Going Gaga

There is more to Lady Gaga’s outrageous persona than meets the eye

High heels

Lady Gaga has some pretty uncomfortable- looking shoes in her wardrobe – sensible footwear need not apply. But how high is too high for heels?

Back in 2004, a physicist at the University of Surrey, England, came up with a formula for the maximum height heel you can teeter in without keeling over.

Steady now, it’s h=Q.(12+3s/8) where “h” is the height of the heel, “s” is the shoe size and “Q” covers a range of motivating factors, including about how much you really, really want to wear those expensive, fashionable stilettoes.

Think of a high-heeled shoe as a triangle, and in essence the formula applies Pythagoras’ theorem to see how high the foot can be lifted off the ground. Ouch.

Lupus

Recently on a TV chat show in the US, Lady Gaga confirmed that her family has a history of lupus, or systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). What’s lupus? It’s a type of condition called an “auto-immune” disease because the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues, which become inflamed. Lupus can affect several tissues and organs, including joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, heart and lungs.

Many people with lupus don’t have symptoms all the time, but they may have episodes where the inflammation flares up.

Lupus probably develops through a mixture of a person’s genetics and their environment. So you could inherit a pre-disposition to lupus, but not lupus itself, and then you could develop the symptoms if you encounter a trigger in the environment.

Meat

In September, Lady Gaga caught the media’s attention when she wore a dress apparently made of raw meat to the MTV Video Music Awards.

It’s not a trend that’s likely to catch on, for several practical reasons – even beyond the obvious bad smell.

Raw meat can quickly become infested with maggots, the larvae of flies, which start to hatch out of their eggs in warm temperatures.

That means the garment would soon be wriggling if you didn’t keep it in the fridge.

As if that weren’t off-putting enough, uncooked and uncured meat can also carry potentially dangerous bacteria, such as E coli O157:H7, which can cause serious food poisoning. That’s why we cook meat at high temperatures, to kill off nasty bugs that might be lurking.

Bubbles

Last year during the Fame Ball tour in the US, Lady Gaga emerged wearing an outfit made partly with plastic bubbles. But did you know that as well as being useful for kids’ parties and slightly bonkers onstage fashion, there’s a whole heap of science behind bubbles?

When you make bubbles from a soapy liquid, the soap acts as as a “surfactant” that stabilises the liquid as it forms a sphere, which is the shape that has the smallest possible surface area for a given volume.

Scientists can learn plenty from bubbles. They can be used to tackle mathematical problems, and understanding how bubbles act in liquids can help design better medical devices.

Tea

Tea is one the most popular drinks on the planet. But for a while Lady Gaga made it her own trademark, seldom appearing on the TV without a cuppa in her hand.

Tea is brewed from the dried leaves of a plant called Camellia sinensis, and people have been drinking it for thousands of years.

Depending on how the leaves are processed, the resulting drink is green, black or oolong tea.

Green tea is particularly rich in chemicals called anti-oxidants, including catechins, and a number of scientific studies are looking at how these compounds could help prevent cancer.