10 Things We Learnt In September, 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 September!

1: Baby shrews have very poor eyesight, so some species move in ‘conga lines’ so they aren’t separated from their mother.

2: Ancient Egypt lasted so long, there were Ancient Egyptian archaeologists studying Ancient-er Egypt. Prince Khaemweset (13th century BC) is known for his study and restoration of ancient monuments. Thutmose IV (14th century BC) restored the Great Sphinx of Giza, which was at the time buried up to its neck in sand.

3: Kakistocracy, a government formed from the worst, most incompetent people possible. It is derived from the Greek kákistos, meaning ‘worst’.

4: How many of you remember asking family and friends to roll their tongue in order to find out who had the ‘tongue rolling gene’? Well, it turns out there’s no such thing – the genetic basis of tongue rolling ability is one of the most widespread genetic myths. It originates from a paper published in 1940 that proposed that tongue rolling ability was based on a dominant gene. However, this was disproved in 1952 when it was discovered that identical twins did not always share the tongue rolling gift. So, why can some people roll their tongue while others cannot? Well we don’t know precisely, but tongue rolling is now considered a complex trait – a combination of genetics, anatomy and learned behaviour.

5: Drilling with microwaves: Geothermal power plants have very low operating costs, with most of the cost being the upfront expenses related to deep drilling. Drilling gets increasingly costly and riskier the deeper you go, due to the increasingly harsh conditions under which the drill must operate. This means that,in practice, only certain countries can access the Earth’s vast reserves of geothermal energy. One company, Quaise, is trying to solve this problem by developing a ‘drill’ that works by vaporizing rock with high energy microwaves. While costly in terms of energy, this method could potentially allow us to drill to unprecedented depths.

6: Escalator handrails: Have you ever stood still on an escalator, put your hand on the rubber handrail and noticed that the handrail is moving slightly faster than the stairs? This is actually a deliberate design choice: the rotating wheel that drives the handrail wears down over time, making its circumference smaller. This means that a single rotation of the wheel produces less and less movement in the handrail over time until the handrail lags behind the stairs. To delay the replacement of the wheel, the driving motor is made to rotate at a slightly faster speed. So if you ever notice the handrail moving faster than you, you can be sure that the wheel has been replaced recently!

7: The Bitter Lesson is a key idea in AI development: the observation that time after time, the most successful approaches in artificial intelligence often don’t come from trying to mimic human reasoning or hand-coding complex rules. Rather, they come from raw computational power and simple, general-purpose learning algorithms that involve feeding massive amounts of data into neural networks and letting them figure out patterns on their own. This is a ‘bitter lesson’ because humans want to make systems that work in the same way their own minds do, by building expert human knowledge into them. While this may work in the short term, this method is less suited to taking advantage of advances in computation, and has repeatedly proven to be far less efficient than simply throwing more computational power at the problem.

8: The first image of a multi-planet star system containing a star similar to our Sun. The two dots in the bottom right of the image are orbiting planets, while the rest of the small dots are background stars. Around 300 light years from Earth, the central star TYC 8998-760-1 is an infant (17 million year-old) version of our own 4.5 billion year-old Sun. By contrast, the two planets orbiting it are more massive than any planet in our Solar system at 6 and 14 times the mass of Jupiter.

9: In legal cases, the names John and Jane Doe are used in some countries as placeholder names to maintain anonymity, or when an individual’s identity is unknown. But where did these names actually come from? Unfortunately, we don’t know why these names specifically were used, but we do know that their use originated in medieval England in the settlement of land ownership disputes. When a landlord wanted to eject a tenant from their land, they would initiate a fictitious lawsuit rather than undertaking legally complex direct action. They would name a fictional plaintiff (John Doe) who was leased land by the landlord and then ejected by another fictional defendant (Richard Roe). The courts would then determine the owner of the land without the true parties having to engage in the legal process. The Ancient Romans also had their own equivalent names, Numerius Negidius and Aulus Agerius, both plays on words which can be interpenetrated to mean ‘he who refuses to pay’ and ‘he who initiates’ respectively.

10: The Grumman F-11 is supposedly the first jet aircraft to ever shoot itself down, by flying into its own bullets. In 1956, a pilot conducted a test-firing of the plane’s 20 mm guns during a shallow dive. As the Grumman continued to dive, it crossed paths with the decaying trajectory of the bullets, forcing it to crash-land, with the pilot escaping with a broken leg and vertebrae.