On April 12, 1961 Russia made history by sending Yuri Gagarin into space in Vostok 1, having him orbit the Earth once, and then successfully land back on Earth. At least that was the official story at the time. In reality, he parachuted from his capsule at a height of 7 km above the Earth, successfully landing ten minutes after the capsule automatically touched down. Since most skydiving happens in the 1-1.5 km range, this jump is noteworthy in itself. Yet while this is a remarkable feat of parachuting and deception (the truth about the flight was hidden for many years), the world record is more than 4 times higher and was set eight months earlier.

In the 1950s, the United States Air Force was developing more advanced jet engines and the beginnings of the Space Race were afoot. Not wanting to lose astronauts or test pilots due to malfunctions, they sought to find a safe way for them to escape and return to Earth. This lead to the creation of Project Excelsior in 1958, lead by Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. as test director. Under this project, Mr. Francis Beaupre designed a parachuting system that would first stabilize descent and then slow it, all being automatically deployed at the appropriate heights. With a general lack of funding, the tests would take place out of a balloon gondola like the one pictured above, the words “This is the highest step in the world” written on the plaque.

On November 16, 1959 Captain Kittinger ascended to just over 22 km and got ready to jump. His seat contained water bottles encased in styrofoam as a cheap way to maintain his body temperature during the ascent, but they froze on the way up and expanded, holding his instrumentation kit to the seat. It took him eleven seconds to get up and during this time he accidentally triggered the timer for the stabilization chute, before he even left the gondola. When he began to descend it deployed after 2.5 seconds after he left instead of the intended 16, accidentally wrapping the main parachute around his neck in the process. He started to spin uncontrollably and eventually lost consciousness. Unable to do anything he plummeted toward Earth and at 1.8 km his reserve shoot successfully deployed, saving Kittinger’s life.

The second jump was less than a month later on December 11, 1959. The main purpose was to work out the kinks found in the first jump, such as repositioning the water bottles and adding in safeguards to prevent another accidental start of the timer. Captain Kittinger bailed from the gondola at just under 22 km and landed without incident twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds later. This data was used to set up a third jump from more than 30 km.

The third and final jump happened on August 16, 1960 from a height of 31.3 km. It took one hour and forty-three minutes for the ascent. Once he left the gondola, he quickly fell back to Earth (footage can be seen here, set to “Dayvan Cowboy” by Boards of Canada). It took only four minutes and thirty-six seconds to plummet 26 km with only his stabilization chute deployed; it would take another nine minutes and nine seconds before he travelled the last 5.3 km with his main parachute deployed. This remains the only human space jump from more than 30 km.

Today’s Tangent: Joseph Kittinger isn’t finished setting records though. In 2005, Red Bull created Red Bull Stratos, a project designed to break Kittinger’s record from 1960 by going to 36.5 km. It wasn’t until 2008 that Kittinger joined as an advisor, and since then the test pilot, Felix Baumgartner, has made several test runs up to 29.5 km. They’re scheduled to meet their goal in the first half of October 2012.

When it comes to survival of the fittest, humans have effectively stepped out of the food chain and have the technology to dine on anything. We’re able to take down any predator and have the science to combat almost any disease, making us effectively safe from any external threat. But when it comes to trying to keep our species alive, our biggest biological threat might not come from another species, but from a battle of the sexes. There’s some evidence that men might go extinct.

Gender in humans is based on our X and Y chromosomes; women have two X chromosomes while men have one X and one Y. This Y chromosome is critical in men because it controls all the male aspects required for reproduction: the development of testicles and sperm, and it can only be given by a father to his sons. Without the Y chromosome to carry this genetic information, our species would lose its male population, and with it the ability to reproduce. Unfortunately, some scientists think that could happen due to many causes, such as high mutation rate, inefficient selection, and genetic drift.

Going back about 300 million years, the X and Y chromosomes each had the same number of genes at 1438. Today the Y chromosome has only 45 (you can see their size difference in the picture above, courtesy of Exit Mundi). If we model this as two points on a line, the Y chromosome will lose its last gene in roughly 10 million years. It could even happen faster given that the Y chromosome doesn’t always select the best and “fittest” specimen to continue. In fact, roughly 1 in 2000 men will be rendered infertile by defects in the Y chromosome. Why is this troubling? The only way for a man to get their Y chromosome is from their father, meaning that all of those men with defective Y chromosomes didn’t inherit it – they became infertile during their lifetime.

Of course, it might not be as bad as once thought. By looking at the divergence of chimpanzees and humans which occurred roughly 6 million years ago, scientists have found that the Y chromosome lost none of its genes during that time, meaning that it must have lost them before and slowed its loss to a stand still by now. Going back further to when humans and chimpanzees diverged from rhesus macaque 25 millions years ago, we find that only one gene was lost over that time. While all this means it’s not a gradual decay, it still raises the question: what happened to Y in the first place, and can it happen again?

Today’s Tangent: When it comes to Adalia bipunctata, a.k.a. the two-spotted ladybug, some populations are heavily female dominated, outnumbering males 4:1. But it isn’t because of genetic mutations: here bacteria actually kill off males when they’re in eggs. Why? Since the bacteria can only exist in the female reproductive cells (it’s too big to live in the male’s sperm), it would die in a male without being passed onto the offspring. Instead, it kills the male eggs so that the females have more food, giving them a better chance of survival and thus allowing the bacteria to infect the next generation.

