Hello, friends!

Squid, turtles and birds have me. Hesitate after me, and you’ll find me in a lab. What am I?

Answer in a moment, but f- *record scratch*

💃🏽 It’s my party: Eee, another of my questions was on Lateral! Listen to Tom Scott, Davina Bentley, Ólafur Waage and Stuart Laws work out why every day, a man called David buys a newspaper he knows he won’t read.

Right! Let’s get into the things.

1. Illustrator Pedro Salgado created this stunningly detailed – and scientifically accurate – drawing of a bluefin tuna over the course of 110 hours. The work required heading out on a fishing boat in the dead of night, taking many, many, photographs of the caught specimen, manipulating sketches to create an anatomically true form, and painstakingly reproducing the animal’s surface texture with ink and blade. It’s incredible.

+ And here’s how not to do it.

2. France has a network of ecological corridors that connect wildlife’s natural habitats. There are green corridors (forests, fields) and blue corridors (waterways), as well as dark corridors, where artificial light is reduced to protect nocturnal species including bats, birds and insects.

+ “Noctalgia”, or sky grief, is the feeling of sadness for the loss of dark skies. The term was coined in 2023 by astronomers Aparna Venkatesan and John C. Barentine.

3. Animal-assisted therapy got its start by accident in 1953, when psychologist Boris M. Levinson found that a withdrawn child would open up and talk to his dog Jingles. He writes in “The dog as a ‘co-therapist’”: “After a while the child inquired whether the dog always played with children who came to my office. Reassured by my affirmative answer, the child expressed a desire to return and play with the dog. It is anyone’s guess what might have been the child’s reaction had the dog not been present that morning.”

+ The first “...walks into a bar” joke might have been about a dog. It was written in Sumerian on a clay tablet about 4,000 years ago, and goes: “A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’” What makes it funny? We don’t know. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dig into it, what makes jokes funny, and whether it’s even a joke, with a suite of experts in this episode of Endless Thread.

4. Goats, which tend to bash their heads into things and each other, could help us learn about the link between head injuries and neurodegeneration in humans. Over the course of six months, the three goats in this study – Alvin, Simon, and Theo – clocked up an average of 227 head butts a day.

+ Sheep defy cattle grid.

5. The Minoans built the first flushing toilet and sewage system 4,000 years ago. (It’s worth sticking around for all of this article, adapted from Lina Zeldovich’s The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health. A great toilet read in every sense.)

+ …and the Romans wiped with a sea sponge on a stick. This tool, called a tersorium, which would be dipped into a gutter supplying clean flowing water. Neat. But the tersoria were probably reused and shared, Zeldovich continues. Not so neat.

Science talks and lectures from Monday 27 July to Sunday 2 August.

Linnaeus’ ‘floral clock’: telling time by living blooms, with Cathy Haynes and Sylvain Aubry, Linnean Society, Wednesday 29 July, 13.00 BST, free #botany

“It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” – psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott

The answer to the riddle was beak. Add the hesitation “er”, and you get beaker – a lab staple.

Thanks for coming, and see you next week! x

PS: In this year’s Great Goat Graze-Off, who will be the GOAT? Watch New York goats Big Buddy, Romeo, and Mallomar chomp through as many invasive weeds as they can in three minutes. “They do not fight evil. They consume it,” booms Major League Eating announcer George Shea, taking good care of proceedings.

Awesome goat intros start here, and the chow down starts here.