Category: Misc
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Merry Christmas
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Packaging
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Meat
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Planktonium
The wondrous (tiny) world of plankton. Phytoplankton (small plant-like cells) are producing half of all oxygen on earth by photosynthesis, like plants and trees do on land. Zooplankton are forming the base of the food chain of aquatic life. Plankton are also playing an important part in the global carbon cycle. The plankton are threatened…
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The History and Future of Everything — Time
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Why are German numbers backwards?
My German is relatively basic, but this is true for Dutch as well. 42 is pronounced twee-en-veertig (“two and forty”). Spoken language was in existence before written language. Many numerals existing today were created long before reading was practised, so if there is any direction in a language at all, German does not “read” “backwards”,…
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Omicron
[…] Even if you did succeed, what then? How long are you going to keep your borders closed? A restriction to a few countries might help the first week, but within a month it won’t even much matter, because there’s too much spread elsewhere. It’s not like a variant worse than Delta is going to…
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The World’s Deadliest Thing
Around 1895, whilst investigating the case of a group of musicians who had died after eating cooked ham, a Belgian scientist called Emile van Ermengem identified the bacteria at the heart of Kerber’s sausage poisonings, a disease that had been coined Botulism, after bolutus, the Latin for sausage. Later work showed that these bacteria, which…
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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings
Octopuses, crabs and lobsters will receive greater welfare protection in UK law following an LSE report which demonstrates that there is strong scientific evidence that these animals have the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm. The UK government has today confirmed that the scope of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill will be extended to…
