10 Things We Learnt In July, 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 July!

1: The tripod fish: A deep see fish that rests on stilts while hunting.

2: Coral sand: The sand found on most beaches comes from the erosion of rocks, but tropical beaches are different. The majority of the sand on these beaches is made up of ground-up coral skeleton. Parrotfish bite chunks out of the coral, grind it up with their specialized teeth and excrete it as a fine sand.

3: The Diderot effect: The phenomenon in which acquiring new possessions leads to a chain reaction of buying more and more things. It is named after French philosopher Denis Diderot’s essay titled ‘Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown, or, A warning to those who have more taste than fortune’. Diderot describes how he was gifted a beautiful scarlet dressing gown. Such was its elegance that his other possessions seemed cheap and gaudy by comparison, so he bought costly replacements that put him into debt. Diderot bemoans: ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing gown, but I have become a slave to my new one…’

4: The Escalator of Denial: A graph depicting anomalous temperature data from Berkeley Earth, showing how short-term random variation can distract from long-term trends. It isn’t hard to cherry-pick 5-10 year time spans in which no significant warming occurs, but looking at data spanning 50 years tells a very different story.

5: The windshield phenomenon: The observation that the number of dead insects on car windshields has decreased significantly since the year 2000, a decline attributed to the use of pesticides. Though mostly anecdotal, a few scientific studies do support the idea that insect impacts on cars have greatly decreased.

6: The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: Suppose Achilles races against a tortoise. Achilles is faster, but the tortoise has a headstart of 100 metres. By the time Achilles has run 100 metres, the tortoise will have moved some distance. By the time Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise will have moved again to be slightly ahead, and so on. Zeno, the ancient Greek creator of this paradox, proposed that this meant that a quick runner can never overtake a slower runner. While obviously incorrect and disprovable in practice, ancient Greek philosophers argued about Zeno’s paradoxes and modern mathematics was required to provide a theoretical disproval.

7: Ramesses II’s ‘passport’: There is a common claim that when the 3000 year-old mummy of pharaoh Ramesses II was transported to Paris for restoration, he had to be issued a passport because it was required by French law. This claim is usually accompanied by an out-of-context artist’s rendition of Ramesses II’s supposed passport. However, there’s no credible source for this claim, and France does not in fact require corpses to present passports. The myth might have originated from a report in French in which the term ‘passeport’ was used in quotations to refer to the complex documentation involved.

8: The worst sporting disaster in history is believed to have occurred 2000 years ago in Fidenae near Rome, when a wooden amphitheatre hosting a gladiator contest collapsed. The amphitheatre was reportedly poorly constructed and possibly also overcrowded. The accounts of Roman historians state that 50,000 people were killed or seriously injured, which included people in the shops lining the outside of the structure. The disaster was blamed on the stadium’s constructor, an unscrupulous entrepreneur named Atilius who ordered his workers to cut corners to limit expenses. He was later exiled as punishment.

9: Crime drop: Aside from a transient increase between the 60s and 80s, crime rates have progressively fallen throughout most of the world, and there is no universally accepted explanation for this phenomenon. While many proposals have been put forward, most of these proposals are country-specific and do not explain why crime rates appear to be falling globally.

10: Larry Silverstein, owner of the original World Trade Centre complex, sought to collect double the insurance value of $3.55 billion after the 11th of September attacks. He argued that two separate planes striking two separate buildings constituted two separate ‘occurrences’ within the terms of the insurance contracts. This led to a multi-year legal battle over the interpretation of the term ‘occurrence’. Courts eventually ruled that only some of the insurers were liable for two payouts, and insurers ended up paying $4.55 billion in total.