10 Things We Learnt In May, 2026

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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 May!

1: Are you ready to unlock a new fear? Meet Eunice aphroditois, aka the trap-jaw worm, sand striker or bobbit worm.

2: Iceland was until recently the only country on Earth that was completely free of mosquitoes. That changed last Winter when three mosquitoes of the Culiseta annulata species (one of the few that can survive Winter) were spotted. There is now no mosquito-free country, though there are still no mosquitoes in Antarctica.

3: Tadpoles can occasionally fail to turn into frogs. In the most publicised example, an American bullfrog tadpole named Goliath was found swimming in a pond in Arizona. Bullfrog tadpoles usually metamorphose at around 15cm long, but Goliath continued to grow past this length. He died, still a tadpole, around a year after his discovery.

4: Orphaned Negative: A word with a negative prefix or suffix that would imply a positive version of the word, but for which said positive version doesn’t exist. For example, you can be dishevelled but not shevelled, nonchalant but not chalant, and reckless but not reckful. This sometimes occurs when words are imported from other languages, leaving behind their positive variant. For example, dishevelled originates from the French words chevelé (hairy) vs deschevelé (‘disordered hair’).

5: There are only two surviving authentic ‘skull and crossbones’ pirate flags, aka Jolly Rogers. The flag on the left would originally have had a black background, which indicated that enemies would be guaranteed mercy upon surrender. The red flag signalled that no life would be spared in an attack.

6: John Clarence Woods, the US master sergeant who carried out the Nuremberg executions of top ranking Nazis after the end of World War II, was not a professional hangman. Woods claimed to have experience as an assistant hangman in Texas and Oklahoma – a dubious claim, since the last hanging in either state took place when Woods was only 12 years old. However, when the US army asked for a volunteer hangman, they took Woods at his word and did not verify his experience. The hangings of multiple Nazi leaders were reportedly bungled as a result – possibly on purpose. Based on subsequent comments by Woods, he may have been motivated by desire for revenge, including for the execution of American POWs by the SS in the Malmedy massacre. Woods died just a few years after the Nuremberg executions, in 1950, while changing a light bulb and standing in a pool of water.

7: Red sprite: A type of electrical discharge that occurs in the mesosphere above stormclouds. Because of this, seeing them from the surface of the Earth is extremely rare, with most existing photographs being from aircraft or from space. The red colour comes from the excitation of nitrogen, which results in the emission of red light. This red light is usually mixed with other wavelengths emitted by other gases in the atmosphere, mainly oxygen. However, in the low pressure environment of the mesosphere, excited oxygen atoms rapidly react with other oxygen atoms before they can emit light in a process called quenching, which allows the red emissions of the nitrogen to dominate.

8: The multiple comparisons problem: In 1993, a Swedish study found that the incidence of childhood leukaemia was four times higher among people living within 300 metres of high-voltage power lines, prompting calls for action by the Swedish government. The relationship was statistically significant with a p value of 0.005, meaning a roughly 1 in 200 chance that the observed clustering of leukaemia cases around power lines would have occurred randomly. There was just one problem: the researchers hadn’t set out with the intention to focus on childhood leukaemia. Instead, the researchers examined the data for over 800 different health conditions to see if any of them were correlated with proximity to power lines. While the probability of any given condition randomly clustering around power lines was low, the probability of this occurring for at least one of 800 different conditions was not. This is known as the multiple comparisons problem, and it arises when many statistical analyses are performed on the same dataset. Subsequent studies failed to find any relationship between power lines and childhood leukaemia.

9: ‘Blue lava’ at the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia. The blue colour doesn’t actually come from lava, but rather from gaseous sulfur igniting as it emerges from underground.

10: Single Event Upset: In 1978, Intel discovered that unexplained errors would randomly occur in some of their DRAM (dynamic random access memory). In this DRAM, memory was stored in the form of the capacitor charge, with a discharged capacitor corresponding to a ‘1’ and a charged capacitor corresponding to a ‘0’. However, in some DRAM, 1s would randomly change to 0s. The cause? An old uranium processing plant in Colorado. The plant had been built on the Green river, just upstream of the factory where ceramic casings for Intel’s DRAM would later be manufactured. Tiny amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium made their way into the ceramic casings and would release highly ionising alpha particles. These alpha particles could occasionally liberate electrons in such a way that an empty capacitor became charged, changing a 1 into a 0. This type of error, in which a single particle strikes in just the right way, is called a single-event upset.