10 Things We Learnt In September, 2026

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Here at Gowing Life, we are keeping our fun record of everything we learn in 2026, be it longevity-related or something else entirely. Here is a selection of our newly acquired neural connections for the month of September!

1: Big Wind: One part T-34 tank and two parts MiG 21 jet engine, Big Wind is the most powerful fire engine in the world, capable of extinguishing oil well fires.

2: How the eruption of a volcano in the Philippines may have contributed to a Hantavirus outbreak in the United States. In 1991, mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, ejecting enough sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool the surface of the Earth by about 0.5 °C. This eruption may have contributed to an unusually wet El Niño, resulting in heavy rainfall over the ‘four corners’ – the neighbouring US states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. This resulted in abundant 1993 Spring vegetation, providing additional food and shelter for rodents and causing the deer mouse population to surge 10 to 20-fold. These mice turned out to carry a previously unknown strain of Hantavirus, resulting in 33 infections and 17 deaths in the four corner states. It should be stressed that the El Niño event was already underway before the eruption, so the outbreak might have happened anyway – it’s impossible to know for certain.

3: Rebuilding the lighthouse of Alexandria: Pharos was a giant lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, before it was damaged and then destroyed in a series of earthquakes. Now archaeologists are scanning the remains of the lighthouse lying at the bottom of the sea and using this to build a digital model of what Pharos looked like. While we already know the general appearance and size of the lighthouse based on ancient contemporary depictions and ruins, this project will give us the most accurate and complete view to date of what the building actually looked like.

4: The ‘chlorine smell’ you get at public swimming pools isn’t the smell of free chlorine – it’s actually the product of chlorine reacting with contaminants to form chloramines. Contaminants that react with chlorine to form chloramines include sweat, body oils and yes, the… other fluid. If the chlorine smell is too strong, it may actually be a sign of poor maintenance.

5: As of 2021, over 10% of road accident victims globally live in India. This doesn’t seem too bad considering India contains around 17% of the Earth’s people, until you learn that it also contains fewer than 1% of the Earth’s cars. In terms of road deaths per capita, India has nearly 3 times as many yearly road deaths as the European average.

6: Dutch auction: A type of auction in which the auctioneer begins with a high price and lowers it until someone agrees to buy. It is typically used for goods that need to be sold quickly, such as flowers. While the name seems to have come from this method’s use in 17th-century Holland, there are accounts of its use in ancient times. When this type of auction was adopted in England, it was called ‘mining’ because the bidder would shout ‘Mine!’ when the price dropped low enough.

7: Crepuscular rays: The technical term for the shafts of sunlight sometimes referred to as ‘god rays’ is crepuscular rays. This term comes from the Latin word for twilight: crepusculum. Though crepuscular rays almost always appear to be radiating outwards from the cloud, this is an illusion of perspective. The distance of the Sun from the Earth means that the rays are effectively parallel – something that becomes evident when viewed from orbit.

8: ‘Slopaganda’: A term for propaganda mass-produced by artificial intelligence.

9: Dark factory, aka lights-out manufacturing, is a term used to describe a factory that is fully automated, with no human presence required on-site. It is so-named because the lights inside the factory can be turned off while production continues.

10: The ‘plastic sea’ – a zone in Almería, Spain containing a concentration of plastic greenhouses so dense that they are visible from space. It covers around 75,000 acres of land and produces roughly 3.5 million tonnes of vegetables every year.