mesh to catch small flies, and larger wide-meshed webs to catch termites.

• One type of assassin bug sits on the edge of a spi der web and tweaks the strands of silk in just ex actly the same way that a small innocent trapped bug would. When the spider approaches, the as sassin bug pounces and eats the spider instead.

• One type of tiny spider discovered in Taiwan sur vives not by eating insects but by stealing and eat ing pieces of other spider's webs.

• Balloon spiders, which throw silk strands into the air in order to be lofted by the wind, have been found floating in the air more than 200 miles from land. Weather balloons have found them floating at 30,000 feet above the surface of the earth.

STICKY SITUATIONS

Why don’t spiders stick to their own webs? Some spiders are covered with a special oil that prevents them from sticking to their webs. Others spike the strands of their web with tiny drops of sticky glue spaced exactly one footstep apart so the spider can run up and down the strands placing its feet be tween the drops. Some make some of their strands sticky and other strands not sticky and then they run only on the non-sticky strands.

DEATH WEB

Two Yale biologists noticed that certain strands in webs had a slightly different appearance from the rest of the web. On a hunch, they put the webs under ultraviolet light and found a distinct pat tern in each web that showed up best under UV wavelengths. Wondering why, they took two webs from the same spider and placed them in opposite ends of a Y-shaped chamber. One of the webs was bathed in light which included the UV wavelength, but the other had UV blocked out. A swarm of fruit flies was released, and most headed straight into the ultraviolet web. The researchers theorize that ultraviolet-reflecting strands are in visible to insects, who see them as clear blue sky and fly into them assuming nothing is there.

WEIRD WEBS

A scientist recorded the effect of drugs on spiders. Drugs such as marijuana and phenobarbital made the spiders lazy and imprecise in their web-build ing; spiders on amphetamines made smaller webs with a distorted pattern; mescaline produced odd angles in webs; caffeine caused spiders to build webs so weird they couldn't really be called webs; and LSD made spiders construct square webs, zig zag webs, and webs that could never hold their

NUGGET OF KNOWLEDGE

The crosshairs you see every time you squint through a rifle scope are usually painted on by hand. However, the crosshairs used to be made of spider silk. Not only did they come from spider silk, but they came from the silk of the female black widow spider, whose silk is much stronger than other spiders.

by Lucie Winbourne

• A town in Washington has a treetop bridge over a busy road that's just big enough for squirrels, called the Nutty Narrows Bridge.

• Russian author Vladimir Nabokov came up with the idea for smiley emoticons in 1969.

• Now here's a great way to "go green": Residents of Surabaya, Indonesia, can pay their bus fare with plastic waste, which will earn them two hours of travel time. The dual aim is to reduce waste as well as the number of cars on the road by encouraging the use of public transportation.

• A U.S. constitutional amendment was proposed in 1893 suggesting that the country be renamed The United States of Earth.

• If you've ever questioned the idea that smartphone addiction is real, consider the case of computer programmer Maneesh Sethi, who hired a woman (at $8 an hour) to slap him in the face every time he tried checking Facebook during working hours!

• The average MLB baseball lasts for just 5-7 pitch es. In the beginning of a game, at least 90 balls are required on hand, with about 60-70 used per the average game.

• When Apple purchased rural land for a new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, an older couple refused to sell the one-acre plot they'd originally purchased for $6,000 more than three decades ear lier. After all offers were rejected, Apple finally asked them to name a price. Success at last! For just a cool $1.7 million.

• The Spice Girls' nicknames were created by Top of the Pops magazine in a 1996 article.

• Monopoly, originally called The Landlord's Game, was invented by Lizzie Magie to share her views on the dangers of capitalism. ***

Thought for the Day: "Knowing trees, I under stand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence." -- Ralph Waldo Emer son

Financial Solutions for the Military

The VA OIG Strikes Again

I have the utmost respect for the VA Office of Inspector General and even more respect now. It ap pears they'll go after anyone breaking the law, bend ing the rules, doing wrong ... even one of their own.

In this case it came to their attention that a se nior OIG employee was still carrying an OIG-issued firearm and credentials after no longer being eligible to do so. Having been transferred out of one position into another one where carrying the firearm was not authorized, the individual should have turned the firearm in when he switched jobs. Didn't happen. Further, others knew of this and didn't speak up ... for six months.

Enter the OIG investigators.

They unearthed a tangle of job classification language that revealed that nobody was reading the fine print nor filling out the correct forms, even the ones who should have done so. And nobody stepped for ward to take the firearm away from the employee, even the ones who knew he wasn't authorized to have it.

Eventually word reached two people in the or ganization who knew instantly that the employee was not authorized to carry an OIG-issued firearm and credentials, and acted pronto to retrieve both the firearm and the credentials.

The end result is a thing of beauty. The employee in question retired. Two senior executives are no longer employed by the OIG, having resigned dur ing the investigation. Another employee received a letter of reprimand. And the two employees who were in charge of the firearms program are no longer in charge of the firearms program.

