Mental Muscles of Steel

STEP 5: SHORTCUTS TO MENTAL SHARPNESS

Feeling sore and achy? Ready to bag your workout regimen? Wait! These exercises will help you reach your fitness goals with the barest minimum of effort.


Couch Potato Science: Seven movies for the, er, passive learner.

The Fly (1958)

This outlandish story of a human-fly hybrid is not beyond the pale: Scientists have injected multiple human genes into flies to study diseases, and strange "mosaic" creatures have been created, including a sheep-goat with wool and hair interspersed in its coat.


2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

A team of astrophysicists helped director Stanley Kubrick add gravity to his sci-fi fantasy. The sound of silence is overpowering, as it should be—in the relative vacuum of space, there's no medium to transmit sounds. And the movie's space station rotates on its axis, capitalizing on centrifugal force to keep its astronauts' feet on the floor—an idea first proposed by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1920.


Jaws (1975)

Real sharks don't hold grudges, and they certainly don't make repeat assaults on specific boat captains, no matter how crusty. But biologists celebrate Jaws because a bearded Richard Dreyfuss acts and talks like a true scientist, clinical even when contemplating the shredded body of the first victim: "It indicates the non-frenzied feeding of a large Squalus, possibly longimanus or Isurus glaucus ..."


Boys from Brazil (1978)

This sci-fi classic, featuring an army of Hitler copies, paints a remarkably accurate picture of cloning methods for the time. A hitch: Just because the clones are genetically identical to Hitler doesn't mean they'll act like him.


Contact (1997)

Based on the book by Carl Sagan, this film hews reasonably to fact. At Sagan's request, astrophysicist Kip Thorne conceived the story's greatest
conceptual leap: Ellie Arroway's 18-hour, 26-light-year wormhole journey to Vega. Thorne then published a Contact-inspired paper about these
theoretical tunnels in space-time in the prestigious journal
Physical Review Letters.


Gattaca (1997)

This futuristic vision of genetic segregation is both far-out and near at hand. Already, human embryos that are created in the lab can be scanned for genetic defects so that only healthy ones will be implanted in the mother's womb. But it'll be years before we can build security systems that grant or deny entry based on an instantaneous DNA test.


Titanic (1997)

OK, so Leo's motor skills are impossibly intact after sloshing through a ship full of ice water. But director James Cameron compensates for that with near-perfect physics in his depiction of the sinking vessel. Realistically, gravity's downward force is barely larger than the upward-acting buoyancy of trapped air pockets, causing a gentle descent, not the typical Hollywood maelstrom.

Mnemonics: The cheater's guide to scientific erudition.

My Very Easy Method: Just Set Up Nine Planets

The first letter of each planet's name, in increasing distance from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.


CHNOPS

From this alternate spelling of a favorite liqueur, the six elemental building blocks of life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.


Roy G. Biv

The name of this nonexistent person holds the first letter of each color in the visible spectrum, in order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.


Oh, Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me!

The first letters of these words provide the stellar classifications, from ultrahot O stars to cool M stars. More PC version: Oh, Be a Fine Guy, Kiss Me! Better yet: Only Boys Accepting Feminism Get Kissed Meaningfully.


Sir, I send a rhyme excelling / In sacred truth and rigid spelling / Numerical sprites elucidate / For me the lexicon's dull eight

Encoded in second-rate poetry: the transcendental number pi to 20 places. Just count the number of letters in each word: three, one, four, one, five, nine ...

Brainfood? U.S. consumers spent more than $210 million on supposed brain-boosting supplements in 2002. Ginkgo biloba:$130 million; Multivitamins: $33 million; Combination herbs: $22 million; Plant and fish oils: $14 million; Other single herbs: $12 million. Source: Nutrition Business Journal

Science: The Cliffs Notes

How to fake it when the conversation goes over your head.

Subject: Time Travel

What to say: "I think Stephen Hawking's chronology protection conjecture is dead on."

What you just said: Time travel into the past isn't impossible according to classical physics and the general theory of relativity, but Hawking proposed that quantum-level effects conspire to always prevent it and its associated paradoxes. His most famous science-fiction-writer-befuddling question: If time travel is possible, why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?


Subject: Superstring Theory

What to say: "The problem is, no one's ever seen a supersymmetric particle."

What you just said: Superstring theory—the leading candidate for a "theory of everything" that can describe gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces with a single set of rules—posits the existence of a slew of undiscovered "supersymmetric" particles, such as selectrons and squarks. But physicists still haven't seen evidence of them.


Subject: Expanding Universe

What to say: "Isn't it wonderful that after all these years, Einstein's greatest mistake may not have been so great?"

What you just said: Straining to balance equations in his relativity theory, Einstein decided in 1917 that an unknown cosmological force was counteracting gravity—an idea he later called his greatest blunder. Then in 1998, two studies showed that the universe is accelerating—and hence that some new force (now called dark energy) must indeed be acting against gravity.


Subject: Tachyons

What to say: "But wouldn't tachyons violate causality?"

What you just said: This putative class of faster-than-light particles has never been observed experimentally, but physicists keep looking. And there's another problem: According to special relativity, tachyons would turn time on its head. If you used tachyons to send a message from Point A to Point B, certain observers would see the message being received before it had been sent. Effect would precede cause: a violation of causality.


Subject: Human Genome Project

What to say: "30,000 genes can't be enough to generate the complexity of a human being."

What you just said: Before the Human Genome Project published maps of the human genome in early 2001, researchers expected that the full complement of human DNA would contain as many as 100,000 genes. The surprise figure—roughly 30,000—means that humans possess only slightly more genes than the lowly wall cress plant (25,000).

The Basic Web: Where to turn on the Net for scientific bolstering.

howstuffworks.com

: A great basic resource for everything from car engines to CAT scans.


math.ucr.edu/home/baez

: This physics reference covers everything from quarks to kinetic energy. But the real gem is the Crackpot Index, useful for evaluating "revolutionary" physics.


nap.edu

: Dull? Perhaps. But with browsable online editions of more than 3,000 books from the National Academy of Sciences and its ilk, this is a dense Web cluster of trustworthy science.


quackwatch.org

: Dedicated to fighting medical frauds, Quackwatch identifies misleading health information on the Internet—and provides a handy, seven-step method for spotting bogus science.


scienceworld.wolfram.com

: The self-proclaimed "best resource for math and science" on the Internet is a simple and reliable quick-reference guide that doesn't gloss over details.


wikipedia.org

: Collaborative, open-source Wikipedia is the encyclopedia equivalent of a peer-reviewed journal—except that anyone can post a definition, or correct an existing posting.