Strange but true
Q. Do dreams take place in an instant, as has been suggested, or do they unfold in real time? A. A famous dream, reported by 19th-century French scholar Alfred Maury, took him back to the time of the French Revolution, when he was found guilty of treason and led to the guillotine. Suddenly, he saw the blade begin to fall, then felt it sharply on his neck. He awoke in terror to find that a rod from the canopy over his bed had fallen across the back of his neck, right where he had felt the blade strike. From this, Maury concluded that the detailed dream had played out instantaneously, triggered by the falling rod. Nice try, Al.
Modern researchers have since put this notion of dream time to the test. They tracked the brain waves of sleepers and waited for the onset of REM sleep ('rapid eye movements') associated with dreaming.
After five minutes or so, they sprayed water on the dreamers, then awakened them moments later. Under these conditions, subjects usually reported something like, 'I was hit by a sudden rain shower at the end of the dream.' But when the experimenters waited five minutes between the spraying and the awakening, about five minutes' worth of dream storyline was reported following the water event. Conclusion: psychologists today believe that dreams take place in something close to real time and external events become incorporated into dreams rather than trigger them.
Q. Space Agency officials don't like to talk about it, but what might become of astronauts lost in outer space? A. Based on the nature of space and the properties of decomposition, dead bodies in a sealed spacecraft with atmospheric pressure approximating earth's would probably start decomposing fast, says Dr Kenneth V. Iserson in Death To Dust. No spacecraft is totally airtight, however, so leakage would occur and the bodies eventually would be exposed to the vacuum of outer space. Rapid exposure to this vacuum would cause a body to disintegrate, possibly even explode, but slow exposure would put it into a deep freeze, halting decomposition. Without insects and small animals to disturb it, the ice-cold corpse would remain intact, drying out over time to become a freeze-dried mummy.
Q. You bet a friend you could go to an ice-cream parlour selling 31 flavours and buy a different three-scoop cone every day for a year, with three different flavours each time and never the same three as another day. Who takes a licking on this one? A. The first scoop can be any of 31 flavours, the next scoop any of 30 flavours (because you can't repeat the first flavour), then 29 flavours. Multiply 31 times 30 times 29 to get the total number of flavour sequences: 26,970. But some of these are repeats because chocolate-vanilla-strawberry, say, is really the same as vanilla-strawberry-chocolate, etc. Each of these three-flavour groupings contains six different variations, so you have to divide 26,970 by six, yielding 4,495 total possible novel flavour combinations. You could have said 12 years and still won your bet.