🚢 11 things I learned last week (Issue 013)
Hey folks! This week we’ve got sinking ships, vanishing sheep, boiling oceans, and a Roman concrete comeback. Plus, magpies named Margaret and dinosaurs with wildly different retirement plans.
When the Oceanos cruise ship sank off South Africa in 1991, senior officers fled, leaving a guitarist, his bass-player wife, a magician, and other entertainers to lead the evacuation and save everyone on board.
Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared around 3300–3200 BC, already fully formed—either their early forms were lost on perishable materials, or they were the invention of an unknown genius.
In 15th-century England, birds often had personal human names—like Will Wagtail and Philip Sparrow. The magpie began as just “pie,” from the Latin pica, then became “Margaret,” shortened to “Maggie,” and eventually “Magpie.”
As early as 1885, the fingerprints of human-caused climate change were already visible in the data. Scientists just didn’t have the tech to spot them.
Ageing rock stars are getting harder to insure. For a band like The Rolling Stones, the cost of a “non-appearance” cover can run into millions of pounds.
In 2024, sea surface temperatures broke records, and about a quarter of the world’s oceans are now in a marine heat wave.
Inspired by the Romans, engineers have created a new underwater concrete using cheap clay instead of volcanic ash, cutting energy use and slashing the carbon footprint by 70 per cent.
Sauropods—a group of giant, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs—likely had the longest lifespans of any dinosaurs, with some living up to 60 years. Smaller species like Stenonychosaurus, by contrast, matured in just 3–5 years and died not long after.
New Zealand’s sheep population keeps shrinking—down to 24 million in 2023, just 4.6 sheep per person. In 1981, it was 22.
Over the past decade, Paris closed 100 streets to cars, cut 50,000 parking spots, tripled SUV parking fees, and added 800 miles of bike lanes, helping cut air pollution by 40 per cent.
Researchers analysed data from over 200 societies and found that nearly 20 per cent of human cultural variation can be explained by nine key ecological factors such as climate, disease, and population density.
What I’ve been reading
How to survive a crisis: “When something bad happens, write down everything that’s affected by the event, whether it’s physical, psychological or logistical. This can help you understand what you have been through, how it is affecting you in all realms of your life and what is or isn’t fixable.”
The great British Museum thefts: “The missing gold jewellery and gems dating back 3,500 years were sold for small amounts of money. In total, it’s thought the sales realised no more than £100,000. Over the course of a decade, that’s hardly a life-changing sum, even if curators are notoriously underpaid in this country.”
Was the Stone Age actually the Wood Age?: “We can probably assume that wooden tools have been around just as long as stone ones, that is, two and a half or three million years. But since wood deteriorates and rarely survives, preservation bias distorts our view of antiquity.”
And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend—or a dozen. 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)
Illustration: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.