Galileo's severed finger, LEGO dinosaurs, and pigonometry

Hello, friends!

And welcome, new friends! Thanks for joining us from the blessed realms of The Kid Should See This and Science Answers. I’m so happy you’re here!

I’m trying something a bit different from here on in – I’ll be sharing 10 things I learnt this week that I’m dying to share (and, on occasion, the rabbit holes they opened).

For the first time, and as ever, let’s go!

1. One of Galileo’s fingers is on display in a Florence museum. His corpse was relieved of the digit in 1737, almost 100 years after he died (in 1642, incidentally when Isaac Newton was born. Insert conspiracy theory here). The University of Padua has one of his index fingers, and a vertebra for good measure. According to a witness to the severance, the nobleman who snagged the fingers did so because Galileo “wrote so many beautiful things with them”. And yep, that linked article has a picture of the finger.

2. A mathematics professor used trigonometry to win a farm’s court case against a hot air ballooning company. The farmers argued that one of the company’s balloons had flown too close to their farm, spooking their pigs and causing a stampede. Using just a photograph of the balloon taken on the day, and good ol’ trigonometry, the University of York’s Professor Chris Fewster could work out that the balloon was indeed flying below its minimum allowed altitude of 750m. In 2014, the farmers were awarded £38,000 in damages. This story found its way to me via the ‘Pigonometry’ chapter of Matt Parker’s Love Triangle, and pleasingly just in time for Pythagorean Triple Square Day (9/16/25 in American), a once-a-century event that fell on Tuesday.

3. Oh, and the year 2025 is a perfect square itself – 45 x 45.

4. Coriander (aka cilantro) tastes like soap to some because it contains aldehydes, chemicals that are also found in – you guessed it – soap. As flavour scientist Arielle Johnson explains in Flavorama (strong contender for my book of the year), a “large minority of eaters” have more aldehyde-sensing smell detectors than the average, which makes them more sensitive to the soapy flavour in the cursed herb. (So we’re right, basically. Ina Garten, Stephen Fry, me, we’re all right. You coriander eaters just can’t taste how wrong you are.)

5. Berlin-based artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas tracks ecological change by cataloguing and preserving smellscapes from around the world. I came across her work in this gorgeous article in Atmos about what we lose when climate change starts to snatch away the smells around us.

6. There’s a LEGO set of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs waiting to be made. (Oh, along with the 1851 Great Exhibition, which is also pretty cool.) It’s the work of designer Menapian, whose Instagram announcement of the set was scooped by the dinos’ keen guardians. At the time of writing, the project has 1,418 of the 10,000 supporters needed to get in front of the LEGO big cheeses. Come on, nerds. Let’s make this happen.

7. The government of South Australia has installed an underwater “bubble curtain” to protect cuttlefish from algal bloom. It’s hoped that the air bubbles forming the curtain will stop algae passing through and harming the cuttlefish that travel there to breed.

8. There’s a ship called the Léon Thévenin that hugs Africa’s coast, carrying expert workers who fix internet cables as soon as they break. Meet the ship’s crew in this Rest of World article.

9. Researchers have named the phenomenon where getting a medical diagnosis starts the healing process the “Rumpelstiltskin effect”.

10. Some potato chip makers have made their crisps, as well as the packets they come in, more noisy so that we’ll enjoy them more. As materials professor Mark Miodownik describes in his book Stuff Matters, studies of crispness have found that our enjoyment of some foods can depend as much on their sound as their taste.

11. Bonus! The pressure you need to force carbon atoms into a diamond is the equivalent of putting the Eiffel Tower upside down on a Coke can. Just one of the incredible things I learnt about diamond when writing this article for Ingenia, which went live this week. (It’s my party, etc.💃🏽)

Thanks for joining us! Just before I go, the answer to last edition’s teaser. It went:

The answer is Saturn. These clues describe the flat variety of peach also known as the Saturn peach, the Sega Saturn, the Saturn Awards, and the Saturn V, the humongous rocket that took us to the Moon.

(Speaking of Saturn the planet, have a look for it this weekend – it’ll be at its brightest on Sunday.)

See you next week! x