10 Things We Learnt In October, 2024

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 October!

1: India’s stepwells, primarily built to ensure access to water during droughts. They were mainly used for bathing, washing clothes, farming, and watering animals.

2: Lake Sørvágsvatn, Faroe Islands: a lake that hangs over the sea.

3: The Mediterranean is saltier than the Atlantic ocean because of evaporation. The rate of evaporation across the entire Mediterranean sea is actually greater than the amount of water being delivered by all of the rivers that feed into it. The reason it hasn’t dried up to a smaller size is that it’s being ‘topped up’ by the Atlantic via the strait of Gibraltar. However, the Mediterranean did actually dry up once about 5.3-6 million years ago in an event called the Messinian salinity crisis. That was because tectonic activity closed the strait of Gibraltar, cutting off the Atlantic. Back then, the Mediterranean would have looked something like this:

4: A gear to represent 1 googol – that’s 10^100, or the number 1 with 100 zeros. Each gear must spin 10 times to make the next one spin once, and there are 100 gears. If the first gear made 1 rotation per second, and had been turning since the beginning of the universe, the 19th gear would not even have turned half way by now.

5: Why do all the planets orbit around the sun in the same direction (anticlockwise when viewed from above the Sun’s North pole)? The Sun and all its planets were formed from the same cloud of dust within which the majority of matter was rotating in one direction. Any object that happened to be orbiting clockwise would eventually be hit by something orbiting anticlockwise until, eventually, everything was orbiting in the same direction. For that same reason, most of the planets in the solar system also spin in the same direction, except for Venus, which spins the opposite way, and Uranus, which spins on its side. The prevailing theory to explain this is that they were hit by large objects at some point.

6: A lego machine demonstrating 20 mechanical principles:

7: In 2011, a study found that people in England with Norman surnames are, on average, 10% wealthier, live 3 years longer and are more likely to attend Oxford or Cambridge than descendants of the Anglo-Saxon artisans they conquered nearly 1000 years ago.

8: The Falkirk wheel: A rotating boat lift in Falkirk in central Scotland, allowing the Forth and Clyde Canal to connect to the Union Canal via an aqueduct.

9: In the United States, patents for perpetual motion/energy machines became so common at one time that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has a policy of automatically refusing such patents, unless the applicant can provide a functioning example. This has not stopped some people trying, including one particularly amusing example from 2001, titled ‘Perpetual motion energy of (GOD) on generating stations‘. The concept essentially boils down to two batteries positioned at either end of a bridge that charge each other up while converting DC current to AC current and back again. The author also implies that God is the co-inventor, and presumably also the creator of the energy.

10: The Dogger Bank Incident: When in 1904, the Russian Baltic Fleet arrived off the coast of Britain on its way to fight in the Russo-Japanese war. Due to false reports by Russian intelligence agencies, the Russians thought that the British had built torpedo boats for the Japanese and that these were roaming the area, and the Russian ships ended up firing on some British fishing boats. Two British fishermen were killed and, somehow, an equal number of Russians were killed by friendly fire. The Russians lost the Russo-Japanese war.