Our man in the Myth Mausoleum

He is no rock star, not even of the celebrity caliber of those under "voluntary home arrest" in the Pinoy Big Brother series. Nor is he one of those walking refrigerators to whom people want to attach their own magnets of political causes to flaunt. His name is Gambit. He is tanned, in his late 40s, wears flip-flops, faded jeans, non-designer eyeglasses, and disheveled hair. You just get the coordinates of the man he is from the sense of humor mapped out on his wrinkled T-shirt: an arrow pointing upward to his north head labeled "The Man" and an arrow pointing south captioned "The Legend." His voice is deep and he talks in careful measure, managing mischievous laughs at intervals, but even then, never straying from the paths of his good mind. He is in a café talking to fellow cafégoers. He has read about these cafés sprouting in cities around the world where scientists go to cafés and talk about their ideas before curious cafégoers – ideas that always have something to do with the discovery of even just a minute aspect of Nature. He says Café Scientifique, as these cafés have been called in a New York Times article by Mindy Sink last Feb. 21, just don’t quite cut it in a cultural setting like ours. He says that scientists in places like ours should not just give tours of the latest scientific discoveries but also be tour guides in the mausoleum of "myths" in the sense of myths being only partially true, have long been resting in peace or those that just had been freshly buried and replaced by new basis in fact. So he asks the others to imagine following him today in the winding path as he points out these "myths" underneath the R.I.P.’s of science.

"When I wake up, I go down and I make sure I turn off my fluorescent lights," Gambit says. Each time he does, he says he also turns off the lights in the dome of a myth that a lot of Filipinos carry about who invented the fluorescent bulb. Just because Agapito Flores is named "Flores" does not make him the likelier fellow to have invented the "fluores-cent" bulb. Science is not a game of "sounds like" (thank goodness!) nor is it a cinematic political play that features an underdog scientist who failed to get credit for his work because he was not from the West. Save for Internet hearsay buzzed in chain by a majority of folk who cannot judge data for themselves, NO ounce of evidence suggests that Agapito Flores invented the fluorescent bulb. The theory about fluorescence and phosphorescence was already set by a French physicist named Alexandre Becquerel 40 years before Flores was even born! Records bear that Flores was born in 1897 and became an electrician, but unless he invented it and filed a patent for the first fluorescent bulb prototype when he was only three years old in 1901 when the patent for the prototype of it was approved in that same year, the credit goes to the name in the US Patent Office in the name of Peter Cooper Hewitt (1861 to 1921) as well as to the 1927 patent shared by Edmund Germer with Friedrich Meyer and Hans Spanner for an "improved experimental fluorescent lamp."

Gambit then points out to the breakfast he and the others in the café just had. "Take, for instance, this breakfast we are now having that consists of rice, boneless milkfish, and eggs. My grandma has always insisted that breakfast is the most important part of the day and she also says that you burn more calories during the day than at night." Gambit continues by saying that July last year, Anahad O’Connor of the New York Times sought experts on this and the verdict was that "a calorie at noon is no different from a calorie at night" and that "at the end of the day, the calories you take in must equal the calories you expend." This is nothing new if you know the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which essentially says that the same energy you say hello to should be the same amount you bid goodbye to. But what do we make of the "after 6 diet"? Science has not so much buried this myth as much as it has performed an autopsy on it and found the real culprit: eating habits. If you do not eat enough during the day at the right pace to match the energy that your entire day’s activities require, you are more likely to binge and overeat at times or worse, eat the wrong foods such as junk food. This does not violate the law of physics mentioned because if you cause food (ergo, energy) traffic because they do not have anywhere to go (activity that requires energy), the likelier it is that you will have them all stuck somewhere and bulging.

