10 Things We Learnt In June, 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 June!

1: Sailor’s eyeball: Believe it or not, this grape-like object is a single celled organism. Valonia ventricosa, also known as sailor’s eyeball, can be up to 5cm in diameter. It has a coenocytic structure, meaning it is a single cell with multiple cell nuclei (where the DNA is stored). Its green colour comes from chloroplasts, and the colour can be darker depending on the number of chloroplasts present.

2: Prototaxites: A genus of fungi (or possibly an extinct kingdom related to fungi) that existed 400 million years ago. Made up of thousands of interwoven tubules, prototaxites could grow in trunk-like structures up to 3 metres wide and 8 metres tall, making them the largest organisms on land at the time.

3: These images show the change in the colour of vegetation in France over less than a month, viewed from space.

4: Clustering illusion bias: Look at the distribution of points below and try to figure out if they are randomly distributed or not. It is not hard to see a pattern, with most points clustering in triangles to the left, right and bottom, separated by three empty zones. In reality the distribution is completely random, but humans have evolved to detect patterns, and tend to greatly underestimate the likelihood of ‘coincidences’ occurring within random data. This is the clustering illusion bias. Examples of where this bias can be a problem include science of course, but also in market data, where investors may think they see trends where none exist, and the London air raids during WWII, in which Londoners were convinced that German V2 rocket impacts had a pattern. Later analysis showed the distribution of impacts to be random.

5: HMS Zubian: During the First World War, the British destroyer HMS Zulu had her stern blown off by a mine, but the rest of the ship remained afloat. Also during the war, another destroyer called HMS Nubian lost her prow to a German torpedo. Rather than scrap either ship, the British navy joined the front part of the Zulu with the back part of the Nubian to create a new ship, HMS Zubian. Despite the ships being slightly different widths, this Frankensteinian operation was a success and the Zubian continued to participate in the war, even sinking a German U-boat in 1918.

6: No Italian prime minister since Mussolini has succeeded in lasting throughout a full term of government. Since Mussolini, the majority of Italian prime ministers have lasted fewer than 2 years in office.

7: Here’s what an exploding atomic bomb looks like less than 1 millisecond after detonation. This photograph comes from the Tumbler-Snapper test series in Nevada in 1952 and shows the explosion when the fireball is about 20 metres in diameter. The odd-looking spikes coming out of the bottom of the fireball (a phenomenon known as the rope trick effect) are caused by the vaporisation of the tensioning cables supporting the tower on which the bomb was placed. The cause of the ‘mottled’ appearance of the fireball itself is more complex and is related to the vaporised material from the bomb casing and ‘shot cab’ being unevenly distributed.

8: Within the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, fungi may have evolved radiosynthesis – the ability to derive nutrients from radiation, much like other organisms gain nutrients from sunlight through photosynthesis. Cladosporium sphaerospermum grows better when exposed to radiation while apparently being immune to its harmful effects. The key to this may be its high melanin content, which gives the fungus its dark appearance and allows most radiation to be absorbed. However, scientists have not yet been able to prove that C.sphaerospermum is using radiosynthesis, or even how exactly it would work.

9: This is what chalk dust looks like under an electron microscope. What you are seeing are coccoliths – overlapping scales of calcium carbonate, produced by single-celled phytoplankton called coccolithophores to form a protective shell.

10: Subterranean networks of fungi help to sustain plant life by delivering nutrients and water in exchange for the carbon. Recently, a study attempted to calculate how far these fungal networks would reach if they were stretched out end to end. The answer? About 110 quadrillion kilometres (110 followed by another 15 zeros), which is roughly 750 million times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, 400,000 times the diameter of the Solar system, or half the distance between Earth and the centre of the Milky way.