'Wrong' species had 'right stuff'

Question: From the early space program, can you name some of the "wrong" species that had the "right stuff"?

Answer: Wrong in that many of these "guinea pigs" died or were sacrificed by scientists to study the effects of weightlessness on living organisms, says New Scientist magazine. In June 1957, Laika was the most famous dog in the world when the Soviet Union launched her into space aboard Sputnik 2, but she faced an equally rapid demise a few hours later when her spacecraft malfunctioned.

Before Laika, note Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs in "Animals in Space," were monkeys carried high into the atmosphere atop obsolete German V-2 flying bombs in 1948; rabbits, rats and mice aboard high-altitude balloons in the early 1950s; and the Russian dogs Tsygan and Dezik that survived a suborbital flight in 1951. NASA's spacefaring chimpanzees Ham and Enos flew on Mercury to help pave the way for humankind.

The first fish, on a 1970s space lab flight, were two mummichog minnows that swam erratically in orbit before becoming oriented but minnows newly hatched on the same flight adapted immediately to the new conditions. Space spiders initially spun too-small webs, finally ones that looked normal except for thinner strands — "either the spiders detected that the same strength of silk was not necessary or they couldn't spin it."

So brave volunteers, no, but certainly heroes of a sort, says "New Scientist," whose stories "deserve a place alongside the human stories of space flight."

Question: When you pinch yourself to be sure you're not just dreaming, how do you know you're not just feeling a dream pinch?

Answer: To test this, dream researcher Stephen LaBerge had lucid dreamers — who become aware they're only dreaming — experiment with three different sensations: pressing themselves on the thumb, caressing their own forearm and pinching themselves. They did these in both the waking and dreaming states. Upshot: The thumb press felt just like a thumb press in either state, says LaBerge in "Conversations on Consciousness," edited by Susan Blackmore.

With the caress, the pleasantness was higher in the dream than while awake, perhaps because in the dream it becomes more a curious mixture of things. The biggest difference was with the pinch, which was much less likely to produce pain in the dream state.