The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction

by Wendy Northcutt

At-Risk Survivor: Shocking Rappel

  Confirmed by Darwin

  Featuring electricity and gravity

  1 JUNE 2008, WEST VIRGINIA | In search of altitude, a man climbed the high-voltage power-line tower behind his house, attached a rope to the top of it, and began to rappel down. But he was shocked to discover that his “harmless” hobby was not safe at all when he hit a power line that carries as much as 46,000 volts, according to American Electric Power employees. The man fell to the ground, a battered but lucky survivor of what easily could have been a Darwin-Award-caliber misjudgment.

  Reference: The Charleston Gazette

  Reader Comments

  “Thought you’d get a jolt out of this story.”

  “Now, tell me these stories don’t make you feel superior!”

  At-Risk Survivor: Shockingly Conductive

  Unconfirmed Personal Account

  Featuring electricity and a tree!

  1971, FLORIDA | An aviation electronics instructor began his class on insulators with this observation: “Wood is a nonconductor, right? Well don’t you believe it!”

  He had purchased an acre of property that was covered in fast-growing poplar trees, each about five inches thick and twenty feet tall. Ax in hand, he set out to clear the yard. His wife expressed concern about the high-voltage power lines that passed along the edge of the lot, but he assured her that there was nothing to worry about. Wood is nonconductive.

  A few minutes later one of his mighty blows felled a tree, which toppled directly onto the power lines. He stood there transfixed as the blue electricity snaked down the tree trunk and up the ax handle, and blew him twenty feet across the yard. Fortunately his wife witnessed the event and rushed his twitching carcass to the hospital, where he was treated for third-degree burns on the palms and soles of his feet (where the electricity entered and exited his body). He was kept in the hospital for two weeks, until his arms quit shaking uncontrollably.

  He assured his wife there was nothing to worry about.

  Wood is nonconductive? Don’t you believe it!

  Reference: Carin Gleason

  At-Risk Survivor: Christmas Light Zinger

  Unconfirmed Personal Account

  Featuring a woman, holiday, and electricity

  2009 | I was helping a friend decorate her tree for Christmas. A strand of lights seemed to have a short, so my friend took it upon herself to solve the problem. She stripped the wires in the area and spliced them, and plugged in the lights to check her work. Then she finished up by using her teeth to crimp the bare wires together. Needless to say, she lit up like a Christmas tree!

  Reference: Robert Miller

  SCIENCE INTERLUDE QUORUM SENSING: SECRET LANGUAGE OF BACTERIA

  By Adam Mann

  The enemy is all around us, invisible, deadly, and using a secret code to coordinate its attacks. In the world of biological warfare, bacteria have humans outnumbered. Not only are there countless combatants on the ground and in the air, but also many species live on and inside our bodies. You are composed of around one trillion human cells, yet at least ten trillion bacteria also call you home. You are more bacteria than human by an order of magnitude!

  Although we rarely stop to consider their existence, bacteria are leading intriguing and noisy lives. In recent years, microbiologists have discovered that bacteria possess a useful skill previously thought to be employed only by higher organisms: language.

  Scientists call this bacterial language “quorum sensing.” Unlike our own speech, it relies solely on simple molecules. With these chemicals, bacteria are able to reach group decisions and coordinate many behaviors, including mass migrations and deadly attacks. Once considered an exotic anomaly, quorum sensing recently has been discovered in nearly all bacteria. Every species has its own vocabulary to prevent eavesdropping by neighboring bacteria, though their languages are as closely related as Spanish is to Italian.

  Quorum sensing works like this: An individual bacterium constantly releases a particular chemical into its environment, telling its brethren, “I’m here!” Other bacteria of the same species hear this message while releasing their own “I’m here!” chemical. The bacteria sense the concentration of that chemical and are thus able to estimate how many of their siblings are in the immediate surroundings. Armed with this information, they make decisions based on their quantity.

