Holy Shit, the Speed of Light!

If you know a little bit about physics, you know that the speed of light is around 300 million meters per second. If you know a bit more, you know that the exact figure is 299,792,498 meters per second. If you know just a bit more, you know that neither of those are necessarily true.

Here's the problem: "The Speed of Light" is a bit of a misnomer, which is probably one of the reasons scientists tend to just call it c. A more accurate definition of c would be "The Speed Limit of the Universe," because 299,792,498 meters per second is the fastest that any energy, matter, or information can possibly travel. It so happens that light is the only thing we know of that can reach that speed.

There are contenders, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.

What that doesn't mean, however, is that light always travels at c. In fact, light only travels at "light speed" in a vacuum. You'll note that the entirety of Earth is not, to our great benefit and relief, a vacuum. We have a whole atmosphere that lets us breathe and stuff.

That's not to say we don't have some perfectly nice vacuums on Earth

The effect of the atmosphere on light is relatively small. It shaves off about 90,000 meters per second from light speed, which is a drop in the bucket. "So what's the big deal," you might say, "that's more or less the same. What's the difference?" To which I'd respond, "Are you inside?"

"Always."

Because if you are inside, the light you're seeing is traveling significantly slower. Even if it's natural light coming through a window. Glass alone will slow down light by almost a third. These are just natural processes that slow light down. If you put some effort into it, you can make light practically crawl. Physicists at Harvard University, led by Lene Hau, used a bizarre state of matter with densely packed, super-cold atoms to slow light to 17 meters per second. That's 38 miles per hour. That's like you're morning commute, if you don't take the highway. You could beat light to work, depending on the traffic.

A few years later, those same physicists succeeded in turning light into matter and making it just stop. They then revived it and started it moving again a short distance away. So, congratulations. Any time you move, you are travelling faster than light...given the right conditions.

Holy shit.





"Bolt200" by Jmex - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

"Робот пылесос Roomba 780" by Nohau - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

"Sacrumi". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia - No offense intended :-)

Holy Shit, Uhura!

The woman in the above photo is Nichelle Nichols, in character as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the set of Star Trek. It's easy to forget (which is encouraging to me) how groundbreaking this character was for American fiction, and particularly for network television. She debuted with series opening episode, "The Man Trap," which aired in 1966.

Uhura was Chief Communications Officer aboard the Enterprise. That makes her the fourth link in the chain of command. So,..a black woman, in 1966, held a position of considerable power in a network television show. That's a mere two years after the Civil Rights Act. Deep-seated institutional racism doesn't just taper off that quickly. Uhura wouldn't have existed if Gene Roddenberry hadn't held downright shockingly progressive views for a man of his generation from Texas.

You wouldn't have known it by his face.

As a matter of fact, Roddenberry's original pilot featured a female First Officer, who was the intensely logical and level-headed presence on the bridge. The female character. In 1965. It goes beyond that, even. He stubbornly refused to allow any reference to organized religion as a going concern on the show. While working on The Next Generation, he told writer/producer Ronald D. Moore that he believed Earth's religions would taper out by the 23rd Century, to be replaced by personal spirituality.

But back to Uhura. At the end of the first season, Nichelle Nichols considered leaving to pursue a career on Broadway. One weekend, she went to a Civil Rights and met a big fan of the show who changed her mind. You may have heard of him, because he was Martin Luther King.

Junior.

Yeah. That Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King told Nichols that Star Trek was the only show he and his wife allowed their kids to watch. He begged her not to leave, because he knew how important it was for black people in America, and in particular black women, to have a role model like Uhura. Someone who was not a servant of the heroes, but their peer. "Once that door is opened by someone," he said, "no one else can close it again.

So she stayed on for the duration of the series. It turns out, Dr. King was right on the money. Among those who called Nyota Uhura a major influence were Dr. Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, and Dr. Mae Jamison, the first black woman astronaut. Whoopi Goldberg, who played Guinan in The Next Generation, also looked up to Uhura. When she first saw Star Trek, she ran to her parents and shouted, "I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain't no maid!"

People make a big deal out of Star Trek, and we like to call those people nerds. But you can't deny the impact. It goes beyond launching a renewed interest in science fiction (and science in general). Star Trek played a crucial role in tearing down racist and sexist taboos, and it did so deliberately. Because Uhura's name? Comes from the Swahili, uhuru. Which means "freedom."

