From AT&T.net Published: 12/28/09 By Jeff Houck

If there was an award for best quote of the year, our money would be
on Richard Fisher, the director of NASA's Heliophysics Division.

Fisher was interviewed in October by National Public Radio
after NASA scientists discovered a mysterious ribbon of hydrogen around
our solar system.

The layer, a sort of protective barrier called the
heliosphere, shields us from harmful cosmic radiation. Its existence
defies all expectations about what the edge of the solar system might
look like.

Fisher's response: "We thought we knew everything about
everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns."

In other words: We don't know what we don't know until we
know that we don't know it.

Life is funny that way. You think you've got the world
wrapped up in string, only to watch some bit of news come along to
unravel your comprehension of how things work.

One thing we did expect: that 2009 would be full of strange
and wonderful revelations.

A prediction for 2010? Same thing as this year, only
different.

Here's a list of stuff we culled from 2009 that may have come
as a surprise:

1. Domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and use
them to find food.

2. Grumpy people think more clearly because negative moods
trigger more attentive, careful thinking.

3. High cholesterol levels in midlife are associated with an
increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia later
in life.

4. Analysis of Greenland ice samples shows Europe froze solid
in less than 12 months 12,800 years ago, partly due to a slowdown of
the Gulf Stream. Once triggered, the cold persisted for 1,300 years.

5. One mutated gene is the reason humans have language, and
chimpanzees, our closest relative, do not.

6. Obesity in teenage girls may increase their risk of later
developing multiple sclerosis.

7. A fossil skeleton of an Aardonyx celestae dinosaur
discovered in South Africa appears to be the missing link between the
earliest dinosaurs that walked on two legs and the large plant-eating
sauropods that walked on all four.

8. Women who have undergone successful breast cancer
treatment are more likely to experience a recurrence if they have dense
breast tissue.

9. Babies pick up their parents' accents from the womb, and
infants are born crying in their native dialect. Researchers found that
French newborns cry in a rising French accent, and German babies cry
with a characteristic falling inflection.

10. Surfing the Internet may help delay dementia because it
creates stimulation that exercises portions of the brain.

11. The oldest known silken spider webs, dating back 140
million years, were discovered in Sussex, England, preserved in amber.
The webs were spun by spiders closely related to modern-day orb-web
garden spiders.

12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and
convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images.

13. Pumpkin skin contains a substance that inhibits growth of
microbes that cause yeast infections.

14. Hormones that signal whether whales are pregnant,
lactating or in the mood to mate have been extracted from whales' lung
mucus, captured by dangling nylon stockings from a pole over their
blowholes as they surface to breathe. (This method could allow
scientists to study whales without having to slaughter them.)

15. The higher a patient's body-mass index, the less respect
he or she gets from doctors.

16. The blue morpho butterfly, which lives in Central and
South America, has tiny ears on its wings and can distinguish between
high- and low-pitch sounds. The butterfly may use its ears to listen for
nearby predatory birds.

17. The ochre starfish or sea star pumps itself up with cold
seawater to lower its body temperature when exposed to the sun at low
tide. It is equivalent to a human drinking 1.8 gallons of water before
heading into the midday sun, scientists say.

18. The eyes of the mantis shrimp possess a feature that
could make DVDs and CDs perform better. By emulating this structure,
which displays color wavelengths at all ranges, developers could create a
new category of optical devices.

19. The calmest place on Earth is on top of an icy plateau in
Antarctica known as Ridge A, several hundred miles from the South Pole.
It is so still that stars do not twinkle in the sky because there is no
turbulence in the atmosphere to distort the light.

20. The thrill of driving a sports car makes the body produce
more testosterone. The findings suggest a biological explanation for
why some men buy a sports car when struck by a "midlife crisis."

21. Remains discovered in China of a flying reptile named
Darwinopterus could be a missing link between short-tailed pterodactyls
and their huge, long-tailed descendants.

22. Bagheera kiplingi, a jumping arachnid from Central
America, is the first known vegetarian spider. It eats nectar-filled
leaf tips rather than other animals.

23. A massive, nearly invisible ring of ice and dust
particles surrounds Saturn. The ring's entire volume can hold 1 billion
Earths.

24. A new chemical compound that mimics the body's ability t o
fight bacteria could be added to cleaning detergents to prevent
bacterial infections in hospitals.

25. Seven new glow-in-the-dark mushroom species have been
discovered, increasing the number of known luminescent fungi species
from 64 to 71. The fungi, discovered in Belize, Brazil, Dominican
Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico, glow constantly,
emitting a bright, yellowish-green light.

