Is it science – or is it just a myth?
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Are right-brained people more creative? Do dock leaves relieve nettle stings? Should we all be drinking two litres of water and walking 10,000 steps per day? Here to bust some scientific myths and maybe sharpen our critical thinking skills to bust some on our own is physicist Dr Shane Bergen from UCD. Shane, good morning. Good morning. OK, let's start with an oldie but a goodie.
Do dock leaves help with nettle stings? Nettle stings. I loved your last segment on poets. I was immediately taken back to a poem about nettles. The regiment of spite behind the shed, as Vernon Scannell told me when I was doing my junior search. And nettles have evolved to have these little glass fibres on their leaves. Yeah, they're silica fibres. They're tiny little microfibers. And when you brush off them, they break and they inject into you formic acid and histamine. So really uncomfortable. And when I was a child, and my father still does it with my niece and nephew. When I was stung by a nettle, what you were told to do was go off and find a dock leaf and you spit in the dock leaf and rub it in and all is well.
There's no need to kind of burn the shed down as Vernon Scannell did in the poem. But the dock leaf, unfortunately, is a complete placebo effect. So if it works, it's only working in your head. There's nothing in the dock leaf, unfortunately.
Do dock leaves actually relieve nettle stings or is it just a placebo?
There's no alkali or basic chemical in there or an antihistamine in the dock leaf that might cause the nettle sting to go away. If you really are bothered by the nettle sting, maybe you should wear long trousers or you might stick some baking soda on it instead and look for something that might relieve it. Same with the bee sting, a little bit of baking soda on it, remove the sting and away you go.
OK, is the earth closer to the sun in the summertime? Clearly it is because it's hotter.
This is a classic and you're talking about critical thinking. With a lot of these myth bustings, I think it's important that you don't want to kind of say all the things you thought were true are wrong and you're stupid. That's not the objective here. When we do this kind of thing with students in UCD, And what I would do is this is a classic one about the sun and the earth and the distance between them. And I would I would get a bulb and stick it in the middle of a dark room and give them all a ball and say, I want you to build a model that shows basic things like day and night, a month, these sorts of things, a year going around the sun. Then I'd like you to now model the seasons. And this is where things tend to fall apart.
So students will tend to make elliptical models. So where the Earth and the Sun are closest at the summertime and furthest away during the winter. Of course, you build that model, you run into problems because you realise that the Earth would be close to the Sun twice in any orbit. So you'd have two summers in one year. And also when it's summer here in the northern hemisphere, it would also be summer in the southern hemisphere. So those things don't match with reality. So it takes a little bit of figuring out and thinking in order for us to arrive at the correct conclusion, which is that it's the tilt of the earth that causes the season. So at this time of year, we're fully facing or more facing the sun than we would be in the winter.
It's why the days are longer here. in the summertime and also because the sun is high in the sky at noon, so we're getting the full blast of that heat.
Okay, so it's the tilt, not the orbit. Right, we've all been told, some of us have still been told, you're more likely to catch a cold going out with wet air.
Yeah, absolutely. Another one that my granny would have said to me going out in the morning. And I think on a day like today, everyone's probably delighted to go out with wet hair because the evaporation might help cool you down on a warm day. There's no truth to the myth that going out with wet hair will, well, maybe partially no truth. Going out with wet hair will give you the common cold. The common cold is caused by a coronavirus.
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