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10 Things We Learnt In April, 2024

Posted on 30 April 2024

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Here at Gowing Life, we are keeping our fun record of everything we learn in 2024, be it longevity-related or something else entirely. Here is a selection of our newly acquired neural connections for the month of April!

1: The western fence lizard is a common lizard found primarily in the western U.S and northern Mexico. Known for its beautiful colouration, the lizard also hides a special ability in its blood: a protein that kills the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease. When ticks feed on the lizard’s blood, it clears the infection in the ticks’ gut so that it no longer carries Lyme disease. Consequently, studies have found the incidence of Lyme disease to be lower in areas where the lizards are more common.

Male western fence lizard
By Connor Long – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116642876

2: A reconstructed CT scan of an elephant’s foot. Their feet may look flat, but elephants actually stand on the tips of their toes! A large fat pad and false ‘sixth toe’ support the weight like a high heel.

Reconstructed CT scan of elephant foot.
Sophie Regnault. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/g9646xnk

3: Did you know that some people are missing an entire muscle in each arm? It’s called palmaris longus, and is completely absent in about 14% of people. It helps flex the wrist and increases grip strength in the 4th and 5th fingers. One way to see if you have one is to place your hand on a table with the palm facing upwards. Press your thumb and little finger together and flex the wrist slightly – the palmaris longus tendon should be clearly visible in the centre of the wrist.

4: Why do we have two nostrils? It makes sense for eyes and ears, but why do we need two separate intakes for the olfactory system? It turns out that at any given time, one nostril will always have a higher airflow than the other, and this actually helps us perceive a wider range of smells. Some molecules take longer than others to dissolve in the fluid covering the olfactory receptors, which means they need to stay in the nose for longer to be detectable. Having a low flow nostril and a high flow nostril helps us to detect these smells while still exchanging an adequate volume of air in the lungs.

5: Niccolò Paganini, an Italian violinist and virtuoso who famously finished a piece on just one string after the other three all broke during the performance. It’s sometimes used as an example of exceptional musical talent but often omits a crucial piece of information: Paganini trained to play the violin with only one or two strings. He composed the ‘duetto amoroso’ in which the middle two strings were removed, with the remaining strings representing a male and female voice. He then started composing pieces for a single string. He would sometimes deliberately cut notches in the other strings so that they would break during a performance, allowing him to finish the piece on the last string. An incredible skill, but not an improvisation.

By John Whittle (active in Preston, early 19th century) – Bonhams, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17291768

6: Why do natural rivers never run straight? This video by MinuteEarth explains.

7: City, a massive sculpture by American artist Michael Heizer located in the Nevada desert. City is open for about 80 days per year and only 6 people (determined by lottery) are allowed in per day. You aren’t allowed to drive yourself there and must be transported by people who know the way, and you aren’t allowed to take any pictures or recordings. It’s over a mile long, making it the largest contemporary artwork ever built.

8: Spiders from Mars: The European Space Agency’s Mars explorers have captured images of small, spidery looking dark patches on the surface of Mars. They are formed when sunlight hits layers of frozen carbon dioxide that have formed during the planet’s winter season. This causes CO2 at the bottom of the layers to sublime (transition directly from a solid into a gas). The gas bursts onto the surface as a geyser, dragging up dark material from below.

‘Spiders’ on Mars as seen by ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter
ESA/TGO/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

9: Some bees can survive underwater for up to a week. Scientists discovered that hibernating queens of the common eastern bumblebee had about an 81% chance of survival when submerged in water for 7 days, while those not submerged had an 88% chance of survival. This is unusual among insects and probably allows the bees to survive flooding.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

10: Yellowstone national park is often described as a supervolcano that could erupt explosively at any time, causing catastrophic damage over a massive area. Yet according to geologists monitoring the volcano, this is a bit of a misconception. While Yellowstone has had 3 catastrophic eruptions in its 2.2 million year history, the majority of its eruptions have been lava flows that only affect Yellowstone’s immediate surroundings, and it is much more likely that the next eruption would be of this type. Perhaps most importantly for anxious visitors, Yellowstone is not ‘going to blow at any moment’. While an eruption may be overdue in the sense that it has been longer since the last eruption than between the previous two eruptions, volcanoes ‘don’t work like that’. The magma chambers under Yellowstone are mostly stagnant at the moment, and scientists would know decades and perhaps even centuries in advance if an eruption was brewing.


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