Holy shit.


"Gene roddenberry 1976" by Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gene_roddenberry_1976.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Gene_roddenberry_1976.jpg

Holy Shit, Giraffes!

I'm gonna make this a short one since it's bed time as I write this and I am currently treating sleep as a precious commodity. That guy up there, as you are no doubt aware, is a giraffe.

I could tell you about how endangered they are. I could tell you about how they gestate for 15 months before being born at about six feet tall. But those facts would just be interesting. Not holy shit interesting.

So I'm gonna tell you how gay they are.

Very.

Giraffes are very, literally gay. Somewhere between 30 and 75% of what scientists coquettishly refer to as "mounting incidents" occur between two male giraffes. It usually happens after "necking," which in this case is a bit more violent than the traditional human definition of "making out."

I guess that makes this foreplay, though.

Two males will hilariously slap their necks against each other until one of them cries uncle. Then they cuddle and caress each other for a bit, which eventually culminates in the stronger male hopping up, mounting, and boinking the one he just out-necked.

And again: this is a more frequent occurrence than mating in the world giraffe community.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Oxygen Catastrophe

Let's say your an obligate anaerobic organism, and it's roughly two and a half billion years ago. You're hanging out on Earth, and you've pretty much got the whole place on a string. The world is your oyster (except those don't exist yet, so the world is your...I don't know, other, smaller type of obligate anaerobe).

One day, a new guy shows up. Or several million new guys, because they're bacteria and they come in large groups. These new guys, the cyanobacteria, are pretty different. They go through this whole process of photosynthesis and end up producing oxygen, and it's kind of weird. You're not a fan. In fact, the stuff is toxic to you.

More like toxygen, amirite? Guys? Hehe. Classic.

Luckily for you, dissolved iron and organic matter ends up capturing most of the oxygen, so you continue on your merry way for another 200 million years or so. At that point, the oxygen sinks become fully saturated. That means oxygen starts becoming a part of the atmosphere. For you and all your friends, that's a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.

The "anaerobic" part of "obligate anaerobic" means "without air/oxygen." The "obligate" part means oxygen will straight murder you. Which is exactly what happened. The same event that started Earth's atmosphere down the path toward being breathable also caused one of the largest mass extinctions of all time. It was essentially an apocalypse. The only survivors were the culprits -- who passed on the trait of photosynthesis to future generations -- and a few varieties of anaerobic bacteria that could tolerate the new atmosphere.

Oxygen was basically the Cthluhu of the obligate anaerobic world.

To get an idea of just how big the Oxygen Catastrophe was (and yes, that is an official name for it), just imagine the same thing happening today. Instead of oxygen, imagine it's an element that humans can't breathe. One that might cause dangerous fluctuations in the living conditions on Earth for the majority of its species. Something like, I don't know, carbon dioxide.

Oh, wait...

Well this isn't totally comforting.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Damascus Steel!

Remember how the Byzantines basically invented napalm about a thousand years ago? Probably not, so follow the link and read about it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Take your time.

Pretty cool, huh? So, you know the part where we still don't quite know what Greek Fire was since it was a closely guarded military secret? That's sort of the same deal with Damascus steel.

Damascus steel swords were made primarily in the Middle East. Funnily enough, they did not originate in Damascus. Their name is the result of someone mishearing the word "damask," a type of weaving pattern that the metal's texture resembled.

Except, you know...stabbier

They were made from wootz steel out of India, and through some miraculous forging process they became incredibly sharp, as flexible as a yogi, and harder than mithril. Legend has it that a Damascus steel sword could cut a feather from the air then slice through armor like a hot machete through lightly curdled milk without losing any of its sharpness.

Around the mid-1700s, the rise of gunpowder and lengthy disruptions in trade from India eventually led to the loss of the swordsmithing techniques required to forge Damascus steel. They became a thing of legend. Then science happened.

Pictured: Science. And it keeps changing directions. Watch. It'll freak you out.

