10 Things We Learnt In March, 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 March!

1: Artesian well: A type of well that brings water to the surface without the need for a pump, by drilling into an aquifer. When the aquifer it tapped, water will rise to reach a pressure equilibrium, which can result in water flowing to the surface. Artesian wells are named after the French region of Artois, where monks began constructing them during the 12th century.

2: 1000+ years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, peasants in the south of France were still using land management techniques developed by the Romans. They didn’t know these were Roman methods, and just considered them to be ‘common knowledge’.

3: The V3 cannon: A weapon built underground in northern France by the Germans during World War II, but never completed, that was designed to shell London 24/7. It used a multi-charge design, meaning that the shells would pass along a long barrel and be accelerated to great speed by a series of rocket boosters positioned along the barrel, enabling the gun to fire shells across the channel. It was 130 metres long and would have had a range of 165km.

4: Low-background steel: Did you know that sensitive modern particle detectors like Geiger counters are built with steel salvaged from World War II shipwrecks? Why not use regular steel? All of the nuclear tests carried out after the war made the atmosphere slightly more radioactive. Because steel manufacturing involves blasting the steel with a lot of oxygen, all steel made post WWII is slightly more radioactive than older steel. It’s enough to confound the measurements of some sensitive particle detectors, so the only way to get suitable steel is by salvaging pre-war material. Fortunately, atmospheric radiation has mostly returned to natural levels, so new steel is now good enough for most uses.

5: Pluralistic ignorance: When people mistakenly believe that an opinion they hold is in the minority. For example, studies suggest that over 65% of Americans support climate change mitigation policies, but the vast majority of Americans believe that support for such policies is under 50%.

6: The Logistic Map: A simple yet rather strange equation that models many natural phenomena, from wild population fluctuation to irregular heart beats to water dripping from a tap. What makes this equation strange is that despite being a very simple formula, it is able to model patterns that can be both regular and completely chaotic. Take the example of a dripping tap: as the tap is slowly turned, drips will fall in various regular patterns depending on the flow rate. However, at certain flow rates, the drips will become completely irregular and random, before returning to a regular pattern. This kind of behaviour is seen all throughout nature and is all modeled by the logistic map.

7: Around half of all internet traffic now comes from bots, with over half of those being malicious bots. In some countries, malicious bots represent as much as 70% of internet traffic. Furthermore, it has been estimated that over $70 billion in advertising spending each year is wasted on ‘invalid traffic’, such as bots that click on ads in order to artificially increase earnings.

8: The Left Handed Problem: Ask an AI to generate an image of someone doing something with their left hand, and they will generate an image of someone using their right hand, sometimes confidently claiming they are using their left hand. This is of course because images used to train AI are overwhelmingly of right-handed people. AI developers are very aware of this specific problem and have tried various methods to fix it. So far, they have not succeeded.

9: Two generals’ problem: Imagine there are two allied generals with their armies on either side of a valley. They are planning to attack an enemy castle in the valley, but in order to be successful, it is essential that they attack at the same time. The only way they can communicate with each other is by sending messengers through the valley, but these messengers have a chance of being intercepted. General A could send a message stating they will attack at noon, but if that message is intercepted, general A will attack alone. General A could ask for a confirmation that the message has been received before they attack, but if that confirmation is intercepted, general B will attack alone. While it sounds like there should be some clever way around this problem, there isn’t – no matter how many messengers are sent back and forth, the generals can never be sure that they are both moving to attack at the same time, because one of the generals will always be unsure whether their last message got through. This problem is usually used to demonstrate a similar problem in computing: how can two computers coordinate an action, such as a payment, when data transfer is unreliable? This is why ‘failed payment’ messages shouldn’t always be trusted, and how duplicate purchases can occur if online purchasing systems aren’t well designed, for example.

10: Physicists may have succeeded, for the first time ever, in demonstrating the generation of electricity from rotation of the Earth through its magnetic field. Moving a conductor through a magnetic field generates electricity, but it was previously thought to be impossible to generate electricity from the Earth’s magnetic field because the resulting force gets perfectly ‘cancelled out’ as the electrons in the conductor generate an opposing electrostatic field. However, this experiment seems to have overcome this problem by using a conductor with a very specific shape, composition and orientation to generate a tiny voltage. The findings still need to be confirmed independently and it’s not certain whether it could be scaled up to produce meaningful power.