For Boys Only

by Marc Aronson

  WHERE WERE THE ETRUSCANS FROM?

  EVERYONE HAS HEARD of the mighty Roman Empire. But long before Rome became an empire, before it even controlled Italy, it had to defeat the powerful Etruscans. The strange thing is, no one is sure where this civilization, which introduced the arch, and perhaps even the system of law to the later Romans, came from. Were they sailors who arrived from Asia? Were they a local Italian group who simply developed their own culture? Scientists were sure the Etruscans were native to the Italian peninsula until DNA tests on Etruscan remains in 2004 showed them to have nothing in common with modern Italians and to be closer to peoples from what is now Turkey. We are back where we started—where did the Etruscans come from?

  BADAKIZU EUSKARAZ?

  BY STUDYING LANGUAGES carefully, scholars have learned that some that sound very different actually have common origins. For example, English, Spanish, and Hindi are known to be part of a single, interconnected language group. But not every language fits into a group. High up in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain live a people whose language is unlike any other. Though they borrowed words from neighbors, their language stands completely alone. The Basques keep to themselves, but before Columbus sailed, the Basques suddenly started to have a lot of dried fish to sell. Some historians think they found a route to North America, caught fish in the Atlantic, and dried them in what is now Canada. If they did, they certainly would never have told anyone. (Can you guess what the words above this paragraph mean? What would you ask someone to find out if he spoke your language?)

  HPN: The Pirahã tribe of the Amazon rain forest has a language that no one outside the tribe has ever been able to completely figure out. The people do not use syllables or tenses in their language and there is no written form of it. No one is even sure how they teach it to their own children.

  When you trace words back to their origins, it can get pretty interesting. An author named Jeanne Heifetz tells us that originally “blue”—the color of the sky—meant “to shine” or “yellow.” So when we lived in caves, blue meant yellow.

  WEAPONS

  THAT CHANGED HISTORY

  THROUGHOUT HISTORY, WHOEVER HAD BETTER technology could make better weapons, win more battles, and dominate their corner of the world. Here are some key technological advances that made big differences in battles, and even in civilizations.

  BOW AND ARROW

  THE BOW THAT WON A BATTLE

  October 25, 1415—Henry V of England was trapped in France with 900 sick, hungry, and tired soldiers and 5,000 bowmen to face a French force of some 20,000 men. Surprisingly, the Battle of Agincourt was a rout, won by the English. As French knights rode toward the English, archers using the longbow showered them with arrows. So many arrows rained down, it sounded like thunder. The 250-yard range of the bows allowed the archers to hit the French before they got close enough to fight.

  HPN: What makes a longbow any different than a regular bow and arrow like the kind Native Americans used? And what were all those thousands of French soldiers armed with that allowed them to get beaten so badly—bad words and insults?

  MA: The French had bows—in fact, theircross-bows were very powerful, almost more like guns than archery. But the French noblemen got all proud and defiant and charged ahead, so while the English rained arrows down on the French knights, the French bowmen only got into the action when it was too late.

  THE BOW THAT WON A CONTINENT

  The weapon responsible for the triumphs of all the Mongol peoples (see p. 96) was the composite bow. Each bow took over a year to make, and was constructed out of wood, sinew (such as the skin from animal necks), and horn. The bow was small enough to carry on horseback, and powerful enough to penetrate leather armor. Until people figured out how to make and use gunpowder, the composite bow was the most devastating military weapon in the world.

  STIRRUPS

  STIR UP CONTROVERSY

  And when stirrups first arrived, every fighter with a horse wanted a pair. That is because a warrior could wear heavy armor while brandishing his weaponry if he had somewhere to brace his feet. The poor slob with no stirrups had to wear lighter armor and use smaller weapons, or risk falling off his horse. The saddle with a stirrup made its way to Europe from China in the 300s. Some scholars think the humble stirrup created the entire world of knights in the Middle Ages. How come? Well, a knight in heavy armor on a horse was like a one-man tank; he could do all sorts of damage that no foot soldier could match. But to make the armor, feed the horse, and train the knight, you needed farmers to work the soil. Soon enough, you had knights, castles, and jousting—all because the stirrup could keep that man-encased-in-steel on horseback. But others say that no one invention could have launched the whole King Arthur package. We call this technological advance the footrest that transformed Europe—unless it didn’t. What do you think? (Want more? Google “stirrup controversy”)

  HPN: Excuse me, didn’t somebody in history start using guns somewhere? Seems to me that all those bow-and-arrow guys must have been pretty disappointed the day they first. ran into bullets.

  MA: For the longest time, guns were cumbersome, inaccurate, and hard to use. While the gunner was fiddling, the bowman was shooting. Guns were scary to guys who had never seen them, but not, at first, particularly dangerous.