While the technique for making it was lost, there were still some extant blades that historians and scientists could study. These have wielded some pretty interesting results, chief among which is that Damascus steel was reinforced by carbon nanotubes. Those weren't actually discovered, by the earliest reckoning, until 1952. It wasn't until the 1990s that we started making practical things out of them.

What I'm saying here is that as far back as 2000 years ago swordsmiths in the Middle East were literally (though probably unwittingly) using nanotechnology.

Holy Shit.

Holy Shit, Delta 32!

C-C Chemokine Receptor Type 5, or CCR5, is a protein in your white blood cells. We don't know its exact function, but we're pretty sure it interacts with T cells, and it may play a key role in inflammations that result from infection. All in all, it's a pretty standard white blood cell protein. That's what HIV counts on.

Some forms of HIV use CCR5 as their point of entry into your immune system. When that happens, shit gets bad. That's why most early drugs given to HIV positive people target CCR5. It's more or less the main point of entry for the AIDS virus.

It's like that drainage grate at Helm's Deep. Only, you know, AIDS.

Now let's take a quick two and a half thousand year trip to the past and take a look at Ancient Athens. In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was struck with a massive, horrific plague that wiped out a fourth of its population. It was at this point in human history when CCR5 started to change. Medicine back then consisted mainly of blood-letting, the type of thing that lands you in a psyche ward nowadays. Back then you paid people to do it to you.

As a result, natural selection weeded out a lot of people via disease. Many survived, of course. Some of them had a bizarre natural resistance, which we now call CCR5-Δ32, or Delta 32. It's a gene mutation. A tiny variation in your genetic makeup that essentially deletes a certain segment of the CCR5 protein. As smallpox and various other diseases spread across Europe, the Delta 32 mutation became more common in the survivors, conferring various immunities to a lucky minority.

Alas, this did not include immunity to ludicrous superstitious violence.

Today, Delta 32 is found in about 10-15% of European-descended humans. The segment of CCR5 that it deletes turns out to be a chief cause of all kinds of problems. That includes the aforementioned HIV. I suppose you can see what I'm getting at. If you are of European descent, there is as much as a 15% chance that you are, if not immune, then highly resistant to the AIDS virus.

That's evolution at work. Think of the untold thousands of people who had to die so that this mutation could become as prevalent as it is. Think of how many people would have to suffer today for it to become a common feature in human beings. This relatively new strength, like all the strengths we enjoy as a species, came at a massive cost over thousands of years.

Luckily, we've gotten pretty good at tinkering with evolution since then. Rather than opening our veins and hoping all the sick pours out with our blood, we use real science to develop real medicine that really works. And the discovery of the Delta 32 mutation is a boon for medicine. We don't know how, and we don't know for sure it'll work, but it's very possible that this natural resistance might hold the key to curing HIV, a disease that only twenty years ago was synonymous with a death sentence.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Phineas Gage!

Phineas Gage had an especially rough day at work. It was 1848 and he was a foreman on a railway construction project in Vermont. There was a big outcropping of rock in the way, so naturally Phineas decided to blow it to hell with blasting powder. It's possible that he neglected to add sand to his magic explosion powder, and as a result his day worsened significantly.

As he was packing the explosives into place with a tamping iron, the iron made a spark. If you've ever been around gunpowder and sparks, you can probably guess what the result was. It was an explosion. It drove the iron, with terrific force, back out of the hole and into Phineas Gage's face, where it created a brand new hole of its own.

It was a way less meticulously dug hole, too.

The effect of this (what surgical journals would later refer to as, I shit you not) abrupt and intrusive visitor was to literally destroy both his left eye and his left frontal lobe. Of his brain. The thing that tells the rest of your body what to do all the time. In most instances, this sort of injury is accompanied by almost instantaneous death. Not for Phineas Gage, though. He survived and even sat up on his own after a few minutes.

In fact, while the injury ultimately did lead to his death, it would take about another twelve years to get around to it. In that time, Phineas Gage became a marvel of the psychological and neurological science communities. When the tamping iron took out a chunk of his brain, it appeared to have taken most of his "how to not be an asshole" knowledge with it, so naturally Gage turned into kind of an asshole for a while.

Like this but smaller and less feline.

