How high will a ball bounce?

Question: I've wondered about this since high school. If I were to drop a "superball" type high-bounce ball from the 1,250-foot height of the Empire State Building, what would happen? Would it bounce super high? Shatter? I can't try this, but I'd love to know. — A Baltimore reader

Answer: You can save yourself, oh, about 100 floors ascent because the small lightweight ball would rapidly come into balance between gravity accelerating it downward and air friction retarding its fall, says University of Washington professor of mechanical engineering Colin H. Daly.

In other words, the ball would reach terminal velocity, maxing out at maybe 30-40 mph for the rest of the way down. So you could just as well drop it from the window of your apartment five or six stories up and get the same bounceback, about 30-50 feet. "It would likely survive this without shattering."

For a truly smashing experiment, build a skyscraper in a vacuum somewhere. Now drop the ball from just 1,000 feet up, and without air resistance it will accelerate to 172 mph. Get ready to go pick up the pieces!

Question: How high can IQs get? We know from the Flynn effect that IQ test performances have been improving worldwide by about 3-5 points per decade. So kids are smarter than their moms and dads, and so on. Where will all this take us in 100 years or 1,000?

Answer: There are really two important influences on IQ scores, says neurobiologist William Calvin, author of "A Brief History of the Mind": (1) How many concepts can you mentally juggle at the same time? Multiple-choice questions usually require about six, and some people can do nine or 10. The right kind of training in youth might double that. (2) How long does it take you to understand the question, reach a good decision, and move on?

IQ is more complicated than just those two, but conceivably IQ scores might be doubled without genetic changes between generations. Obviously, only some jobs demand high IQ: Good doctors certainly need it, but most high-end work such as doing science doesn't often require thinking speed. "Most of us can 'sleep' on a problem in a way that physicians cannot."

True, there is no theoretical limit on IQ performances, adds Yale's Robert Sternberg, but these tests just assess memory and analytical skills, not creativity or practicality. "What the world lacks is not IQ but wisdom."

Question: What's the long and the short of the human height-life story?