⏰ 8 things I learned this week
Hey folks! From Neanderthal alarm clocks to reindeer power naps, here’s a batch of facts I learned this week:
Neanderthals were morning people, and if you like waking up early, you might have them to thank. A study comparing modern human DNA with Neanderthal fossils found shared genetic variants linked to early rising.
Since 2005, France’s constitution has included the Charter for the Environment: a kind of green bill of rights declaring that everyone has “the right to live in a balanced environment which shows due respect for health.”
More than half of all species live in the soil, including 90% of fungi, 85% of plants and more than 50% of bacteria.
Every iron object made before 1200 BC came from meteorites.
Reindeer can partially shut down their brains while eating, a sleep mode that helps them load up on food during the short Arctic summer.
By analysing fossilised poo from extinct hyenas, palaeontologists have reconstructed the woolly rhino’s DNA.
In 2016, the world traded about 636 million cubic metres of real, physical water through pipes, trucks, and markets. But that’s tiny compared with 2 trillion cubic metres of virtual water moved through products like soybeans, rice, chocolate, coffee, and palm oil.
The United States might have adopted the metric system if not for pirates: the ship bringing Thomas Jefferson a standard kilogram from France in 1793 was blown off course into the Caribbean and captured.
From my mailbox
Mehrdad Aref-Adib wrote a love letter to London trees: “The city’s trees form a living record of movement, of seeds carried by wind, trade and longing. Though they began in distant soils, from Asia, the Americas, the Mediterranean and beyond, they have taken root together, creating a canopy that belongs to everyone.”
Alexander Verbeek mentioned a 6-year-old boy who found a Neanderthal hand on a West Sussex beach: “Experts at the museum confirmed the artefact’s authenticity, noting that Neanderthal hand axes are exceptionally rare. Many professional archaeologists never get to see one firsthand.”
Sam Matey-Coste covered an invention that could electrify air travel: “In a sodium-air fuel cell, liquid sodium reacts with oxygen to produce electricity, potentially solving the battery weight problem by collecting much of its fuel mass (the oxygen) from the air in-flight.”
What I’ve been reading
Who invented the measurement of time: “The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago. Before that, people likely tracked time with devices that did not survive in the archaeological record—such as an upright stick in the dirt that acted as a primitive sundial—or no device at all, simply by observing the location of the sunrise and the sunset each day and by watching how high the sun reaches in the sky.”
The earliest known war in Europe was a Stone Age conflict 5000 years ago: “There are at least 338 people interred at San Juan ante Portam Latinam. 23% have visible injuries: one of the highest prehistoric rates of violent injury. The wounds include 65 unhealed injuries and 89 healed, indicating prolonged conflict. Injuries were attributable to blunt-force trauma, as might be caused by axes, clubs or thrown stones.”
The most important machine that was never built: “Alan Turing’s great insight was to provide a concrete answer to the computation question in the form of an abstract machine, later named the Turing machine. It’s abstract because it doesn’t (and can’t) physically exist as a tangible device. Instead, it’s a conceptual model of computation: If the machine can calculate a function, then the function is computable.”
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.