Which was a huge deal. It seemed to confirm suspicions that our actions are, in a way, preordained by the contents of our brains. This played right into the hands of phrenologists, a large group of charlatans who managed to convince much of the scientific community that our personality types are dictated largely by where our heads are bumpiest. The fact that Gage had a dramatic swing in his behavior after part of his brain was destroyed was pretty compelling.

Part of the "White People are Just the Greatest" branch of pseudo-science

However, a recently discovered report seems to indicate that Phineas Gage got back to his old self by the time he died of a massive seizure in 1860. Either he re-learned the social conventions that had been literally blown out the top of his head, or there was a fundamental problem with the model of phrenology. Which there obviously was, since it's been thoroughly debunked anyway.

Maybe it was just an enormous amount of stress that had caused the change. I mean, he had suffered quite a bit of trauma. That much trauma is bound to cause some disorder in his life involving stress.

HEY WAIT A SECOND WE HAVE A NAME FOR THAT KIND OF THING!

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Toba Catastrophe!

I believe we've established by now that supervolcanic eruptions would suck harder than the vacuum of space. In case you needed a little extra evidence of that, let's take a look at the eruption of the Lake Toba supervolcano. It happened around 70,000 years ago, and was terrifying.

The Toba Supervolcano Eruption may have been the single largest volcanic event in the known history of the planet. It spewed so much ash into the air that all of South Asia was covered with about six inches of it. Six inches of ash. Over an entire sub-continent. That's about 800 cubic kilometers of volcano vomit.

Why, yes, I am an adult. Why do you ask?

Even bigger were the long term effects. All that ash and sulphur dioxide is not so great for the global climate, as it turns out. There is some debate on the issue, but it has been suggested that the Earth's most recent ice age was either ushered in by, or a direct result of the Toba Catastrophe. For six years after the eruption, the planet was consumed by a volcanic winter. The following 1,000 years were a period of global cooling.

Which was just murder for the poor tauntauns

Right now, some of you are thinking, "Hey neat! A solution to global warming! Maybe a supervolcano eruption wouldn't be so bad after all!"

To you I say, "Nay." For there is a minor detail I left out before. Human beings were around before the Toba eruption. Afterward (or so goes the theory), we very, very nearly weren't. By some accounts, humanity sank into a genetic bottleneck in the aftermath of Toba. In fact, the human population of Earth may have dropped to around 10,000 people. By comparison, there are seven billion people today. That difference in population is literally too large to meaningfully display on a computer monitor.

10,000 is about one person per twenty square miles. It's not enough people to make up a city in some parts of the world. You'll find significantly more people per day in any one of the parks of Disney World than there were people in existence after the Toba Event.

And the rides in the apocalypse weren't nearly as fun.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Gut Feelings!

If you're like just about anyone in the world, you're pretty sure you've got a handle on the whole "intuition" thing. You can think logically about your conundrums until the cows come home, but when it really comes down to it, you have to go with your gut. It never seems to let you down.

Okay, now I want you to strap yourself in. We're going for a ride through Wild Speculation Based on Recent Research Land, and the turbulence can get a little bit rough. There are basically two points that you need to take out of this that will completely blow your mind. Or gut. Hopefully just your mind.

This is as far as I'm going with that joke.

Number one: when you get a "gut feeling," it may actually originate in your gut. As in, you are literally thinking with your stomach and basing your major life decisions on how it's making you feel.

Number two (and this one's the kicker): it may not actually be you doing the thinking. In fact, in a very real way it's not thinking at all, but a general optimism or pessimism, and it's all thanks to these fellas:

Aren't they just charming?

Well, not specifically those guys, but microbiotic organisms that reside in our tummies. Recent research suggests (not conclusively, but suggestively. Like your friend's mom making a few uncomfortably familiar remarks while he's in the bathroom so you're not sure if she's just being friendly or...anyway) that there may be a causal link between the types of bacteria in your gut and how you respond to stressful situations.

So far, all the hard evidence we have relates to mice. Scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario took a group of mice, studied their behaviors, and looked at their poo to see what type of bacteria was there. Because the life of a scientist is a life of glamour.

It's not all posing for group pencil and wash portraits

Then they started feeding probiotics and antibiotics to different mice and observing how they reacted to the changes. What they found was that, as the tiny ecosystem of their digestive track changed, so did the behavior of each specimen. Aggressive mice attained a Lebowski-esque state of calm, and lazy hippie mice began wailing and gnashing their teeth at the murine condition, taking out their newfound existential distress on their neighbors.

