Biology
Science
43 rabbit holes · 17 people exploring
Common starting questions
- What does blood smell like?
- does sourdough really taste different depending on where it's made?
- What did patient H.M. teach us about memory?
- What's the maximum possible height of a tree?
- Are some people really tetrachromats?
Rabbit holes
- What gives blood its smell
The searches followed blood's smell through different environments, oxygen, iron content, and possible causes of a bad smell.
Vincent · 6 sources
- there's a library of sourdough starters in Belgium
A baking company keeps over a hundred sourdough starters from around the world in fridges in St. Vith, and supposedly refreshes each one with flour from its home region so they don't drift. It's a seed vault but for bread.
Ravi Subramanian · 5 sources
- axolotls regrow limbs, hearts, parts of their brain
Noor Rahman · 5 sources
- H.M., the man who couldn't make new memories
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- how tall can a tree possibly get
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- birds are dinosaurs, a thread
Not 'descended from'. Birds ARE dinosaurs, in the same way we're mammals. Velociraptor had feathers and was the size of a turkey.
Clara Novak · 6 sources
- some women might see colors the rest of us can't
moth · 5 sources
- why moths fly at lights (2024 answer)
moth · 5 sources
- cilantro tastes like soap to some people. it's (partly) genetic
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- how do salmon find their way home
Frida Nyström · 4 sources
- whale falls: when a whale dies, an ecosystem starts
A single whale carcass can feed a deep-sea community for decades. First scavengers, then bone worms, then bacteria living off the sulfides in the bones.
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- Coral can sense the moon
Mass spawning on the Great Barrier Reef happens a few nights after a full moon in late spring, and corals seem to time it with light-sensitive proteins that detect moonlight.
Aroha Williams · 4 sources
- birds can't feel chili heat, and that's kind of the point
Vera Lindholm · 6 sources
- There are probably tardigrades on the moon
They were in a 'lunar library' on the lander. A later experiment suggests they probably didn't survive the impact, but they're still up there, dehydrated, forever.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- robins might navigate using a quantum effect in their eyes
Inês Carvalho · 6 sources
- the appendix might not be useless after all
Min-seo Choi · 4 sources
- cells can only divide about 50 times, except the ones that never stop
Noor Rahman · 7 sources
- everything keeps evolving into crabs
It's real! At least five separate times, crustaceans that weren't crabs ended up with a flattened crab body plan. The meme is barely an exaggeration.
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- crows hold grudges against specific humans
Researchers in Seattle wore a specific mask while trapping crows. Years later, crows (including ones that were never trapped) still mobbed anyone wearing that mask. They taught each other.
Aroha Williams · 5 sources
- the zombie ant fungus is real and somehow worse than the game
It makes infected ants climb to a specific height, bite onto the underside of a leaf at a specific time of day, and die there, and then a stalk grows out of the head to rain spores on the ants below.
Noor Rahman · 4 sources
- the first photobook was about seaweed
Anna Atkins laid algae specimens directly on paper coated with iron salts and left them in the sun. No camera involved. She started publishing the book in 1843, in parts. Architects' blueprints used the same chemistry for decades afterwards.
Jade Fontaine · 5 sources
- an octopus does most of its thinking in its arms
Grace Whitfield · 6 sources
- why don't whales get cancer more often?
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- Sharks are older than trees
Grace Whitfield · 4 sources
- naked mole-rats barely age
Live 30+ years (a mouse lives ~3), rarely get cancer, and don't seem to have mortality that rises with age. Also they have a queen. Also they're cold-blooded-ish. Also they don't feel some kinds of pain.
Grace Whitfield · 5 sources
- a bird-watching engineer redesigned the Shinkansen nose
Trains entering tunnels at high speed were making sonic booms at the exit. Eiji Nakatsu, a birdwatcher, modeled the nose on a kingfisher's beak, which dives into water without a splash. Quieter and more efficient.
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- can fish feel pain?
Jade Fontaine · 4 sources
- the young blood thing
Old mice joined to young ones show improvements in muscle, liver and brain markers. That spawned startups selling young plasma infusions, until the FDA put out a warning about them in 2019.
Grace Whitfield · 5 sources
- Japan has a national fungus
Aspergillus oryzae, koji, is the mold behind sake, miso, soy sauce and mirin. The Brewing Society of Japan named it the 'national fungus' in 2006.
Frida Nyström · 6 sources
- every banana you've eaten is a clone
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- almost all vanilla is hand-pollinated, using a trick a 12-year-old figured out in 1841
Outside Mexico, vanilla orchids barely set fruit because their natural pollinators aren't there. On Réunion in 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy, worked out a fast way to pollinate each flower by hand with a thin stick and his thumb. Commercial vanilla is still done that way, one flower at a time.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- petrichor: why rain smells like that
The earthy smell is mostly geosmin, made by soil bacteria, and humans are absurdly sensitive to it. Probably because finding water mattered a lot to our ancestors. Also: camels might use it the same way.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- can you reset a cell's age? (Yamanaka factors)
Four transcription factors can turn an adult cell back into a stem cell and wipe most of its age markers along the way. The longevity idea is to do it only partially, so cells get 'younger' without forgetting what kind of cell they are.
Grace Whitfield · 6 sources
- the goats that ate Kahoʻolawe, and other islands overrun by feral animals
Started with Kahoʻolawe's goats and ended up reading about every island where a ship left goats or rabbits and they ate everything.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- Australia lost a war to emus
1932. Soldiers with machine guns vs. ~20,000 emus eating wheat crops. The emus won. The commanding officer reportedly compared them to tanks.
Inês Carvalho · 4 sources
- Argentine ants are one giant colony across continents
Ants from the main supercolony in Europe, California and Japan don't fight each other when put together, which has been called one of the largest cooperative units of any animal ever.
Priya Natarajan · 4 sources
- fairy circles might be a Turing pattern
Termites or plants competing for water? The water-competition explanation produces exactly the kind of evenly spaced pattern Alan Turing described in 1952. Both camps are still arguing.
Grace Whitfield · 5 sources
- sloths are tiny ecosystems
Algae grow in their fur (they look green), moths live in their fur, and the moths lay eggs in sloth poop, which is why sloths climb down once a week to poop at the base of the tree. Everything about this is a bad deal for the sloth.
Priya Natarajan · 4 sources
- the 'wood wide web' is shakier than the books say
Aroha Williams · 5 sources
- rapamycin was found in soil from Easter Island
A Canadian expedition in the 1960s collected soil on Rapa Nui, and a bacterium in it made the molecule. It became a transplant drug, then a lab favorite in aging research.
Frida Nyström · 6 sources
- why zebras have stripes
Jade Fontaine · 4 sources
- sea otters protect kelp forests by eating urchins
Priya Natarajan · 5 sources
- the platypus is ridiculous
Lays eggs, males are venomous, hunts with its eyes closed by sensing electric fields, no stomach, and glows blue-green under UV light. When the first specimen reached Britain people thought it was a fake.
Frida Nyström · 5 sources