10 Things We Learnt In February, 2025

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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 February!

1: These incredible paper sculptures by Li Hongbo:

2: SoftRAM: A piece of software released in the mid 1990s that claimed to double the effective random access memory of Windows machines. In reality, SoftRAM did nothing of the sort, merely displaying a window indicating the supposed RAM quantity in the hope that users would imagine a performance boost. It has been described as an example of ‘placebo software’.

3: The Atlas moth: An Asian moth that disguises itself as snakes!

4: If tiger stripes evolved as a form of camouflage, why did tigers also evolve to be orange? Wouldn’t that make them stand out more? As it happens, no! Most animals predated by tigers are dichromats – they cannot distinguish between reds and greens. To them, a tiger would look something like this:

5: Stated preferences vs revealed preferences: A way of thinking about how people make choices, developed mainly as a way to analyse consumer behaviour, but that can be applied more broadly. Stated preferences refer to what individuals claim they prefer, while revealed preferences are what their actions imply they actually prefer. For example, surveys report that many people stongly support environmental conservation and are prepared to make lifestyle changes to protect the environment. However, the observed engagement in said lifestyle changes is far lower. A significant problem with revealed preference theory is that it assumes that individuals are both rational and consistent in their decision-making.

6: Pele’s hair: A fibrous, volcanic glass named after the Hawaiian godess of volcanoes and creator of Hawaiian islands, Pele.

7: Lake Karachay: The most radioactive lake in the World. This small lake in the southern Ural mountains in Russia was used as a dumping ground for radioactive waste during the Soviet Union era. It was estimated that just standing near the shore would expose you to a lethal dose of radiation in just 50 minutes. The lake began to be filled and concreted over during the mid 90s and the project was completed in 2015.

8: This is the first ever intercontinental weapon: the Fu-Go balloon bomb. Thousands were launched by Japan towards the U.S during the Second World War, carried across the Pacific by the jet stream. The bombs were ultimately a failure, as their intended purpose – to start forest fires – was thwarted by damp conditions. U.S newspapers were also ordered not to publish stories about the bombs, so the Japanese had no way of assessing their effectiveness and stopped the project. The bombs are nevertheless responsible for the only U.S civilian deaths during the war when a reverend, his wife and four Sunday school students were killed inspecting an unexploded bomb.

9: Gavrilo Princip, credited as the catalyst for the First World War by assassinating Franz Ferdinand, did not feel responsible for the conflict. He believed that the war would have broken out even had the assassination not taken place.

10: The terrifying anglerfish is actually pretty small – most species are only 2-18 cm long, with the largest being about a meter long.