The reason for the connection seems to be a single nerve, shared by mice and humans, called the vagus nerve. It connects with both the stomach and the brain, and when its connection is lost, so is the influence of microbes on mouse behavior.

The implications of this research, if it turns out to be applicable to humans, could be staggering. Mental illnesses ranging from autism to bipolar disorder (and remember, speculation) could be reined in by the research that's currently looking into your stomach. It may actually turn out that the secret to living a calm, happy, and fulfilling life is contained within this:

Plus it helps Jamie Lee Curtis to poop regularly. So that's nice.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Svalbard Seed Vault!

One day, something terrible is going to happen to the Earth. I mean, the Earth will be alright. In most apocalyptic scenarios, the Earth will do just fine. That's not what people are really worried about when they say we need to save the planet.

No, what they mean is that we need to save ourselves. In a big ecological disaster, the crops we grow are going to become incredibly scarce. Maybe even extinct. That's problematic if you're a fan of eating. Even if you're strictly carnivorous, your food is not. I don't know why I feel the need to clarify this, but without crops, humanity is just...super dead.

Deader.

Luckily, we have a contingency plan. Yeah. That's not just something from disaster movies. There is a very real, very functional contingency plan with an out-of-the-way, isolated, 11th hour savior station and everything. It's called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and it is aptly named.

Because it's in Svalbard, is a global initiative, has seeds, and is a vault. It's that simple, yes.

Funded by various world governments and organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is humanity's insurance policy. It's the destination for real life post-apocalyptic scientists/farmers who want to save the world.

I'm gonna be honest. I want to make fun of this concept. I want to make light of it. At first glance, it's so bizarre that this place exists. At second glance, it's even more bizarre that it has funding.

But you know what? I can't. It's goddamn terrific that we, as a species, are planning so far ahead as to stuff a bunch of biodiversity into nature's refrigerator. All I can do is share it and reassure you that, should you find yourself starving due to a meteor, nuclear war, or massive blight, there's a little beacon of hope in one of the coldest places on Earth.

SUBTLE METAPHOR.

A place where you are legally required to carry a hunting rifle outside of towns so that you can defend yourself from polar bears, sure, but it's there. And one day, it may save the world.

And yes, I'm serious about the polar bear gun thing.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Pluto!

Sit down. Look at me. Are you looking? Okay, now listen closely. I know it hurts, I know it betrays the memory of your favorite third grade acrostic, and I know you don't want to hear it, but Pluto is not a planet. It never was. The mistake was calling it a planet in the first place.

It's nothing personal. It's not like we like Pluto any less for being a dwarf planet. Some of my best friends are dwarf planets! It's just that the evidence is all there in support of Pluto's demotion, and the only compelling argument to the contrary is basically just nostalgia.

And what has nostalgia brought us?

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old astronomer from Kansas. Given his youth, he was assigned the arduous task of taking pictures of the sky every two weeks and comparing the two to see if anything had moved. Shortly after he began his work, something moved, and that something was Pluto.

Ladies love the 'scope

Initially, astronomers thought that Pluto was around the size of Earth. Since that time, estimates have been repeatedly revised downwards. The most recent evidence puts the size at about .6% of Earth. That's "zero point six percent," not "six percent." It's really damn small, is what I'm getting at. It's small enough that its satellites have a sufficient gravitational pull to make Pluto sort of revolve around itself.

Pluto...wat are you doing?

Don't worry, though, I'm not just picking on the little guy. That's not the only reason Pluto was begging for the boot. After all, if I learned anything from Star Wars it's that size matters not. Orbit does, though, and Pluto's orbit...well...

Go home, Pluto, you're drunk

Yeah. Pluto's not really being a team player in that regard. It's orbit has more in common with a comet than a planet. In fact, it even weaves its way in and out of Neptune's orbit at different times. Planets don't get all up in one another's grill like that. That's Planetary Etiquette 101. You orbit like a planet and you own the neighborhood. Pluto does neither.

KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF, PLUTO.