If you suspect something is wrong in either the VA programs or operation, contact the VA OIG ho tline at 800-488-8244. You also can go online to www.va.gov/oig/hotline. If you need to submit a complaint about violations, abuse, fraud, misman agement or other problems, that's where you do it. They don't take regular email submissions. To see the OIG's reports, go to www.va.gov/oig.

by Freddy Groves

OUT OF THIS WORLD

THE VOMIT COMET

• There was a need to acclimate astronauts in training to zero gravity. In 1950, the U.S. Air Force recruited two German brothers, aeronautical engineer Fritz Haber and physicist Heinz Haber. They proposed simulating the microgravity in airplanes that would make para bolic flights in a wave-like configuration similar to a rollercoaster. In 1957, the Air Force began what would become NASA's Reduced Gravity Program, training astronauts this way.

• During a typical flight, the plane flies out over the sea, climbing in a wave pattern of steep climbs and sharp dives. As it climbs up the parabola, or the top of the "hump," passengers achieve several seconds of weight lessness at the peak. The plane then dives back toward the ground, pulling up to create the bottom of the wave. Passengers experience nearly twice the tug of Earth's gravity from the midpoint on the way down, across the bottom and halfway back up.

• Adjusting the flight pattern can vary the pull of grav ity and affect how long weightlessness lasts. Complete weightlessness lasts about 25 seconds. Passengers can experience different gravities, ranging from Martian gravity (about one-third of Earth’s gravity) which lasts about 30 seconds, or lunar gravity (one-sixth Earth’s gravity) which lasts about 40 seconds. This maneuver is typically repeated forty times during a two-hour flight, making up to one hundred parabolas on some flights.

• Because of the nature of the ride, many people become ill. Generally, one-third become violently ill, one-third become moderately ill, and one-third do not get sick at all. Thus it has earned the name of the Vomit Comet.

• In 1973, NASA took over the program from the Air Force. However, since 2008, a private company, Zero-G Corp., has handled the training. Although the program was designed for astronaut training, it's open for use by other people as well.

• Celebrities such as director James Cameron, "Star Trek" actor George Takei, and Virgin Galactic's bil lionaire founder, Sir Richard Branson, have all taken flights on Zero-G planes. In 2007, renowned physi cist Stephen Hawking flew on G-Force One.

• Actors in the movie "Apollo 13" Tom Hanks, Kev in Bacon, and Bill Paxton, were probably the most famous visitors on the Vomit Comet in the 1990s. Set designers created a spacecraft interior adapted to the inside of the airplane, then the cameras captured shots on film, 25 seconds at a time. Director Ron Howard leased the aircraft over six months to achieve the weightless shots.

• Today you can book a ride on the Zero-G Experience now for $8200. Each ticket includes 15 parabolas, your own Zero-G flight suit, a “Regravitation Cel ebration,” a certificate of weightless completion, photos, and video of your unique experience.

• To avoid becoming ill, it’s recommended that you always try to stay right side up even if it is more fun to have your feet on the ceiling. Doing flips in mid-air is fun but will exacerbate the nausea. Try to lay down during the period of heavy gravity. You are also welcome to partake in motion sickness remedies, including either a pill or an injection of an in tense version of Dramamine which slows the move ment of fluid in the inner ear. Don’t make any quick motions while on the ground after taking these meds as it interferes with the sensation of movement.

by

I learned of a neighborhood group, six seniors, who are trying to keep themselves fed against all odds. They've come up with a brilliant plan: At the end of each week they pool whatever foods they have left over and have dinner together. They split the leftovers to take home.

The woman who told me about this talked about a website she discovered where all manner of ingredients could be entered, with the machine scouting the internet for recipes that could be created using those ingredients.

Whoever created the SuperCook website (www.super cook.com) did a fantastic job. Meats, grains, fruits, vege tables, dozens of cheeses, nuts, spices, dairy substitutes ... it's all there, ready to be clicked. You only need to scroll down the left side and select the ingredients you have on hand.

I tried it out, clicking that I have butter, milk, onion, ground beef and rice. The result came back that I could make a potential 521 recipes. Some of them actually sounded pretty good. When I swapped the ground beef for bacon, it was even better. A little suggestion note at the top of the screen said that if I had certain other ingre dients on hand, I could find an additional 51 recipes.

Another website, My Fridge Food (myfridgefood. com), offers the same thing, although on a more limited basis. There's even a phone app, and when you click on a recipe it tells you the cooking time, calories and serving size of each recipe.

Once I found those two sites I went on a hunt for more and found a public library database titled "Finding Reci pes for Ingredients You Already Have." You can check it out at www.penningtonlibrary.org/finding-recipes-foringredients-you-already-have.

Maybe you don't need another trip to the grocery store, at least not yet. Maybe you have on hand what you need to make a meal once you find a creative recipe.

