The Reality Check Episode 17

Zombies+Crime Stats+Moon Illusion

Part 1:

The zombies that they will be talking about isn't the zombies we see in movies, they are just people with some disease and come running at you scary like. 

Is it possible for these kind of rage virus to get released? The kind of virus is that when infected, they will go into a rage and just run around and try to infect other people. These facilities have many kinds of security, there are many many doors that disinfect everything that goes in and comes out. It is very unlikely that anything would get out. 

Is it possible to even have a virus that when infected cause us to behave like zombies? Given examples like rabies, so it is possible to have a more extreme version of a virus. Rabies only infect animals, and they do make them go crazy and starts attacking other creatures. There are stories where they are trying to kill a rabbit, and when they cornered it, it starts attacking them. The people of course can't be harmed, and they started trying to kill the rabbit with sticks. They beat the rabbit for around half and hour before the rabbit died, it just wouldn't give up until it's dead. That's an example of rabies. It does remind a lot of people of zombie attacks, because zombies just don't "die". 

In humans, it's another story. From what we know, it doesn't seem to affect humans like how it affects other mammals. When humans get bitten by a mammal with rabies, at first it just seem like a bite. The virus will get into our bloodstreams and make us really sick with many different kind of symptoms. In the end, instead of turning into zombies or crazy people, we just die, painfully.  

There are some parasite that can affect the creature's thinking and behavior once it gets inside the creature. There's this one type that infects crickets only and gets them to just jump into water and drown. It somehow tricks it's host and makes it think it's thirsty or something, and then when the host drowns, they come out and eat the host. 

Part 2:

We hear about people talking everyday about how bad our society is, how people are getting robbed and hurt. But is this just the media effecting us? Or do we really need to worry about these problems? 

Basically, from 1997 to 2007, the crime rate did rise until around the year 2000, then it has been declining ever since. Crime rates are actually decreasing greatly in metropolitan areas. Homicides has also been decreasing a lot since the year 2000. 

Breaking and Entering however, have been increasing during the holiday seasons. 

So basically, crime rate is decreasing in general.

Science Myth of the Week: 

Moon Illusions. How come the moon looks bigger when it's closer to the horizon than it is on the top of our heads? There have been many moon illusions and made people think it's closer, or just a UFO. 

The fact is actually that the moon is always the same distance away from us, even though it does move away from the Earth 3cm every century. 

If the moon is bigger, we would assume that it is closer. But using computers to test these out, the moon is actually bigger when it's on the top of our heads than the moon that's close to the horizon. When you have to look at the moon across the horizon, you have to look across a bit of the Earth, and the atmosphere curve the lights and make the moon look bigger. Another thing might be the relative size. When you look at the moon when it's close to the horizon, you have many things around it to compare the size, that's why it looks bigger. When the moon is up over our heads, it's only surrounded by a mass space of darkness and stars, that's why it looks smaller.