10 Things We Learnt In November, 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 November!

1: Sunfish have among the highest relative growth from birth to adulthood of any animal. They are less than one centimetre long upon hatching but can grow to around 3 metres long and can weigh over 1000kg.

2: The Great Grape Graft: Last month we learnt that as America was being colonised, Europe avoided devastating American diseases because there were simply no plague-causing diseases in the New World (well, at least not until the Europeans arrived…) The same cannot be said for pests, and in the mid-19th century, French wine makers accidentally introduced an American aphid (Phylloxera vasatrix) to their vineyards. These aphids sucked their food from the roots of grape vines, but while the American varieties had evolved to withstand these attacks, the European plants were defenceless. The only solution was to graft European grape vines onto American grape rootstock. To this day, almost all of the world’s wine is grown on American roots.

3: The word ‘loot’ comes from the Hindi word lūṭ, meaning to steal or plunder. It began to be incorporated into the English language from the mid-18th century onward – somewhat ironic considering British activities in India during the same time period.

4: Despite the popularity of the claim, there’s no evidence that the Ancient Greeks deliberately used the golden ratio when constructing the Parthenon. Many of the proportions of the Parthenon do conform closely to the golden ratio, but not everyone agrees that it was built with the understanding of a special ratio. A less discussed fact about the Parthenon is that it contains no straight lines – the base is slightly convex and the columns curve subtly outwards, instead of running parallel to each other. This makes them appear parallel when viewed from a distance (otherwise, they would appear to converge due to perspective). This would have to have been done deliberately, as it required a unique design for each column.

5: Scientists, historians and art conservators are working together to use bacteria in order to clean historical sculptures. Bacteria that feed on oil, phosphates and other buildup on stone statues have been successfully used to remove the most stubborn staining at various churches and cathedrals, and most recently to clean some of Michelangelo’s works.

6: Solarpunk: A literary and artistic movement that is derivative of cyberpunk. Contrary to cyberpunk, which mostly depicts dystopian worlds and explores the dangers of technological progress for society and the environment, solarpunk takes a more optimistic view. It tries to provide a vision of what the world could look like if humanity solved major problems, particularly climate change and unsustainable energy, and rejects what could be perceived as the ‘climate doomerism’ present in much of science fiction.

7: Why does the planet Mercury share its name with the world’s only room-temperature liquid metal? In medieval alchemy, each of the main known metals was assigned a celestial body – gold, ‘quicksilver’, copper, silver, iron, tin and lead corresponded to the Sun, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn respectively. Quicksilver was assigned Mercury because it was fastest-moving planet, which was itself named after the Roman God Mercury for his association with speed. Mercury is the only metal whose planetary name has become the preferred name, as chemists thought it sounded better. However, there could be an alternative universe in which we’re cooking with cast mars pans, or perhaps eating jupitered fish? Perhaps not.

8: Radio Garden: A website where you can eavesdrop on what’s playing on the radio all over the world.

9: The most expensive video game ever made was not a Grand Theft Auto or a Call of Duty, but rather a mobile game: Monopoly Go! Most of the game’s expenses have been marketing costs – over one billion dollars in total marketing spending since its 2023 release. It has reportedly generated over $200 million in revenue per month, meaning that a single month of revenue could cover the entire initial development cost of Grand Theft Auto V alongside most of its marketing budget, after controlling for inflation.

10: Action video games might make safer drivers – a study found that people with experience playing action video games performed significantly better in simulated driving tests than non-gamers, though it is admittedly difficult to separate better driving from the benefits of more experience with simulated environments. One interesting observation from the study was that even though the gamers performed better overall, they weren’t any better than non-gamers when it came to compensating for distractions while driving.