Matilda Charles

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is seeking volunteers age 18 and older to provide a break for family caregivers. Share your skills and talents, meet new people and make a positive impact in your community by giving a few hours weekly. No prior experience required, and training is provided.

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is seeking volunteers age 18 and older to provide a break for family caregivers. Share your skills and talents, meet new people and make a positive impact in your community by giving a few hours weekly. No prior experience required, and training is provided.

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is seeking volunteers age 18 and older to provide a break for family caregivers. Share your skills and talents, meet new people and make a positive impact in your community by giving a few hours weekly. No prior experience required, and training is provided.

• On Sept. 30, 1868, the first volume of Louisa May Al cott's beloved coming-of-age book "Little Women" is published. Alcott dedicated most of her life and writing to supporting her family after her father's failure at run ning a school.

• On Sept. 28, 1901, Ed Sullivan, who will become the host of the long-running TV variety program "The Ed Sullivan Show," is born in New York City. During the peak of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Sullivan's program showcased a wide range of entertainers.

• On Oct. 1, 1920, Scientific American magazine reports that the rapidly developing medium of radio would soon be used to broadcast music. Experimental concerts were being conducted from the Radio Laboratory of the Bureau of Standards with local radio operators being used to see if the transmissions could be heard hundreds of miles away.

• On Sept. 27, 1930, Atlanta golfer Bobby Jones wins his fourth major tournament of the year, making him the first person ever to win the Grand Slam of golf. Jones had the picture-perfect swing of every golfer's dreams, despite never having taken a lesson.

• On Sept. 26, 1945, Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, a U.S. Army officer with the Office of Strategic Services in Vietnam, is shot and killed in Saigon. Dewey was the head of a seven-man team sent to Vietnam to search for missing American pilots.

• On Sept. 29, 1954, Willie Mays, center fielder for the New York Giants, makes an amazing over-theshoulder catch of a fly ball hit by Cleveland Indians first baseman Vic Wertz to rob Wertz of extra bases in game 1 of the 1954 World Series. The catch has gone down as one of the greatest in the history of baseball.

• On Oct. 2, 1965, a team of scientists invent Gato rade, a sports drink to quench thirst, in a Univer sity of Florida lab. The name Gatorade was derived from the nickname of the university's sports teams. A coach had asked for something to help his players who were negatively affected by the heat during play, and the salt and sugar drink was developed.

Cats use a litter box because of primordial instincts to hide their scents from predators.

The world record for a cat surviving a fall is 43

Babies will cry without shedding tears until they Jerry Springer was born in the London under

The University of Oxford in London (est. 1096 AD) predates the establishment of the Mayan cul

“Jazz” is the hardest word to guess in the game of

The antlers of a moose are so sensitive they can detect a fly landing on them.

• The Canadian province of Alberta has no rats, the largest inhabited region of the planet that is officially rat-free. Pet rats are not allowed.

• The human body consists of 65% hydrogen atoms; 24% oxygen atoms; 10% carbon atoms; and 1% other atoms.

• Thomas Edison proposed to his wife using Morse code, which he had taught her.

• Tokyo is the most populous city in the world with 38 million people.

• The only times the Olympics have been cancelled have been because of war (1916, 1940, 1944) and Covid (2020).

• Chihuahuas have the biggest brain in the canine world, relative to their body size.

• Before 1912, tires were white or beige. They only turned black when carbon was added to improve their strength and durability.

• The original ampersand sign “&” was formed from the letters “E” and “T” because “et” is the Latin word meaning “and.” Its name is a contraction of “and per se and.”

• When the Pentagon first opened in 1943, it was the first non-segregated building in the state of Virginia. President Roosevelt insisted that no federal buildings would be segregated.

• The tip of the finger can feel items as thin as the width of a hair.

• In 2002, a barber who cut Neil Armstrong’s hair sold the clippings to a collector for $3,000. When Neil Armstrong found out, he insisted the trimmings be returned and that the barber make a $3,000 donation to a charity.

• It’s estimated that 85% of the world’s oxygen is made by phytoplankton in the oceans.

• When you lose weight, you don’t get rid of fat cells; it’s just that the fat cells shrink.

• Erno Rubik invented the Rubik’s cube. It took him nearly a month to solve his first one. Today the record is 3.47 seconds.

• There are over 60,000 species of tree on earth. Half exist only in a single country.

• Not only can a starfish regenerate a lost limb, but a limb can regenerate the entire starfish.

• The giraffe has the same number of neck verte brae as humans.

• Every human has a tongue print as unique as a fingerprint. Dogs have a unique nose print.

• Every lamppost in Central Park, New York City, has an ID tag attached that tell you the nearest street names and numbers. Among the mammals, humans and other pri mates are the only ones that cannot see ultra violet light.

• 360 million years ago, there were species of fungi that grew 24 feet tall.

• The opposite of “déjà vu” is “déjà reve” which is the feeling that you’ve already experienced something in a dream.