Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (45 page)

• Another record: Io’s solid iron core makes it the densest moon in the solar system. In that respect, Io is more similar to the four inner planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—than it is to the other large
Jovian
moons, which are mostly made of water ice.

ASSAULT ON THE SENSES

• A trip to Io would be amazing…and treacherous. Viewed from afar, Io resembles a giant pizza, complete with tomato sauce, melted cheese, and black olives. These colors are created by sulfur and sulfur dioxide in their various states—liquid, gas, and solid. If you flew closer to Io (avoid the massive plumes!), you’d see enormous sulfur icebergs floating in bubbling sulfur lakes, volcanic craters the size of Texas, raging rivers of molten lava, and mountains twice as high as Mt. Everest.

• Please remain in the safe confines of your spacecraft…or at least hold your nose when you venture outside. Because it literally snows sulfur dioxide, Io smells like a really, really,
really
bad fart. If you do want to get out, wear layers. Io boasts some of the most extreme temperature differences ever recorded: The surface temps are about -200°F; the areas surrounding volcanoes can top 3,000°F. Only one place in the solar system is hotter than that: the sun.

• But that’s assuming you could even fly close enough to observe these phenomena. Io’s thin sulphur dioxide atmosphere is sucked away at about one ton per second by Jupiter. This creates an intense radiation belt known as the
Io plasma torus,
a doughnut-shaped ring of ionized sulfur, oxygen, sodium, and chlorine around Io. Between the ionized field, the radiation, and the bad weather, it’s best to observe Io from a safe distance. (Bring a camera.)

“I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

—Galileo

Stomach ulcers aren’t caused by spicy foods or stress—they’re caused by bacteria.

NO FINALE

The finales of popular TV shows like
M*A*S*H
or
Friends
are big media events, wrapping up the series neatly and bringing in huge numbers of viewers. But some shows tape their final episodes without knowing it’s the final episode, or that the show’s about to get canceled
.

S
how:
Married…With Children
(Fox)
On the Air:
1987–1997
The End:
An offbeat, cynical, and often crude take on the traditional family sitcom,
Married
was one of the first-ever shows on the Fox Network. It remained on the air through its 11th season, getting renewed well in advance of the season’s end each year. In early 1997, Fox was noncommittal about another year of the show, but the producers filmed the 11th-season finale as planned—a regular episode in which Al Bundy (Ed O’Neill) prevents daughter Kelly (Christina Applegate) from marrying a jerk. A few weeks later, Fox canceled the show. O’Neill got the news that he was out of a job when a couple of fans bumped into him in a parking lot and expressed their condolences.

Show:
My Name Is Earl
(NBC)

On the Air:
2005–2009

The End:
Earl
was the most popular new sitcom of the 2005–06 season and finished the year at #40 in the ratings with 11 million viewers. The original premise appealed to audiences: Earl (Jason Lee) was a redneck petty thief who won the lottery and tried to turn his life around by righting every wrong he’d ever committed. But the show took a lot of weird turns (example: Earl spent half of season three in a coma with an imaginary 1950s sitcom playing in his brain, in which he was the star and the other characters were his friends and family) and lost nearly half its viewers, dropping to #85 in the fourth season. Creator Greg Garcia knew the show was slipping and asked NBC what their plans were so he could produce either a wrap-up final episode or an end-of-season cliffhanger in which Earl finds out he may be the father of his ex-wife’s child. NBC told him to go with the cliffhanger. After it aired, the network canceled the show. (And Earl never found out if he was a dad.)

What do Henry Ford and Paul Revere have in common? They both made clocks.

Show:
All in the Family/Archie Bunker’s Place
(CBS)

On the Air:
1971–1983

The End:
All in the Family,
the satirical show about a loud-mouthed, blue-collar bigot named Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) and his “dingbat” wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), was one of the biggest hits in TV history—it was the #1 show for five years. Then, in 1979, the actors who played Archie’s daughter and son-in-law (Sally Struthers and Rob Reiner) quit the show, necessitating a format change away from the “family” setting. So producers changed the name to
Archie Bunker’s Place
and moved most of the action to the bar that Archie bought in season eight. The new show continued to draw viewers and was a top-20 hit, although it wasn’t as popular as
All in the Family
. Then Stapleton left. With none of the original characters in the cast except Archie, the ratings plummeted, and CBS canceled
Archie Bunker’s Place
without a proper ending to the 13-year Archie Bunker story. Instead, the last episode is about the bar’s co-owner trying to win back an old girlfriend. Writer Fred Rubin said that if he’d been given advance notice, he would have written an ending that reunited Archie with his WWII army buddies in Italy.

Show:
Gunsmoke
(CBS)

Years:
1955–1975

The End:
Gunsmoke
debuted in TV’s early black-and-white days, outlasted more than 100 other Western shows, and was still popular in 1975, when sitcoms like
Happy Days, Sanford and Son,
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
dominated and it was the
only
Western on the air. For 15 of its 20 years,
Gunsmoke
was a top-10 show, and no prime-time TV show has ever produced as many episodes—635 in all. (
The Simpsons
is a distant second, with over 460 and counting.) Despite all that,
Gunsmoke
was simply pulled off the air in April 1975, a few weeks after a forgettable episode—the sharecropping Pugh family struggles to get their crops planted before they’re evicted; lead character Marshal Dillon barely appears. The show had slipped to #23 in the ratings, but no one from CBS had ever mentioned to anyone in the cast or on the production staff that the end was even a possibility. James Arness, the star of
Gunsmoke
for 20 years, had planned to retire after another three years. Instead, he read about the show’s cancellation in
Variety
.