  For humans, bacterial quorum sensing can be deadly.

  For example, a lone member of a life-threatening species might get into your body. By itself, it stands no chance of evading your immune system and taking you down. Producing toxins, or doing anything except laying low in such an environment, would be a waste of energy.

  But there is strength in numbers. Over time, the bacterium multiplies, and perhaps a few more sneak into your body, each loudly announcing its presence while multiplying furiously. Soon enough, there is a whole bacterial chorus shouting to the world of their arrival. Once the bacteria have massed enough troops to take you down, they begin their attack and pump out toxins. You get sick. Without treatment, you may die.

  While the scenario seems dire, understanding quorum sensing is giving researchers hope. Biologists are learning how to decode this bacterial language and produce chemical tools that “jam” some of the communication lines. This method is a brand-new tactic in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Quorum sensing evolved billions of years ago, so it is likely to be much harder for bacteria to develop immunity to these weapons, compared to the relative ease of defeating traditional antibiotics.

  Scientists are now manufacturing molecules that silence the bacterial dialogue, turning the bacteria’s advantage into a disadvantage.

  Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a serious problem worldwide. Our reliance on penicillin, ampicillin, and other antibiotics—while lifesaving—has produced some nasty strains of killers. For instance, one of the most well-studied quorum-sensing bacteria is the opportunistic Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Some strains are highly resistant to antibiotics, and this microbe is often responsible for nosocomial infections—pneumonia and wound infections acquired during a patient’s stay in a hospital.

  P. aeruginosa colonies are clever. They signal to one another when a host’s white blood cells are on the march and, as a group, produce a chemical that eliminates the white blood cells, disabling a patient’s immune system. And once these shrewd bugs know that they’ve reached high density in a body they can enter into a state known as a biofilm, a gooey layer of germs and proteins that acts as a shield against antibiotics.

  But, by knowing which chemicals are used to coordinate this conspiracy, doctors may someday gain the upper hand and turn the P. aeruginosa deaf to their comrades. Without speech, individual bacteria will no longer be able to go about their trickery. This could be a huge boon to hospital patients, particularly immune-compromised ones such as those with AIDS or undergoing radiation therapy.

  Aside from medical applications, there are many interesting complexities to quorum sensing.

  A microbe never lives alone: A diverse jungle of species usually surrounds it. While each has its own language, there is a second system—a bacterial lingua franca—that allows all species to communicate with one another. Referred to as quorum-sensing cross talk, this scheme allows bacteria to measure the total amount of other species in their neighborhood. Researchers are just beginning to understand this cross talk, which could allow species to make decisions together based on the local environment.

  Furthermore, using genetic analysis, researchers discovered that bacteria have been “speaking” for far longer than we have. Quorum sensing is so widespread in bacteria that it must have evolved billions of years ago and provided such a survival advantage that it stuck around. By studying the genetic changes that control quorum sensing, scientists will be able to trace lineages and better understand bacterial evolution.

  In fact, since quorum sensing has been around for so long, it means that we multicellular creatures came into being against a chatteri
ng background. Some scientists believe that learning about bacterial communication will give insight into how our own cells organize into tissues and organs, a process that obviously involves close coordination.

  As humans, we sometimes think of ourselves as standing on the top rung of the evolutionary ladder. But all organisms have an equally long history. Humans aren’t so exalted, evolutionarily speaking, and lowly bacteria routinely humble us with their highly attuned chemical signaling.

  Bacteria were here first, and they set the rules. Perhaps if we learn to speak their language, we will alter the rules enough to help ourselves. But we should never forget that the ones in charge are the smallest. The meek shall inherit the earth; in fact, they already have.

