30 Things We Learnt In September, 2022

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Here at Gowing Life, we have decided to keep a fun record of everything we learn in 2022, 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 mossy leaf-tailed gecko is a species of lizard endemic to Madagascar. It’s not difficult to see where it got its name.

2: During the First Punic War, the Romans built an entire navy of 120 warships in just 60 days, after copying the design of a Carthaginian ship that had run aground on the Italian coast. Later during the war, they would lose 284 ships and as many 100 000 soldiers in a severe storm. Following this disaster, the Romans built another 220 ships in just three months, and almost immediately lost 150 of said ships in another storm.

3: Cheating in the Olympics has been a problem since its creation millennia ago. Though the ancient Greeks may not have had access to state-sponsored doping schemes, they found plenty of other ways to cheat. These included bribing judges and other athletes, posing as a representative of a different city state to circumvent bans, attempting to put a curse on their opponents and, according to depictions on some pottery, attempting to gouge out their opponent’s eyes. Cheaters could be beaten, and in some cases would have statues made of them that recorded how they cheated.

4: The Antikythera mechanism: Described as the single most shocking discovery from the ancient world, the Antikythera mechanism is a mind-bogglingly complex bronze gear mechanism built by the Ancient Greeks in around 100-200 BC. It was discovered in a shipwreck in 1901, and was originally described as an astrolabe – a device for calculating the position of the Sun and other stars. However, the gear system within was much too complex to serve this function alone, and we now understand the Antikythera mechanism as the world’s first computer. The device could be used to make a variety of astronomical predictions, including the occurrences of solar and lunar eclipses.

5: Researchers have succeeded in turning PET – a simple plastic commonly used to make various containers – into diamond using powerful lasers. When blasted by lasers, the plastic reached temperatures between 3200°C and 5800°C and pressures of over 72 gigapascals. This resulted in the formation of microscopic diamonds a few nanometres across.

6: Researchers who have self-experimented are about as likely to have won a Nobel prize for said experiment as they are to have died as a direct result. A study reported that of 465 documented cases over the past two centuries, 8 resulted in death and 7 in a Nobel prize, while another 5 won Nobel prizes for unrelated work.

7: Cells owe their name to Robert Hooke, who said they reminded him of cells in a monastery.