Have you ever seen one? There are fewer than 50 albino alligators in the world.

THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS,
PART II

For Part I of the story of the 2001 anthrax attacks, go to
page 75
.

H
OW THE DISEASE WORKS
The method by which anthrax disables its victims is like something out of a horror movie. Once spores enter the body, either through a cut on the skin or via food or inhalation, the body’s immune cells capture and ingest them. Normally invaders are broken down and taken to the nearest lymph nodes, where antibodies against further infestation are produced. But that’s just what anthrax wants: The spores have a protective coating that prevents them from being broken down, but being ingested by immune cells induces them to
germinate,
or “wake up,” so to speak, from their spore state and become fully active bacteria. Then they begin to multiply incredibly rapidly, quickly killing and bursting out of their host immune cells to enter the bloodstream. They continue multiplying in the blood, which carries them throughout the body. That’s bad, but it gets worse: The bacteria now begin producing and releasing the deadly anthrax toxin.

Anthrax toxin is made up of three proteins that work together to chemically “trick” the body’s cells into allowing the proteins to enter them—a big cellular no-no—then induce them to produce inflammation-causing fluids. Inflammation is a normal immune response and is usually a good thing. But this is a
massive
response, and toxic levels of fluids quickly build up in the body, leading to tissue damage, decreased blood pressure, organ failure, and, in the worst forms of the disease, death in just a few days.

Result: The little
B. anthracis
bacteria have what they wanted all along: something dead to feed on. And when they’re all done, and there’s no food left, they go back into their spore state. And wait.

TRIPLE WHAMMY

There are three different forms of anthrax disease, each one corresponding with how the bacteria enter the body.

Hi Mom!

•
Cutaneous anthrax,
caused when anthrax spores enter through a cut or abrasion on the skin, accounts for about 95 percent of all known human cases. It begins as a small, itchy sore at the site of contact, then a blister that eventually bursts and dries into a very black scab, all of this accompanied by flulike symptoms. Cutaneous anthrax is easily treatable with antibiotics and is fatal in only about one percent of cases. People most likely to get it: those who work with wool and cow hides. (Anthrax is also known as
woolsorter’s
and
ragpicker’s disease
.)

•
Gastrointestinal anthrax
is caused by ingestion of the spores, most commonly through eating infected meat. It is extremely rare, and no cases have ever been reported in the United States. (It is, however, the most common form in animals.) Symptoms include abdominal pain, fever, and severe inflammation. It is often fatal in livestock, but is treatable with antibiotics.

•
Inhalational anthrax
is caused by inhaling airborne spores, and it’s the worst form of the disease. Characterized by fever, flulike symptoms, and fluid buildup in the lungs, it causes death within days in nearly 75 percent of all cases—even with treatment. It’s also extremely rare: Before the 2001 attacks, the last death in the United States due to inhalation anthrax occurred in 1976, when a 31-year-old weaver in California died after working with spore-infested yarn imported from Pakistan.

FROM MEDICINE TO WEAPON

For all the bad press that anthrax gets, it actually holds an important place in the history of advances against infectious diseases: It’s the very first disease positively linked to a particular bacterium. That discovery was made by German physician Robert Koch in 1876. (He did the same with cholera and tuberculosis, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.) Five years later, French scientist Louis Pasteur developed an anthrax vaccine, which is still used on livestock around much of the world today.

Unfortunately, the discoveries also led to less-than-humane pursuits, and it wasn’t long before the anthrax bacterium (as well as many other microorganisms) was being studied for possible use as a weapon.

• During World War I, the German government reportedly sent agents supplied with anthrax bacteria to several Allied countries in order to kill livestock. One agent, Dr. Anton Dilger, a German-American physician, set up a lab in his basement in Washington, D.C.—just miles from the White House—in 1916. There’s little evidence to suggest that he and the other agents were successful.

The Latin name of the black squid
Vampyroteuthis infernalis
translates to “vampire squid from Hell.”

• In the 1930s, several nations—including Germany, the United States, the U.S.S.R., Canada, and Japan—conducted extensive research into weaponizing anthrax, though it’s unclear whether it was ever used in battle.

• In 1942 the British military exploded the first known “anthrax bomb” in a test on Gruinard Island off Scotland. It released a cloud of anthrax spores that killed 60 sheep and made the island uninhabitable for the next five decades.

• The British also produced five million “anthrax cakes” intended to be dropped over Germany and eaten by cattle, but never deployed them. They were safely incinerated after the war.

• In 1943 the United States began producing anthrax-based and other biological weapons at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

• In 1969 President Richard Nixon ended America’s biological weapons program, but studies, including work on human anthrax vaccines, continued. The FDA approved a human vaccine a year later.

• In 1979 an unknown amount of anthrax spores in aerosol (airborne) powder form was accidentally released at a bioweapons plant near the Ukrainian city of Sverdlovsk. At least 68 people in the area died in the days that followed, as did livestock as far as 30 miles away.