  For more information, visit the University of Nottingham’s quorum-sensing site:

  http://nottingham.ac.uk/quorum

  CHAPTER 3

  TOOLS: THE MONKEY WRENCH

  “When you tempt fate . . .” Man is called the tool-using animal. So what do we call a man who misuses tools? Well, much of the time we call him a Darwin Award Winner. The human animal is remarkably creative in finding ways to mishandle everything from a basic shovel to more sophisticated tools like chainsaws, drills, air compressors, washing machines, and Tasers. Wait! Don’t touch that knob . . .

  Fool’s Gold • Rub the Mint • Saw It Coming! • A Drilliant Idea • It’s the Cure That’ll Kill You • Spin Cycle • A Putty Bullet

  Darwin Award Winner: Fool’s Gold

  Confirmed by Darwin

  Featuring money and a shovel

  5 FEBRUARY 2009, INDIA | Bachelor lottery agent Pravin K. lived with his brother’s family in Vasai. His own house, an abandoned hundred-year-old building, was located a few meters away.

  Some legends hold that a pot of gold lies buried at the end of the rainbow, but Pravin learned in a dream that an ancient pot of gold was actually buried beneath his house! He decided to “follow his dreams” and dig for that gold. He kept his plans private to avoid a fight over the fortune.

  The dream told him to dig beneath the staircase, so after lunch every day without fail, Pravin would take his spade and dig a little deeper beneath the stairs. The neighbors had no idea that days and nights of digging had resulted in a long, fifteen-foot-deep tunnel. The innovative gold digger had even rigged a remote-control toy car to carry a flashlight to assist him in the dark!

  He was smart enough to control his lighting needs, but not smart enough to take into account the water table. One day the thirty-two-year-old lottery agent did not return home, and his worried relatives lodged a missing persons report. Police discovered that the floor of the old house had caved in. The soil beneath the staircase becomes wet at a depth of five meters due to its proximity to the sea, and the unsupported walls of the tunnel had collapsed.

  A few hours later an earthmover excavated Pravin’s body from the debris, along with a spade and the innovative mobile flashlight. The lottery agent’s number . . . was up.

  Reference: Mumbai Mirror

  BEACH GETAWAY

  Digging a hole sounds simple enough but it’s actually a dangerous activity.

  Sunny, sandy beaches can get crowded, even on a winter day. In December 1997, a quest for privacy and protection from the wind prompted D. Jones to dig an eight-foot-deep hole on the beach in Buxton, North Carolina. He unfolded a beach chair at the bottom of the pit, and was enjoying his hard-won seclusion when the wet sand collapsed, burying him in a suffocating slide. Although digging for privacy—or for gold—may seem to be a harmless pastime, distinct danger lurks in the depths of a deeply dug hole.

  Reference: Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design

  (Plume, 2007)

  Darwin Award Winner: Rub the Mint

  Unconfirmed Personal Account

  Featuring school, work, and an air compressor!

  DECEMBER 1988, ROMANIA | I was a student of electricity and mechanics in Communist Romania. At the time, it was mandatory for all children, including university students, to boost the economy by “active participation.” Each autumn we worked in agriculture, harvesting fruits and vegetables, and for three weeks per year we were required to train in a power plant or factory, to get a feel for successful Communist industry. This was known as “Rub the Mint.”

  My class was sent to Slatina where aluminum was obtained with the power-hungry electrolysis process. We were not much use, so we were ignored by the people in charge of our training. We spent our copious down time reviewing our class notes. Not only were the students bored, but so were many workers in the factory, who were actually paid for doing nothing.

  One day I was assigned to walk documents from one department to another. Along the way, I spotted two men crafting a wooden coffin. I was accustomed to all kinds of crazy sights, but a coffin . . . ? Was the aluminum factory branching out into funeral supplies?

  “The coffin is for a comrade who accidentally removed himself from the gene pool,” the woodcrafters told me. And how had this accident come to pass?