What really did Pluto in was the fact that we found other objects like it in the Kuiper Belt. The final nail in the coffin was the discovery of Eris. Until that point, the tentative agreement among astronomers was that as long as all those Kuiper Belt objects were smaller than Pluto, we'll keep telling ourselves that it's a planet. Then Eris came along, and it had more mass. By 27%, too, so it's not even close.

If that's not enough to sway you, let me ask you this: Are you upset that Ceres is not a planet? How about Pallas? Juno? Vesta? Are you willing to fight for their inclusion in the planet club? Because they were demoted, too. When they were first discovered, all four of them were considered planets. Then astronomers realized that they were all on the same orbit, and they shared it with a bunch of debris. So they were demoted, and we started calling them asteroids (although some asteroids have actually been promoted to dwarf planet status now).

You can sort of see why we had to be a bit more specific with the "planet" title here.

There are basically two ways of taking this information in. The first is to rage against the astronomers. You grew up thinking Pluto was a planet, so a planet it is and that's that. There's no better way to label that reaction than to call it anti-science. The point of any scientific pursuit is to be willing to challenge previous discoveries. To deny new discoveries because they conflict with your feelings is to deny critical thinking.

The other way to look at it (while still maintaining your love for old Pluto) is to realize that Pluto wasn't the last discovered planet, but the first acknowledged dwarf planet. Being the first, Pluto gets a whole range of benefits, not least of which is the fact that a whole class of dwarf planets are now named plutoids. This isn't the story of Harry Pluto being bullied and shunned by the muggle astronomers, this is Harry Pluto finding his Hogwarts.

And yes, I did go there

Don't cry for Pluto. Give it a pat on the back and a congratulations. While you're at it, keep your eyes peeled. Next summer, for the first time, we'll have actual pictures of Pluto. The New Horizons robotic spacecraft is scheduled to get there sometime in July.

Before you dismiss this whole thing as a silly and pointless argument, give it some real thought. How we categorize the universe will inform how well we understand it. If we get it wrong just because we're used to the wrong answer, we'll never understand the way the universe works, and it'll be our own fault. Denying the recategorization of Pluto is denying critical thinking. It's the same frame of mind that gets people to think vaccines cause autism, which leads to children dying of preventable diseases.

This stuff matters.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Green Revolution!

When you think of a revolution, your mind will probably mosey its way into a battlefield, full of glory, gore, and lives laid down willingly for the righteous cause. This is not that kind of revolution. In fact, the Green Revolution was the exact opposite. It was centered not around death, but life.

The Green Revolution is most notable, for preventing hundreds of millions of deaths by starvation. It all started in the mid-1940s with an agronomist named Norman Borlaug. While many young American men were overseas causing brown stains in the pants of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese high command, Borlaug was receiving a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology and Genetics. When he finished, he took a research position in Mexico and started tinkering with wheat genes.

That's his tinkering face.

After a few years, Borlaug had developed a new and dwarfish type of wheat. It was short and resistant to many diseases, so it ended up being a boon to Mexican agriculture. Seeing how well it was working, he figured, "What the hell? Let's keep this going."

That was one of the most important "What the hell"s in human history, made no less important by the fact that I just put the words in his mouth and he probably never said it like that. According to Malthusian population projections, the world - and India in particular - was due for a massive starvation epidemic around the 1980s.

Because there's a friggin' lot of people there

Norman Borlaug came along with his dwarf wheat (and later dwarf rice), and suddenly there was just...food. Everywhere. The problem in India was that rice has a hard time growing high up on hills, because it has a tendency to blow over and break. The reduced height of Borlaug's crops, coupled with the resistance to blight, meant that new acreage could be opened up to farmland. Lots of it.

And open up it did. Between 1950 and 1984, the duration of the Green Revolution, world grain production exploded by over 250%. Instead of a catastrophic population collapse, the world's population grew by four billion. Four billion more people were born than died in a time that was supposed to be marked by fear, famine, and death.

Suck it, hunger.

You can argue that the Green Revolution only delayed the inevitable, perhaps even increasing the already horrific burden that the unsustainable human population places on the Earth, and you'd probably have a pretty good point. But it's hard to look at a man who won a Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for pretty much single-handedly saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation as anything but a goddamn hero.

Holy shit.