🦦 7 things I learned this week
Hey folks! This week took me from tool-using sea otters to the lack of female statues, via experimental pigeons, fast-evolving yeast, and Elon Musk enablers who can’t tell a million from a billion:
Wild sea otters use stones as tools to crack open hard-shelled prey like snails and clams, making them the only marine mammals that regularly use rocks while hunting for food. (Here’s also my piece on otters protecting shores.)
Unmarried adults are about 80% more likely to report depressive symptoms than married ones.
In 2018, fewer than 3% of statues in the UK depicted real, non-royal women.
A 2023 study gave pigeons categorisation tasks in which they saw simple patterns — line width, angles, rings — and chose a category by pecking left or right, earning food for correct answers. Starting at chance level, the birds improved through trial and error to about 68% accuracy.
On average, a UK graduate earns about 20% more in net lifetime income than a non-graduate: roughly £130,000 for men and £100,000 for women after taxes and student loan repayments.
In just two years of evolution, single-cell yeasts can grow into multicellular clusters, going from microscopic to branching structures visible to the naked eye.
One of the first things DOGE, the U.S. “Department of Government Efficiency”, did was mistake millions for billions in an IT contract.
From my mailbox
Alec Luhn: “Currently we’re losing 1000 glaciers every year. That’s a crazy number, and it could triple by 2040. On our current trajectory of 2.7°C of warming, 79% of glaciers will disappear by 2100.”
Sam Matey-Coste: Colorado recently completed construction of the world’s largest-ever wildlife overpass to provide a safe migration route for elk, mule deer, and pronghorn. It will decrease wildlife fatalities by 90%.
Matt Brown: In 1926, London Underground released this transport poster, depicting life in the city a century later. “The artwork by Montague B. Black shows a futuristic metropolis with lofty buildings and ubiquitous air transport.”
What I’ve been reading
The best sports for longevity: “Even four to five minutes of vigorous physical activity every day has been linked to longevity benefits. Tennis players lived almost 10 years longer than their sedentary peers — and longer than soccer players, swimmers and the other recreational athletes included in the analysis.”
Animals count and use zero. How far does their number sense go?: “Researchers want to pin down the genetic mechanisms underlying numerical ability. They have already identified genes that seem to be associated with a math learning disability in humans called dyscalculia, and are manipulating the equivalent genes in zebra fish.”
A writer who delights in demystifying the arcane and obscure: “I’m looking for something that strikes me as not just different, but something I’ve never really thought about before. And then the challenge is to express it as clearly as possible.”
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.