Here’s a good trivia question to break the ice at parties: “Who was the first person to put two feet on Mt. Everest?” Answer at the end of this post (hint: it wasn’t Sir Edmund Hillary.). Climbing the tallest mountain in the world is one of those feats not for the faint of heart—or for the faint of anything. In fact, you’re very likely to faint in the attempt, what with the air getting progressively thinner the higher you climb. Also, climbers often fall prey to a wide array of other effects such as hypoxia, muscle loss, sleep apnea, and more. It turns out, these effects are also found in patients with chronic heart problems and other medical disorders. (Makes the ascent that much more appealing, doesn’t it?) So much does climbing Everest mimic these other problems that researchers from the Mayo Clinic are heading out to the Himalayas to study a team of climbers. Says Discover:

The team will gather data on the mountaineers’ heart rate, oxygen levels, and sleep quality, as well as taking samples of their blood and urine. Among the questions the scientists will investigate are whether muscle loss, common in heart disease patients and the elderly, is related to lack of oxygen, especially during sleep, and why fluid gathers in the lungs of both some high-altitude climbers and some heart failure patients. They’ll also test out a new heartrate monitor device embedded in the climbers’ clothes—and, if it works well, perhaps in the clothes of patients someday soon.

So, back to the trivia question I posed earlier. Who was the first person to put two feet on Mount Everest? It’s actually a trick question. It wasn’t Sir Edmund Hillary, but—and I am not making this up—Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, who was the first to accurately measure the height of Mount Everest. After several years of observations and data analysis, the number he came up with, in 1856, was 29,000 feet exactly. However, he felt that the public would think he was just giving them a rounded estimate and not the “real” number—so he arbitrarily added two feet to the calculation, making the height of Mount Everest a seemingly more plausible 29,002 feet. Its current height has been further refined to 29,029 feet—so high that you would have to pile more than 29,000 rulers to equal the height of the tallest mountain in the world. By the way, the Tibetan name for the mountain is Chomolungma, and it was Waugh who, in 1865, officially named the mountain after his predecessor as Surveyor General, George Everest, who actually protested the idea. Another little bit of trivia is that George Everest pronounced his name with a long e, “EE-verest.” (h/t Stephen Fry on the British quiz show QI.)