10 Things We Learnt In August, 2025

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Here at Gowing Life, we are keeping our fun record of everything we learn in 2025, be it longevity-related or something else entirely. Here is a selection of our newly acquired neural connections for the month of August!

1: Eriovixia gryffindori: A spider discovered in Karnataka, India in 2015. For its resemblance to the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, it was named after Godric Gryffindor, the hat’s original owner.

2: Gyotaku: The Japanese art of fish printing, originally conceived as a way for fishermen to document and prove the size of their catches.

3: The first Aztec cities marked the beginning of the civilization during the 14th century, making Oxford older than the Aztecs. By contrast, the first Mayan cities developed around 750 BC, around the time that Rome was founded. Though they suffered a collapse in the 9th century, the same Mayan civilization endured until the Spanish arrived in Mesoamerica, ending both the Aztec and Mayan civilisations during the 16th-17th centuries.

4: The garbage can model of organisation presents the idea that most organisations are ‘garbage cans’ in which problems and solutions are dumped together and in which decisions are often not made in rational ways, but occur to justify their own existence. In the words of the coining paper:

[…] such organisations can be viewed […] as collections of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision makers looking for work.

5: Around 75% of aluminium ever produced is still in use today. Over 70% of aluminium production from ore has occurred since the year 2000.

6: The Ammassalik wooden maps: A set of carved wooden maps of the islands and coastlines of Greenland, made by a native Inuit named Kunit who sold them to Danish explorer Gustav Holm in 1885.

7: You may recall that the Richter scale is logarithmic – a magnitude 2 earthquake is 10 times stronger than a magnitude 1 earthquake, and so on. This means that there can also be negative magnitudes – a magnitude -1 earthquake simply means 100 times weaker than a magnitude 1 earthquake. As a very approximate analogy, footsteps might have a magnitude of around -4. A falling grain of sand would cause a magnitude -9 ‘earthquake’.

8: Isaac Newton began formulating the laws of motion, laws of universal gravitation, invented integral and differential calculus, and discovered the laws of optics all before the age of 26. Most of this happened when he was 23 while Cambridge University was closed due to the plague, a period known as his ‘annus mirabilis’ (year of miracles). And yes, the famous apple is said to have fallen during that year.

9: Playing video games might make you a better surgeon. A study found that surgeons performing laparoscopic surgery made 37% fewer errors and were 27% faster if they played video games for at least 3 hours per week compared to their non-gaming colleagues. Not only that, but higher gaming skill correlated with better surgical performance.

10: Research suggests that just seeing someone showing signs of illness might be enough to activate the immune system. A study had participants wear VR headsets to simulate being approached by people showing signs of infection. Not only did this result in activation of brain regions related to dealing with threat, but it even mobilised immune cell types that act as early responders to infection.