12 Things We Learnt In 2024

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Here at Gowing Life, we keep a fun record of everything we learn each month, be it longevity-related or something else entirely. Here are some of our favourites from 2024!

January

A visualisation of the evolution of vision. Visit Visual Capitalist for the full sized version.

February

Rubies and sapphires are almost entirely composed of the same material – an aluminium oxide called corundum. Their colours come from trace amounts of other elements. Chromium gives rubies their red colour, while the classic blue sapphires contain iron and titanium.

March

Eroom’s law: the reverse of Moore’s law. Eroom’s law is used to describe the staggering decline in drug discovery over the past 70 years. During the 1950s, biopharmaceutical researchers were discovering between 40 and 100 new drugs for every billion dollars invested. After adjusting for inflation, that has now dropped to an average of fewer than 1 new drug per billion dollars. Why? A combination of factors including rising costs, stricter regulation and competition from established drugs.

April

A reconstructed CT scan of an elephant’s foot. Their feet may look flat, but elephants actually stand on the tips of their toes! A large fat pad and false ‘sixth toe’ support the weight like a high heel.

May

The Coin Rotation Paradox: If one coin is rolled around the rim of another coin of equal size, how many full rotations will the moving coin make? Your first intuition might be to say that it makes one rotation, since it must roll a distance equal to the circumference of the stationary coin. In actual fact, the coin makes two full rotations. The reason for this is that the moving coin must not only roll a distance equal to the circumference of the stationary coin, but also move in a circle, which accounts for the second rotation. To visualise this, imagine sliding the moving coin around the stationary one, such that the point of contact on the moving coin remains the same the entire time. Even though the coin is not rolling, it would still have to make one full rotation to get back to where it started. If the coin is rolling and not sliding, then it must additionally rotate a distance equal to the circumference of the second coin, resulting in two rotations in total.

June

Footage of the RP FLIP research vessel switching from a horizontal to a vertical orientation, its bulkheads becoming decks. This put most of the ship’s mass underwater below the influence of the waves, making the vessel exceptionally stable, quiet, and ideal for studying acoustic signals, waves, and collecting other ocean data. It was in service for around 60 years.

July

This is the optimal way to pack 11 squares inside the smallest possible larger square. The square packing problem is one of the rarer examples of mathematics producing highly asymmetrical and deeply unappealing results.

August

This chart showing how much sugar is added to the same baby food product in different countries:

September

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:

October

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:

November

Shot towers: Towers designed for the production of lead shot by pouring molten lead through a sieve at the top. The resulting droplets cool into spheres under surface tension as they fall and are caught by a pool of water at the bottom of the tower. Since larger droplets take longer to cool, the taller the tower, the larger the shot it can make.

December

Prince Rupert’s drops are glass beads created by dropping molten glass into cold water. The head of the drop is extremely strong, able to withstand direct hammer blows or even bullets, but slight damage to the tail causes the entire drop to shatter. The drops owe their strength to the cooling process. An outer layer of glass cools rapidly in the water, creating a solid shell. The molten glass inside then shrinks as it cools, resulting in significant compressive forces on the outer shell. These compressive forces resist the formation of cracks that would be required to break the drop.