10 Things We Learnt In November, 2024

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Here at Gowing Life, we are keeping our fun record of everything we learn in 2024, be it longevity-related or something else entirely. Here is a selection of our newly acquired neural connections for the month of November!

1: Antarctica’s Blood Falls: First discovered in 1911, the colour was originally believed to be caused by red algae. However, it is now known to be produced when subglacial brine comes into contact with iron-rich sediments, forming iron-sulphides and iron-oxides (rust) upon contact with the air. The weight of the glacier pressurises the brine and prevents it from freezing despite the sub-zero temperatures.

2: Betteridge’s law of headlines: An adage that states that any headline posing a yes/no question can usually be answered ‘no’, or else the question would not be necessary. For example, if a headline asks ‘Have scientists cured cancer?’, the answer is almost certainly no, or else the headline would be ‘Scientists have cured cancer!’. The equivalent rule for academic papers is called Hinchliffe’s rule, although this rule was disproven in 1988 by a paper titled: ‘Is Hinchliffe’s Rule True?’ The paper is only two sentences long for obvious reasons. Several more serious studies do appear to suggest that when the title of an academic paper is a yes/no question, the answer is actually more likely to be yes.

3: The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty: Historical records of the reigns of Kings of the Korean Joseon dynasty, thought to be the longest continual documentation of a single dynasty ever produced (1392 to 1865). Joseon court historians appear to have been very committed to accurate documentation, as is evident from this entry:

The king himself rode a horse and shot arrows at a deer. However, the horse stumbled, causing him to fall off, but he was not injured. Looking around, he said, “Do not let the historians know about this.”

– The Veritable Records of Taejong, Vol. 7, article 4

4: The Han dynasty, which lasted nearly four centuries and ushered in a golden age of peace and prosperity in China, was founded by a peasant. Liu Bang was born in 256 BC. After becoming a local sheriff, he was tasked with escorting prisoners to a construction site, but some of the prisoners escaped during the journey. Since the penalty for allowing prisoners to escape was death, Liu Bang decided he may as well release the rest of the prisoners and start a rebellion with them. This led to Liu Bang becoming Emperor and founding the Han dynasty.

5: Do you know the difference between the two symbols below? The one on the left stands for Conformité Européenne, and means that a product conforms to European Union regulations, including meeting safety and environmental standards. The one on the right with the letters closer together stands for China Export, and has no legal standing within the EU.

6: Shot towers: Towers designed for the production of lead shot by pouring molten lead through a sieve at the top. The resulting droplets cool into spheres under surface tension as they fall and are caught by a pool of water at the bottom of the tower. Since larger droplets take longer to cool, the taller the tower, the larger the shot it can make.

7: Brains of human corpses can occasionally survive thousands of years without any kind of deliberate preservation. Even though brains are usually among the first organs to decompose, brains can sometimes be found preserved even after all other soft tissues are gone. While hypotheses exist, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how this happens.

8: You may think that with our increased awareness of its environmental impact, our production of plastic might have decreased in recent years. However, it has actually been increasing and still is. It is estimated that over half of the plastic ever produced was produced during the last 15 years.

9: Leaftronics: Scientists have found a way to make circuit boards using leaves. This was done by chemically removing the leaves’ cells, stripping them down to their lignocellulose ‘skeleton’ and filling the skeleton’s holes with a biodegradable polymer. They were then able to solder and print circuits onto the leaves.

10: Contrary to what many people expect, large language models like ChatGPT are terrible at recognising whether something was written by a large language model, being in many cases no better than chance and sometimes worse than chance. In one study, ChatGPT had a roughly 50% chance to classify text generated by LLMs as having been written by humans. GPT-4 on the other hand labelled 95% of human-written texts as being written by LLMs.