  ENIGMA

  THE ENIGMA THAT LOST A WAR

  As Germany prepared to fight World War II, the Nazis were absolutely certain their secret messages would be secure. They sent messages using the Enigma machine, which took letters that were typed into it and translated them into other letters through a mechanism that produced so many possible variations, no code-breaker could make sense of them. But brilliant Polish mathematicians managed to figure out how the Enigma machine must have been set up, so they built their own copy of it. That was only a partial help, because the Germans kept changing and complicating their codes. Now the Allied fight against the Enigma went on two fronts: The British set out to capture Enigma machines from German ships or submarines, while, at the same time, teams of British and American code-breakers in a top secret project labored to decrypt Enigma messages. By the second half of 1941, the Allied team was able to break the unbreakable code. The information this yielded may well have decided the war.

  FAKE BLOOD

  HERE’S A WAY TO MAKE REALISTIC BLOOD for stage shows, school plays, really gruesome Halloween costumes, or freaking out your friends:

  • ¼ cup of creamy peanut butter

  • 1 pint of white corn syrup (use the cheapest one you can find; they’re usually thicker than the expensive ones)

  • ¼ cup of dishwashing soap (try to use pink, yellow, or pale orange)

  • 1 small bottle of red food coloring (these are usually .25 oz.)

  • 5 drops of blue food coloring

  • A clean quart jar or bottle

  1. Add just 1/2 cup of the corn syrup to the peanut butter and stir until the mixture becomes runny.

  2. To this peanut butter mixture, add dishwashing soap and the red food coloring. Mix everything together.

  3. Add what’s left of the corn syrup. Add drops of blue food coloring, one at a time, as you stir. The blue will make it look darker, so add as much as you want to make it look like your idea of the perfect color of blood.

  4. Pour everything into the jar. Cap it and shake well. Now you’ll have enough realistic blood to impress Dracula.

  ♠ ♣ ♦ ♥ CARD TRICK 1 ♠ ♣ ♦ ♥

  “THE FLIPPED CARD”

  LET A VOLUNTEER PICK A CARD,

  memorize it, and put it back in the deck. Casually search the entire deck and then, to everyone’s surprise, find the volunteer’s card.

  1. Take a complete deck of cards, and make sure all the cards are facedown.

  2. Flip the bottom card upside down so that it faces inward. When the deck is flipped over, this card looks like the top.

  3. Start with all the cards facing down (except the bottom one) and ask the person to pick one
.

  4. While your volunteer is looking at their card, casually flip the deck upside down. Now the only card facing down is your top card.

  5. Have the volunteer reinsert the card in the same way they took it out. The volunteer will think that all the cards are facedown, just like theirs.

  6. Flip the deck and spread them out, claiming that the volunteer’s card has magically turned itself over. Make sure you don’t spread them out so far that your top card shows. Their card will be the only one facing up.

  HOW TO ESCAPE FROM BEING TIED UP

  YOU’VE DECIDED TO BECOME A SPY. But unfortunately, your latest mission has turned out badly. You’ve been captured, and now the bad guys are blindfolding and gagging you, and tying you to a chair. Here is what you need to do.

  Quietly take a deep breath as you are being tied up. This expands your chest area, making your body bigger. Force your arms and legs away from the chair as the enemy is wrapping the ropes around you. If you can do it at the same time, flex your arms to make your muscles bigger.

  When your captors have left the room, jerk your body so that you and the chair end up next to a wall. Rub your face hard against the wall (yes, it will hurt) so that the blindfold pushes up to your forehead and the gag drops down to your chin. Now you can at least see what you’re doing, and you can yell for help if necessary. It’ll also help your breathing.

  Breathe out as much as you can and relax your arms and legs. The rope should now have a little bit of slippage because it’s no longer tight on you. Wriggle your body, arms, and legs so that the rope gets looser and looser. Use your teeth if you can. It helps if you sweat, because that will make the rope more slippery. Focus primarily on freeing your hands because once they’re free, you can get the rest of the ropes off that much quicker.

  Now go save the world.

  A SPY WALKS AMONG HIS

  enemy and sends back the information he gathers. A double agent convinces his enemy that he is a spy working for them. A triple agent convinces his enemy that he is a double agent working for them. Here are some agents who have done really well at this game of deception.

  Karl Ludwig Schulmeister was a smuggler who was Napoleon’s secret weapon. Schulmeister could change his appearance in an instant, and get out of any jam— trapped in one city, he escaped in a coffin. In 1805, Napoleon was at war with Austria. A native speaker of German, Schulmeister persuaded the Austrians that he was on their side. He fed them false information about Napoleon’s supposed troubles, which lie made convincing with fake newspapers the French printed up for him. Fooled by Schulmeister, the Austrians stumbled into a trap, and a 40,000-man army was captured. Collecting money from both the still-blind Austrians and the grateful French, he became a rich man.

  The spy who had the biggest effect on the outcome of a war may have been Richard Sorge. Sorge worked for the Russians during World War II. He posed as a German newspaper reporter working in .Japan, which was allied with Germany at the time. When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Sorge’s timely information told Russia that Japan was not about to attack. Knowing that troops did not need to be kept in Asia to defend against Japan, Russia was able to concentrate on defeating the Germans. Though Sorge was finally caught and killed by the Japanese, he is sometimes called history’s greatest spy.