26. Hormones in oral contraceptives might suppress a woman's
interest in masculine men and make boyish males more attractive to her.

27. Women who revealed about 40 percent of their skin
attracted twice as many men as those who covered up. Any more than 40
percent and the signal changes from allure to one indicating general
availability and future infidelity.

28. Communities of 850 species of previously undiscovered
insects, small crustaceans, spiders, worms and other creatures were
found living in underground water, caves and micro-caverns across
Australia.

29. The human body emits a glow that is 1,000 times less than
what our eyes can detect.

30. If you're trying to attract a partner, an athletic body
helps, but a good-looking face is more important.

31. Cockroaches hold their breath for five to seven minutes
at a time through a respiratory system that delivers oxygen directly to
cells from air-filled tubes. One reason they hold their breath may be to
prevent their bodies from getting too much oxygen, which could be toxic
to them.

32. Earth was bombarded in 2008 with high levels of solar
energy at a time when the sun was in an unusually quiet phase and
sunspots had virtually disappeared.

33. Scientists have discovered female eggs in the genitalia
of a third of all American male smallmouth bass and a fifth of their
largemouth cousins. Female bass occasionally show signs of male testes
in their reproductive organs.

34. Nearly all animals emit the same stench when they die,
and have done so for more than 400 million years.

35. Previously unknown molecules called hydroxyl radicals are
produced by nature and are believed to act as cleaning agents that
scrub away toxic air pollution in Earth's atmosphere.

36. A new species of giant rat was discovered in a remote
rainforest in Papua New Guinea. At 32.2 inches from nose to tail and 3.3
pounds, it's thought to be one of the largest rats ever found.

37. Differences in body odors produced by people who are more
prone to insect bites show they have lower levels of fruity-smelling
compounds in their sweat than those who are resistant to mosquitoes.

38. A chemical component in broccoli can protect the lining
of arteries from blockage that leads to angina, heart attack and stroke.

39. The length, curl and texture of a dog's fur are
controlled by only three genes.

40. The speed of U.S Internet broadband lags far behind other
industrial nations, including Japan, Finland, South Korea, France and
Canada.

41. Polar bear skulls have shrunk 2 percent to 9 percent
since the early 20th century. It's the result, scientists theorize, of
stress from pollution and melting habitat.

42. A mysterious disease that killed off more than a third of
American honeybees in 2007-08 may have been caused in part by a virus.

43. A group of deep sea worms dubbed "green bombers" are
capable of casting off appendages that glow a brilliant green once
detached from their bodies. The tactic is believed to be used by the
worms to confuse attackers.

44. A flesh-eating pitcher plant that grows more than 4 feet
long can swallow and devour rats that are lured into its slipperlike
mouth to drown or die of exhaustion before being slowly dissolved by
digestive enzymes.

45. An orchid on the Chinese island of Hainan gets hornets to
spread its pollen by producing an aroma identical to that made by bees
under attack. The hornets feed on bee larvae, so when they get a whiff
of the alarm pheromone, they head to the orchids figuring bees are
inside.

46. More than 350 new animal species were discovered in the
eastern Himalayas, including the world's smallest deer and a flying
frog.

47. The spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune
cells called monocyte. In the event of a serious health crisis, such as a
heart attack, wound or infection, the spleen will disgorge them
bloodstream to help defend the body.

48. The Amazon River is about 11 million years old and took
its present shape about 2.4 million years ago.

49. A close relationship with a caregiver can give
Alzheimer's patients an edge in retaining brain function over time.

50. Watermelon is more efficient at rehydrating our bodies
than drinking water. It contains 92 percent water and essential
rehydration salts.

Sources: Sydney Morning Herald; BehavioralHealthCentral.com;
Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry; New Scientist;
Neurology; BBC News; Women's College Research Institute; Current
Biology; Saint Joseph Health Scene; Live Science; University of
California, Berkeley; stltoday.com; Journal of General Internal
Medicine; Live Science, American Naturalist; Nature Photonics; London
Times; Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes; Science
News; Current Biology; NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Acta
Biomaterialia; San Francisco State University; Trends in Ecology and
Evolution; Behaviour; Eurekalert; Tohoku Institute of Technology and
Kyoto University; Evolution and Human Behavior; Journal of Experimental
Biology; Geophysical Research â?? Space Physics; U.S. Geological Survey;
Evolutionary Biology; National Geographic News; Oxford University
Museum of Natural History; Rothamsted Research; Imperial College London;
National Human Genome Research Institute; Communications Workers of
America; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Science;
Redfern Natural History Productions; Current Biology; World Wildlife
Fund; Geology; Journals of Gerontology; University of Aberdeen Medical
School

Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324.