Question:Videocam your infant daughter's face for a week, through mood highs and lows, and how many distinct emotional expressions might you capture?
Answer: Expect to spot joy — mouth smiling, cheeks lifted, twinkle in the eye — anger, fear, sadness, surprise, interest and disgust — nose wrinkled, upper lip raised, tongue pushed outward — says David G. Myers in "Psychology: 6th Edition," drawing on the work of Carroll Izard.
These natural seven are there in baby from birth, recognizable in cultures worldwide, the number later growing to include contempt, shame, guilt, and maybe love. Other emotions may be combinations of these 10. In almost all cases the expression and emotion are intertwined, with the expression actually heightening the feeling, called "facial feedback": How happy that a doting Mom (or Dad), when smiling at baby, not only expresses her joy but feels it more; and that baby, beaming back the same, helps tighten empathic bonds through up-close mother-and-child facial mimicry!
Question:From a reader in the United Arab Emirates: "Many thousands of years have passed since Earth and its first creatures and early humankind appeared. These have died and gone and there are new births and growth of trees and plants. So, is the mass/weight of Earth increasing or not?"
Answer: Not, because the Earth is pretty much a closed system. Some interplanetary cosmic dust and rocky meteorites do enter, but light gases like helium and hydrogen escape from the top of the atmosphere for a mass-reducing effect.
But these are minuscule compared to the Earth's 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. Yet as organisms die and are born, a vast recycling of elements occurs: Animate or inanimate, it makes little difference, says Penn State-Erie University geologist Tony Foyle.
"Calcium in my left tooth may have spent time inside a volcano in the western Pacific, or in a coral reef in a tropical sea many millions of years ago. Carbon dioxide I exhale today may, within a few thousand years, end up in the shell of a limpet (not yet born) on the rocky shores of Ireland."
What goes around, comes around, you know.
Question: Classic puzzle: A bookworm eats straight through a 10-volume encyclopedia from the first page of Vol. 1 to the last page of Vol. 10. If each volume has 1,000 pages, and the set is shelved in the usual order, how many pages does the bookworm eat through, ignoring covers, title pages, etc?
Answer: Left to right is the usual shelving order, so the ravenous worm eats through only the front cover of Vol. 1 and only the back cover of Vol. 10. That leaves 1,000 x 8 reading pages in Volumes 2-9, or 8,000 pages.
But since these are printed front and back, the 8,000 converts to only 4,000 physical pages wormed through. It's a matter of semantics whether the worm ate through the first and last pages themselves, which would push the count to 8,004 (4,002).
Question:Is it easier for a 10-year-old or a healthy 100-year-old to add muscle mass?
Answer: You seniors, take heart, for research shows it's never too late to pump iron and gain at least modest strength, say V. Gregory Payne and Larry D. Isaacs in "Human Motor Development: A Lifespan Approach."
Moreover, you stand a better chance of adding muscle mass than does a prepubescent child, who likely can benefit more than you in gaining neural adaptations to activate muscle tissues for improved coordination.
So youth surely has its advantages, but age does not need to bow out prematurely — just don't overdo it, check with your doctor first, and follow professional guidelines in preparation for those Centenarian Olympics.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com.