  Two men in their twenties, recent hires, were fiddling with the pressurized air hose used to power industrial air tools. They swept the dust off their dusty clothes, and this was so much fun that one of them dropped his pants to feel the air sweep across his testicles. He bent over further, and bet his comrade that he had the guts to pressurize his guts, and maybe experience some fun farts. He proceeded to stick the hose in his anus and release six bar (atmospheres) of pressure, inflating and rupturing his intestines.

  He did not believe his comrade would be so stupid as to proceed.

  He died within minutes from internal hemorrhage. Even if he had been goofing off in a hospital corridor, he would not have survived: Several meters of his colon and intestines had ruptured.

  The employee was posthumously found to have broken internal (heh) company regulations. His “scientific collaborator” stated that he did not believe his comrade would be so stupid as to proceed and thought he was only goofing off.

  Reference: Florin Ungureanu, who says it wasn’t covered in the media

  because it happened during Communist times

  Fun fact: In powdered form, aluminum catches fire quickly when exposed to a flame.

  INDUSTRIAL SCIENCE

  Aluminum is a very important metal in modern society. The main natural source of aluminum is aluminum oxide, Al2O3, a very stable compound. You can’t extract the aluminum just by heating the oxide—you need more energy.

  The Electrolytic Process

  A method of smelting aluminium was discovered in 1886 by Charles Martin Hall, a twenty-one-year-old college student. The aluminum oxide is melted, and forms ions of aluminum and oxygen. A positive and a negative electrode are immersed in the molten liquid, and electrical current (a flow of electrons) flows out of the cathode. Positively charged aluminum ions pick up negatively charged electrons and deposit on the cathode as pure aluminum metal, while oxygen gas combines with the anode to form carbon dioxide gas.

  The melting point of aluminum oxide is more than 2,000°C. Modern smelters save energy by dissolving a small amount of aluminum oxide in cryolite (Na3AlF6)which melts at a much lower temperature, closer to 1,000°C. An electrical current is passed through this molten mixture and, as described above, aluminum ions combine with electrons to form liquid aluminum metal that is siphoned from the bottom of the tank. The oxygen ions combine with carbon from the anode to form carbon dioxide, CO2 (which is much safer than O2 ).

  Merits Discussion: Saw It Coming!

  Confirmed—Or Is It?

  Featuring electricity, alcohol, and a chainsaw!

  27 JUNE 2009, NEW YORK | A severe storm damaged power lines and left seventeen thousand homes without electricity. Mieczysław M., sixty-four, was one of the affected parties. His power line serviced only seventeen homes and therefore was one of the last to be repaired. Seven hours after the line fell, the disgruntled man finally lost his patience.

  The old man had been shooed away repeatedly by firefighter
s who were guarding the power line. “Police and firefighters literally chased him away, did everything [they] could,” said the Sullivan County commissioner of public safety. But they were not prepared for the homeowner’s sudden bold move.

  Mieczysław emerged from his home shortly after midnight with an industrial power saw in his hands and plastic bags on his feet. He stood in a puddle of water and attempted to saw through a 4,800-volt feeder line that was dangling off the pole. One thing led to another, and soon he was on intimate terms with the hissing and buzzing live wire. While emergency responders waited for utility workers to shut down the power, Mieczysław was busy dancing his way to death’s door.

  The story says it all. The old coot was repeatedly shooed away from the power line but insisted on cutting it while standing in a puddle, and now he is safely out of the gene pool. Thanks for doing our species a favor, Mieczysław!

  Reference: Middletown Times Herald-Record, YWN Sullivan County News Team,

  Mid-Hudson News Network, and an anonymous NYSEG employee

  MERITS DEBATED!

  News reports spelled his name Mieczyskaw, but that name is not listed in the Social Security Death Database. There is an obituary for Mieczyslaw M. (note spelling difference) at findagrave.com, stating that he died—not in 2009—but in 2008. Ultimately we concluded that the man did indeed exist, at least before his feud with the power line. This common Polish surname is difficult to spell correctly, and the discrepancy at findagrave.com is likely due to the fact that contributors submit unverified new listings.