- Asked about sleep, Beakman calls on Rip Van Winkle for help. After noting that during sleep, muscles relax and the heart rate and breathing both slow down, Rip describes the four stages of sleep. The first, lasting about ten minutes, is very light with enough awareness to even answer questions. The second stage, lasting approximately half an hour, is characterized by a lack of awareness of the surroundings and scattered thoughts. Stage three brings on total relaxation of the muscles and can include some tossing and turning for ten to twenty minutes. Stage four, or delta sleep, is the deepest state of all and lasts about twenty minutes. When Liza points out that these fall way short of a full night, Beakman explains that the remainder is generally spent in REM sleep (for Rapid Eye Movement), drifting between stages and characterized by dreams. During "Beakmania," Beakman reveals that chewing gum does not take seven years to digest; that zebras are black with white stripes; and that a dense fog fifty feet deep and covering a hundred square miles contains only about three gallons of water. For the "Beakman Challenge," Lester is asked to make one jar disappear by placing it inside of another. When he cannot do it, Beakman shows how, by filling the larger jar with a dense fluid like glycerine, the light rays travelling through the pair of jars are not refracted as much, making the inner jar seem invisible. Asked why some noises are louder than others, Professor Boring explains that it is because of amplification ?? "the process of increasing the magnitude of a variable quality without changing any other quality." Using the Boguscope, Beakman shows how sound energy travels in waves created by the vibration of material objects. As an example, he uses the vibration of vocal chords disturbing the air around them.
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