10 Things We Learnt In January, 2026

Here at Gowing Life, we are keeping our fun record of everything we learn in 2026, be it longevity-related or something else entirely. Here is a selection of our newly acquired neural connections for the month of January!

1: Did you know that some air-breathing animals like seals and hippos can sleep underwater? This is thanks to an involuntary reflex during sleep that causes them to resurface for a breath every few minutes. Here’s a video of seals doing it:

2: Those of us who have experienced sleep deprivation will be familiar with the lapses in concentration that are all too common after a bad night. But what actually causes these ‘mental shutdowns’? Well, scientists may now have the answer. In this study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers monitored participants’ brains while they took a test after either a normal night’s sleep or a night of sleep deprivation. They found that lapses in attention corresponded to the expulsion of cerebrospinal fluid from the brain – something that usually happens during deep sleep and is thought to help rid the brain of waste products. It seems as though lapses in concentration might be the result of the brain performing essential housekeeping that it missed out on during the night.

3: One of many sculptures by Matthieu Robert-Ortis that change depending on the viewing angle

4: Dazzle camouflage, a camouflage pattern used mainly on ships throughout the 1st and 2nd World Wars. Its main intended purpose wasn’t to conceal, but rather to make it challenging to determine the heading of the ship, thereby making them harder to hit – especially with torpedoes. During WWI, ships with this pattern were around 20% less likely to be sunk compared to other ships, but it’s hard to know if this was thanks to the camouflage, as larger ships were more likely to receive the pattern. During WWII, range-finding technology improved and made the pattern less effective.

5: The Andromeda paradox, a form of the ‘Rietdijk–Putnam argument’ which proposes that if special relativity is applied to all of space and time, then every observer is living in their own unique ‘present’. The Andromeda paradox demonstrates the implications: suppose two people are walking down a street in opposite directions. For the person walking towards the Andromeda galaxy, the events in said galaxy could be days behind the events in Andromeda for the person walking away from it. Thus, a spaceship from Andromeda could be on its way to Earth for one person, while for the other person the decision to send that ship has not even been taken yet, seemingly resulting in a paradox. However, the interpretation of relativity used in this argument is not universally accepted, with critics pointing out that the present is a local concept that cannot be extended to global hyperplanes (and no, I don’t know what that means either).

6: Origin of Poe’s law: Most people know of the ‘law of the internet’ warning that any attempt at sarcasm, even when expressing the most extreme views, will be mistaken by some to be a sincere statement unless the sarcasm is explicitly indicated. It seems to have originated from a 2005 comment by a Christian Forums user named Nathan Poe, originally referring to comments about creationism. Ironically, Poe’s law has since been used as a way to make genuinely extreme statements under the veil of sarcasm. That is to say, you can post anything you like online so long as you end your comment with a winky.

7: Motte and Bailey fallacy: A form of argument that references the Motte and Bailey castle design – a highly defensible (but unpleasant to live in) tower on a hill (the Motte) surrounded by desirable land encompassed by a wall (the Bailey). When the Bailey cannot be defended, inhabitants can retreat to the Motte. The Motte and Bailey fallacy is when a person puts forward an argument with a component that is challenging to defend (the ‘Bailey’) and one that is easy to defend (the ‘Motte’). When challenged on the first component, the arguer can then ‘retreat to the Motte’. When their opponent refuses to attack the ‘Motte’, the defender then attempts to claim that their argument has not been refuted.

8: The term ‘kung fu’ does not refer to martial arts in China. Kung fu (gōngfu) translates approximately to ‘mastery through effort’ and can be used to refer to any skill acquired through hard work and practice. The western meaning of kung fu originated in Chinese martial arts films in which the term was mistranslated/misunderstood. It most likely took hold because it sounded better/was easier to pronounce than the more accurate terms for martial arts such as wǔshù.

9: The name ‘Canada’ originates from a miscommunication between French explorer Jacques Cartier and a pair of indigenous youths. While receiving directions to their village (and present day site of Québec), Cartier repeatedly heard the word ‘kanata’, which in the local language (probably an Iroquoian dialect) simply means ‘village’. However, Cartier thought this word was the name of not only the village, but the entire region controlled by its chief. This lead to the present day St.Lawrence river being dubbed ‘rivière du Canada’, which in turn extended the name ‘Canada’ to refer to all land along its banks, and eventually to the entire country after confederation in 1967.

10: Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal (aka Hurrian Hymn no.6) is the oldest surviving near-complete work of notated music in the world. It is recorded in cuneiform on a collection clay tablets excavated in northern Syria, and dates to approximately 1400 BC.