As it stands today, Canada only has 5 bills being issued: $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. In the past though there were a lot more, not only because the $1 and $2 bills were replaced with coins. But to tell this story, we have to start before Canada was even a country, back at the War of 1812.

The first money printed in Canada that were denominated in dollars were Army Bills, made to help finance the war effort during the War of 1812. The public was distrustful of paper money at the time, but when the British Government redeemed the money at its face value, the public began to trust the currency and not just precious metals. This lead to more paper money being produced by banks throughout the 1821 to confederation in 1867. Due to each bank being able to produce money, a wide variety of bills were created including $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $10, $20, $25, $40, $50, $100, $500, and $1000.

In 1867, confederation occurred and the Dominion of Canada was created, spurring the design for one currency across the nation. The Province of Canada was the most prolific issuer of paper money before confederation, so its currency became the national currency. In 1870, the first Dominion of Canada bills were issued in 25¢ (nicknamed the shinplaster and seen above), $1, $2, $500, and $1000 denominations, with $50 and $100 notes being added in 1872. With the bulk of the currency in $1 and $2 bills, a $4 denomination was added in 1882 followed by the $5 bill in 1912. The 25¢ bill was last issued in 1923.

During this time period, individual banks still issued their own currency. The Bank Act of 1871 prohibited the issuing of anything less than $4 from these banks and raised this to $5 in 1880. This left all the lower denominations to the Dominion of Canada to print, which is why there was such demand for their $1 and $2 bills. To not be completely removed from this market, other banks started printing unusual denominations such as the $6 and $7 bills from Molsons Bank in 1871. These bills, when combined with the $5 they were already printing, would allow people to pay $2 by giving $7 and receiving $5 change (and similarly $1 with the $6 bill).

In 1934, the Bank of Canada was founded and began issuing $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $25, $50, $100, $500, and $1000 bills in 1935. After ten years, the Bank of Canada became the only bank that could issue money, which is unchanged to this day. Unique to this first run of bills was the purple $25 in honour of King George V’s Silver Jubilee and the $500 bill (only 46 of which are still unaccounted for). Unfortunately, all of these bank notes were printed separately in both English and French and changes in legislation in 1937 required that the bills be bilingual, prompting a new series of bank notes to be printed.

From 1938 to 1979 there were two more series of notes issued, one in 1954 and the other from 1969 to 1979. These bills had the same denominations as the 1937 series but the artwork changed and old bills were taken out of circulation as they started to wear out. It wasn’t until the Birds of Canada series was issued in 1986 that the $1 bill was not updated to the new look, followed by the $1 coin being minted on June 30, 1987 and then $1 bill being withdrawn from circulation exactly two years later.

In 1996, the $2 bill was removed from circulation and replaced with the toonie, a $2 coin. It wasn’t until 2000 that the $1000 bill was retired, mainly due its use in money laundering and organized crime. This meant that when the Canadian Journey series was issued from 2001-2006 it only contained five notes: $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. As of 2011, the Frontier Series began being issued which involved Canada’s transition from paper bills to polymer. The series is planned to finish by the end of 2013.

Today’s Tangent: Think the largest denomination in Canada is only $1000? Think again. In 2007, the Canadian Mint issued a 100 kg gold coin with a face value of $1,000,000; the world’s first million dollar coin. At 99999 pure gold, it’s worth more than five million dollars and so far five investors have bought one.

In 1976, Harry McGurk and his research assistant John MacDonald were researching how infants perceive speech as they develop. Some of their experiments involved separating visual and auditory stimuli and seeing how the children learned, such as playing the video of a mother speaking in one area and having the audio play in another. In this same vein they took two phonemes, “ba” and “ga”, and then merged the audio of “ba” with the video of “ga”. And just like a mad science experiment gone wrong, they created a third sound: “da”.

At first McGurk and MacDonald thought there was some audio error at play or technical mixup, but further testing confirmed that they discovered something new. Listening to the audio alone lead the person to hear “ba”, but watching the video with the wrong audio made them hear “da”. This phenomenon is called the McGurk Effect and you can see and hear it in this BBC2 video, pictured above. To really appreciate the effect though, watch this video and then replay it with your eyes closed.

What’s going on? In order to perceive speech, our minds merge both auditory and visual information, overlaying them in an effort to decipher words. When “ba” and “ga” are merged we hear the middle sound of “da”, or as in the BBC2 video, “ba” and “va” become “fa”. Interestingly, people in Japan experience a weaker McGurk Effect than English speakers because the former don’t look at each other as often during conversation. Similarly, people who watch dubbed movies are less susceptible to the McGurk Effect because they’ve trained their brains to dissociate audio and video speech processing. This indicates that the effect is learned instead of something we’re born with.

Today’s Tangent: The McGurk Effect is something that can’t be easily overcome; even those who have researched it for years and understand how it works are still affected by it. In contrast, many optical illusions can be easily flipped between by knowing that there are two options, such as Ruben’s Vase (a vase with two faces surrounding it). More interesting is the Spinning Dancer as the silhouette is seen spinning clockwise twice as often as counter-clockwise, though the animation never changes. The reason? There’s a slight vertical angle and more people imagine looking down at the dancer instead of looking up. In fact, the original animation was taken at a slightly downward angle, making clockwise the true rotation.