Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have investigated academic fraud, tracked infectious-disease outbreaks, studied the evolution of artificial intelligence, and chronicled extreme weather events. We’ve reported on the quirks of animal behavior and the latest in psychedelics research. Along the way, we stumbled across facts that surprised, sobered, and humbled us, and we wanted to share them with you. We hope they blow your mind too.
Onions were used to treat wounds during the French and Indian War. The energy required to show a new Instagram post from Cristiano Ronaldo to each of his followers could power a house for several years. A group of butterflies flew across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. It took them only about eight days. Children with cystic fibrosis are no longer automatically eligible for the Make-A-Wish Foundation because a new drug works so well that these kids are now expected to have an essentially normal lifespan. Your body carries literal pieces of your mom—and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles. The generative-AI boom is on pace to cost more than the Apollo space missions. Early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, and some spacewalking astronauts really struggled to make it back on board. Around the world, more than 10,000 barcodes are scanned every second. McDonald’s cooked its french fries in beef tallow until 1990. The fast-food giant also grills its beef patties for exactly 42 seconds. California grizzly bears are mostly vegan, but over time, humans have made them more carnivorous. A tick bite can make you allergic to mammalian meat—so much so that some ranchers are becoming allergic to their own cattle. When some people took a drug originally approved to treat asthma, their food allergies also started disappearing. Brains have a consistency not unlike tapioca pudding. The weight of giant pumpkins increased 20-fold in half a century. Kids don’t really need to eat vegetables. You can give rice a nutty flavor by growing cow cells inside the grains. Mushroom genes can make petunias glow. In the Middle Ages, people took their pet squirrels for walks and decked them out in flashy accessories. You can buy a fitness tracker for your pet. Humankind has basically reached the limit of airplane-overhead-bin space. Study-abroad accents might be real. Each clan of sperm whales uses its own set of clicking sounds to communicate. Some of these sounds may be older than Sanskrit. Subtitles from more than 53,000 movies and 85,000 TV-show episodes have been used to train generative AI. In 1998, Aaron Sorkin insisted to ABC executives that if he were forced to add a laugh track to his first-ever TV show, Sports Night, he’d “feel as if I’d put on an Armani tuxedo, tied my tie, snapped on my cufflinks, and the last thing I do before I leave the house is spray Cheez Whiz all over myself.” Sports Night still debuted with a laugh track. Comic Sans was originally designed for a program in which an animated dog taught people how to use their first personal computer. AI image generators have a penchant for rendering hot people. The total employees of the government’s free tax-preparation software, Direct File, are outnumbered by the lobbyists working for Intuit. Electric cars, with powerful acceleration and no fuel costs, might make the best police vehicles. Minivan sales in America have fallen about 80 percent from their all-time high in 2000. One breadfruit tree can feed a family of four for at least 50 years. Proteins can make pretty good sugar substitutes. Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the graham cracker, thought his crackers would curtail masturbation. In July, a cybersecurity company accidentally introduced a single software bug that canceled or delayed tens of thousands of flights and trains, halted surgeries, and blacked out television broadcasts around the world. Americans threw out four times as many small appliances in 2018 as they did in 1990. Luddites actually didn’t hate technology. When our writer ran his own dissertation through the plagiarism-detection software that was likely used to help bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay, it initially claimed that his work was 74 percent copied. The correct number was zero. Classical composers used dice to randomly compose songs. Male birth control could soon be as simple as rubbing a gel on the shoulders and upper arms daily. Humans could find alien life by detecting fluorescent corals on other planets. In April, a red Tesla Model S became the first electric car to travel 2 million kilometers. The car could have traveled from the Earth to the moon and back, twice, then circled the equator 11 times. Blocking the sun can lower how hot a person feels by 36 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Termites bury fellow colony members that have been dead for a while. Fresh corpses, they devour. In the 20th century, each day on Earth got longer by between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond. That rate has been increasing since 2000, and could nearly double by 2100. The winds of a Category 5 hurricane are faster than the world’s fastest rollercoaster. In 1993, scientists dumped nearly 1,000 pounds of iron crystals into the Pacific Ocean to draw carbon dioxide out of the air. And in 2008, China used cloud seeding to clear the skies over Beijing ahead of the Olympics. In Goodyear, Arizona, a data center used for generative AI may guzzle as many as 56 million gallons of drinking water each year. Forty-two percent of MIT students now major in computer science. Air conditioners’ money-saver mode is a lie. By 2040, as few as 10 countries will have enough snow to host the Winter Olympics. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication. And the domestication they’ve already undergone may have led them to bark more. Elephants and parrots use namelike calls that identify them as individuals. Whales and bats might too. Sigmund Freud said he put his patients on the couch because he could not deal “with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day.” Our brains release dopamine in response to even the most rudimentary animations. A model of a human embryo made from stem cells secreted hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive. American men married to women are five times more likely to fully adopt their wife’s surname than to append it to their own with a hyphen. Bedbugs’ mating rituals may have supercharged their immune system. Lions on the East African savannas struggled to hunt zebras because of a single ant species. Wanting is different from liking. A “Christian conservative” mobile-phone-service provider has been operating in the U.S. for more than a decade. It pays T-Mobile for access to its cellular network. Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, his campaign team maintained an account on Donald Trump’s Truth Social site. They used it to try to goad the Trump campaign into selecting a more extreme vice-presidential candidate. A slim majority of Republican voters now favor legalizing recreational marijuana. The hottest new psychedelic drugs might not cause any trip at all. Some scientists believe that multicellular life may have arisen thanks to enormous mountain ranges. BRCA mutations, famously linked to breast cancer, can also lead to cancer in the pancreas and prostate. A dentist found a hominin jawbone in a floor tile of his parents’ newly renovated house. Chewing gum became a baseball standby in part because Philip Wrigley, the heir to the Wrigley Company, gave it to players in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse after he took over ownership of the team in 1932. Sociologists have conducted several ethnographies on long-running pickup-basketball games. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers. As the world warms, some dog mushers are running their teams at night so the animals don’t overheat. Extreme heat led schools to move recess indoors for millions of students in August and September. Higher amounts of naturally occurring lithium in tap water are associated with lower suicide rates in some countries. You can buy a $99 quantum water bottle “charged” with special healing frequencies. Humans have 10 times as many sweat glands as chimpanzees do. If you want to tame all that sweat, you should put your antiperspirant on at night.theatlantic.com