  SPIES

  Then there is the spy family—where a sharp-eyed, eleven-year-old boy played a key part, unfortunately though, helping the Germans in World War II. In fact, the Kuehn family paved the way for the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Bernard and Friedel, their teenage daughter Susie Ruth, and then six-year-old son Hans Joachim arrived in Hawaii from Germany in 1935. Susie dated American sailors, even getting engaged to one. She and her mother ran a beauty parlor, where they collected information from the wives of military men. Hans would go on tours of ships and note details. Bernard seat all this information to the Japanese embassy by hanging different kinds of clothes on a line or flashing lights through his windows. The family was caught after the attack, but the damage was done.

  The model for the suave superspy James Bond was a real double agent named Dusan Popov. He was recruited to work for the Germans during World War II, and gave them so much information they thought he was their best spy in England. But all along, he was actually working for England against Germany. Everything he told the Germans was almost true, but never actually valuable. He warned America about the attack on Pearl Harbor, but J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, did not trust him. Popov was wealthy, enjoyed going to casinos, and dated attractive women. Ian Fleming, who later went on to write the Bond books, once actually met him.

  SECRET MESSAGES

  Could a secret message be contained in this sentence—without the use of any codes? Yes. Starting in World War II, spies developed the ability to shrink information into tiny microdots, the size of this period. Microdots could be hidden in any sentence, or on any postage stamp. You just needed to know where to look, and to have a reader that could blow up a tiny dot into a large image, Any microdots here? We aren’t saying.

  DETECTIVE STUFF

  CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION

  IN THE OLD DAYS, DETECTIVES LIKE

  Sherlock Holmes walked around a lot, asked a lot of questions, and apparently always kept a magnifying glass nearby. That was about it.

  Today, detectives have the entire world of science and technology behind them. Laboratories create products that make dried blood glow and can determine if two hairs came from the same person.

  It’s all part of forensics, which is the use of science to find solutions to legal problems. There are many ways that forensics are used in solving crimes, and popular TV shows like CSI have given people a close look at forensics in action. We’ve got a few forensic projects to get you started on your own investigations.

  HOW TO COLLECT FINGERPRINTS

  1. Get some talcum powder or cornstarch (for surfaces like dark floors or desktops), or cocoa powder (for light surfaces like a window or the outside of a clear drinking glass); a small paintbrush with soft bristles; Scotch tape; a piece of paper (dark paper if you’re lifting powder prints, white paper for the cocoa prints); and a magnifying glass.

  2. Choose a hard surface and press your fingers against it.

  3. Sprinkle talcum powder or cornstarch on dark surfaces and cocoa powder on light surfaces where there are visible prints.

  4. Take a small paintbrush with soft bristles to gently swipe off the excess powder, leaving just the print exposed.

  5. Take a piece of clear Scotch tape and press the sticky side down onto the powdered print. Gently pull the tape back and press it onto a piece of paper (dark paper if you’re lifting powder prints, white paper for the cocoa prints). Now, you can examine the prints with a magnifying glass.

  LIKE FINGERPRINTS, PEOPLE’S BITE PATTERNS are different because every person’s teeth grow in differently. (It can be a problem if criminals have fake teeth, though.) You can easily learn how to check for dental evidence. Have a few friends each bite a chunk out of their own individual apples, and then compare the bite marks. You should be able to see the differences in the position of each person’s teeth. Then have them bite into the apple, but not take a chunk out of it. You’ll see impressions of each tooth; compare them to check for differences.

  DENTAL

  EVIDENCE

  CHROMATHOGRAPHY

  CHROMATOGRAPHY IS THE WAY THAT INVESTIGATORS identify ink, especially on fake documents. The process separates ink into different colors and determines which type of ink was used. Here’s how you can do your own chromatography.

  Fill a tall glass about one-third full. Take a pencil or stick and lay it across the top of the glass, Cut a piece of heavy paper towel into strips a little more than in inch wide. Take a number of different black and blue markers (some pen inks won’t dissolve in water, so you need to use markers), and, using a different marker for each strip, make a large dot about half an inch from the bottom. Now drape the strips over the pencil or stick
so that the dots are just above the waterline, and just the bottom touches the water—not the dot.

  Let the water soak into the strips. As the ink dots begin to get wet, they’ll separate into different colors, bleeding down the paper.

  BLOOD TESTING

  THERE ARE EIGHT DIFFERENT TYPES OF HUMAN BLOOD. Blood is identified by whether it contains two components called A molecules or B molecules. Blood can contain one or the other, or both, or none. If the blood doesn’t have either type of molecule, it’s called O type. Human blood is known as the ABO blood group system.

  By identifying the type of blood found at a crime scene, police can narrow down suspects by using percentages. That percentage is based on who has what kind of blood. Some types are more common than others. Here’s how it breaks down:

  The + (positive) and - (negative) refer to whether that person also has a particular protein in their blood. This is called the Rh factor, which is named after the rhesus monkey, who also has the same protein. People with the protein are positive in their blood group, people without it are negative. That’s why some people have B-positive blood while others have type O-negative. Next time you visit the doctor, make sure to ask what blood type you have.