⚖️ 10 things I learned this week
Hey folks! From baby cries that make your face heat up to Ramesses II getting gifts a millennium after death, here’s a batch of strange and brilliant facts I learned recently.
In medieval England, some taxes were paid in eels. The village of Harmston alone owed its earl 75,000 eels a year. Wisbech fishermen paid monasteries nearly 35,000. By 1086, the national total topped half a million eels.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected its most promising sample yet: a rock from an ancient riverbed in Jezero Crater that may hold traces of past microbial life. The sample contains possible biosignatures: clues that could be biological, though more study is needed. It’s the closest we’ve come to finding life on Mars.
Girls who play after-school sports are 50 per cent more likely to land top jobs later in life, a boost on par with a university degree. Yet, girls in the UK still play far less than boys, missing 280 million hours of sport a year.
A baby’s cry makes both men and women physically hotter. Thermal scans show blood rushing to the face when people hear wailing, especially if the cry is chaotic and distressed.
Nitisinone, a drug approved in the U.S. for metabolic disorders, can make human blood lethal to mosquitoes. Female Anopheles gambiae — the malaria carriers — died within 12 hours after feeding on treated blood.
In 2022, vinyl sales surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1988.
Necrophilia is illegal in just 16 U.S. states, according to Mary Roach. Which means, technically, it’s legal in the other 34.
The Covid-19 pandemic sped up the rollout of mRNA vaccines in 2020, but the idea dates back to 1988. The science was already in place. What held it back was the lack of funding, not technology.
A thousand years after Ramesses II died, worshippers were still leaving gifts to this pharaoh: archaeologists have uncovered more than 2,000 mummified rams’ heads at his temple in Egypt.
One theory suggests humans domesticated themselves when sociable beta males joined forces to kill alpha bullies.
What I’ve been reading
25 things found frozen in Europe’s mountain ice: From Iron Age sandals to medieval candle boxes, Europe’s glaciers are a giant deep freezer for lost artefacts.
The scientists who’ve cracked professional networking on LinkedIn: “You don’t want to sound like a salesperson, and you certainly don’t want to sound transactional. You want to build a relationship. People like to work with those whom they know, like and trust”.
From IBM to OpenAI: 50 years of winning (and failed) strategies at Microsoft: “To secure the company’s success in mobile telephony and compete with the iPhone, Microsoft bought the cell phone division of Nokia for $5.4 billion in September 2013. Less than two years later, Microsoft put an end to its mobile phone operations, with losses amounting to $7.6 billion. Nokia was sold for just $350 million.”
From the archives
And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.
Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)
Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.