Next R.I.P. myth he points to is quite fresh: "Calcium prevents osteoporosis and colorectal cancer." Hopes were broken and calcium supplement prescriptions that fueled a $993-million industry in 2004 were probably shelved forever when the results of an $18-million, seven-year study of over 36,000 women under the federally funded US Women’s Health Initiative were released last February. At best, the study found that calcium strengthens the hip bones of a group of menopausal women over 60 but found that women aged below this do not significantly benefit from it in terms of foiling bone fractures and certain cancers, but, in fact, increases their risk of developing kidney stones. Gambit also told the ladies in the café that the calcium they are getting from their regular diet is most likely already in sufficient amounts and that if they took more calcium now, it is very unlikely that it will give them an edge in terms of bone strength.

Gambit moves on by reading a joke from his cellphone. He says he gets a joke daily by SMS at 9 a.m. from an old friend. He points out to a myth that says "if you laugh too much now, you will surely cry later." Gambit says he likes jokes and goes to see comedy films. Early this year in the University of Maryland, they had an experiment where they measured the bloodflow of two groups of people, one after watching the comedy film There’s Something About Mary and the other, after the serious Saving Private Ryan. It turns out that the bloodflow in the comedy group could be likened to a free-flowing Mardi Gras parade while the circulation in the group who watched the "sad" movie was like a slow-moving funeral procession caught in Makati at 5 p.m. on a Monday. So if you laugh more, it is likely that you will have a longer use for your heart other than for bouts with sorrow.

Gambit takes a sip of his coffee and he and the rest all hear bits and pieces of  Lupang Hinirang from somewhere. He uses this to point us to another myth that "we only hear tunes with our ears." Scientists at Dartmouth College last year pointed out that this myth does not apply to familiar tunes because our brain "hears" them, making us "hear" the song as seen in our continuing activity of brain waves in the auditory cortex even when parts of the familiar song is muted. Gambit says this is probably how an already familiar song gets to even be reinforced in our memory.

There are pasta sets are on display for customers at the counter when Gambit notices them and says that in late 2005, an archaeological find in Lajia, China, by scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, has finally settled the dispute on who first invented noodles. The archaeological race to gain the historical credit for this was among the Chinese, the Italians and the Arabs. The result: move over century egg, welcome four-millennium-old noodles! Yes, the 4,000-year-old, 50-centimeter long noodle was luckily trapped in time by a vacuum between its vessel and a layer of sediment. Gives new meaning to the cheer "long life in noodles!" 

Gambit notes that he is getting sleepy even with doses of coffee all day at this Myth Mausoleum. This is especially true between 3 and 4 in the afternoon when our inner clocks, our circadian rhythms, are "softest" so that most people who die, die during these hours. Someone in his 70s tells Gambit that "older people seem to need less sleep." Gambit takes the chance to gently point out that that is another myth. What scientific studies have shown is that it is the kind of sleep that they have that changes, which means they do not get enough sleep at night of the kind that restores energy, making them sleepy during the day. This inability to get a good night’s rest is most likely caused by the chronic pains and illnesses, probably even anxieties brought on by aging. But the need for sleep does not diminish as one ages. Furthermore, you can probably address this problem with exercise regardless of how old you start putting this wisdom to work in the treadmill. Studies in The Journal of Aging and Health released last month found out that even if you are 66 to 96 years old, you can still benefit from exercise even at that age, compared to those who do not. And exercise could even slow the advance of Alzheimer’s.

Gambit gets tired and signals the rest that he has to go. He says he may come back to us from time to time to give us tours of other parts of the Myth Mausoleum if people would care for it. But all the young women come up to him to ask him questions and he notices one who has one good question about a myth that says that only humans use tools. She says, "Hidden cameras in the jungle recently revealed that not only do chimps use tools, they have, like men who love Home Depot, have tool kits to hunt for termites!" Gambit thinks she is up to something more with this chimp analogy and is intrigued to know her more. Who ever said that science is not for lovers? Sheesh, talk about myths. 

(Note: Gambit is a myth. I invented him but the science he used to bury the myths is very real.)

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