10 Things We Learnt In September, 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 September!

1: The Richat structure, a 40km wide geological formation in the Sahara desert. It was formed as a dome of rock created by volcanic activity, and was slowly eroded over millions of years to expose onion-like layers of rock.

2: Gravity is a force that pulls all objects with mass towards each other, but is so weak that the only gravitational force most of us can observe daily is that of the Earth on other objects. But did you know that gravitational attraction between very small objects can be measured with a relatively simple experiment named the Cavendish experiment?

3: Helicopters have been around for longer than you might realise. The first free flight with a helicopter was in 1907, though the helicopter only lifted a foot into the air. It wasn’t until 1939 that the first practical helicopter took flight. Because of their recency, very few helicopters were used during the Second World War and there are fewer photographs still, which is perhaps why they feel like a more recent invention.

4: The Pythagoras cup: A cup that empties itself if you overfill it. As the name implies, its invention is credited to Pythagoras, who supposedly created it so his contemporaries could not overfill their wine cups.

5: Borgund Stave Church in Norway, built between 1180 and 1250 AD, and constructed entirely from wood without a single nail.

6: Turtle ants: a group of ant species whose soldiers have heads that double up as doors.

7: The egg of Columbus: An apocryphal story in which Spanish courtiers at a banquet attempted to belittle Christopher Columbus’s achievement of crossing the Atlantic, suggesting that anyone could have done it and that he was merely lucky enough to have tried. In response, Columbus supposedly took hard-boiled eggs and ask the courtiers to balance them upright, a task at which they failed. Columbus then took an egg, broke the tip so that it was flat and balanced it on the table, saying ‘you could have done it, but I did it!’.

8: Tesla’s egg of Columbus: An exhibition designed by Nikola Tesla for the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Its purpose was to demonstrate how induction motors worked by using an alternating current to generate an alternating magnetic field, which would cause a copper egg to spin until it stood on it’s major axis as per the egg of Columbus story. Turns out this also works when a real egg is filled with steel wool.

9: Many animals can detect polarised light – that’s when the electromagnetic waves that make up the light all oscillate in the same plane, rather than going every which way. Polarised light is produced in nature when light interacts with certain surfaces and particles in the atmosphere, and is used by animals to navigate and even to hunt and forage. But did you know that humans can also detect polarised light? This manifests as a faint yellow hourglass shape called Haidinger’s brushes in the centre of one’s visual field, corresponding to the macula in the eye. The direction of polarisation runs perpendicular to the hourglass. The best way to see it is to look at white surface through a polarising filter and slowly rotate the filter. Otherwise, look at a source of white polarised light like an LCD screen and slowly rotate your head. You should see a fainter version of this:

10: SOS didn’t originally stand for anything and was only used because it was the easiest way to remember the Morse code distress signal ”… — …”. It could equally have been IWB, VZE, 3B or V7 as these all make the same sequence in Morse code. ‘Save Our Souls’ and ‘Save Our Ship’ where ‘backronyms’ that were applied later. As a related bonus fact, the distress call of ‘mayday’ is not related to some famous disaster that happened in May, but instead originates from the French for ‘come and help me’ – ‘venez m’aider‘.