Helpful vultures, walking statues, and Isabella Rossellini being a seahorse

Hello, friends! Here are 10 things I didn’t know last week:

1. Isabella Rossellini made a series of short science docs about sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom. The series, called Seduce Me, playfully brings stories of animal courtship to life with real science, a liberal sprinkling of shadow puppets, and some cosplay by Rossellini herself. This one looks at seahorses. I’m confident it’ll be the most joyful thing you’ll see all day.

2. The huge Easter Island statues – called moai – may have been “walked” into position. Studying high-res models of the statues, anthropology professor Carl Lipo and his team identified the D-shaped bases and forward lean that would suit the structures to a rocking motion. Together, these features would make it possible for two small teams to shuffle the monoliths forward by alternately pulling on either side with ropes. They tried it out, managing to shift the 4.35-ton statues 100 metres in 40 minutes. (And they were good enough to film themselves doing it).

3. Straight after the total solar eclipse over the US on 8 April 2024, many confused birds started singing the dawn chorus. Analysis combining observations from more than 10,000 citizen scientist birders and locally recorded tweets (the ones made by birds) found that the eclipse, despite lasting only a few minutes, did convince about half of bird species that night had indeed fallen, and that it was a brand new day.

4. The world’s transistor production depends on material from a single mine in North Carolina. Spruce Pine produces an incredibly pure form of quartz that’s used to make crucibles for melting the silicon that will become our microchips and solar panels, explains Ed Conway in Material World. He writes: “‘Here’s something scary,’ says one veteran of the sector. ‘If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.’” From the same book…

5. To get a single bar’s worth of gold (400 troy ounces, or about 12.5 kg), you’d need to dig up about 5,000 tonnes of earth. That’s about the same weight as 10 fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos.

6. Animal scavengers are protecting our health. “Vultures are really, really good at cleaning up dead bodies,” explains reporter Jonathan Lambert on NPR’s Short Wave podcast. “They can pick a cow carcass clean in under 40 minutes.” Why is this important? It means less pathogen-infested flesh hanging around, which can make us sick. I came out of this podcast with a new respect for the often demonised animal.

7. We have the “mini-Ice Age” of the 1700s to thank for the unique sound of Stradivarius violins. Seasonal conditions back then affected the density of the wood from which the violins are made, conditions we haven’t seen since. H/T tom t on Bluesky. And while we’re on wood…

8. A molecule called lignin is responsible for all the coal, ever. Lignin is a long molecule that gives trees their rigidity. After the molecule emerged on the plant scene about 360 million years ago, folding itself into cell walls, and letting trees reach staggering heights, it would be 60 million years before any microbes worked out how to eat it. In the meantime, the trees would just die and pile up, not decomposing, being crushed under their own weight, and eventually forming coal.

9. There are four small rice paddies in Cambridgeshire almost ready for their first harvest. They’re part of an experiment that aims to work out what crops could be grown in the UK’s warming climate.

10. In 1974, avant-garde arts and architecture collective Ant Farm drew up the plans for a floating research vessel called the Dolphin Embassy. Sadly never realised, the structure featured chutes, allowing dolphins to swim between floors, and a “land/water living room”, where the two species could hang. The project aimed to investigate the relationship between humans and dolphins.

Thanks for coming! See you next week x