Playful bees, sleepy lemurs, and 96 lorries in formation

Hello, friends! Here are 10 things I discovered this week:

1. Lemurs may play a key role in human spaceflight. Lemurs are the closest relatives to us that can hibernate. Researchers at the Duke Lemur Center are studying them while they’re in their deep sleep to better understand how the process could translate to humans, and pave the way for longer journeys in space.

2. Parachutes can be pretty much all holes and still work. These funnel-shaped parachutes start out as flexible plastic discs with slits cut into them. As Imma Perfetto explains in this article for Cosmos, the slits open as the disc falls, which generates drag and results in a slow, controlled descent. The parachutes are inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami, and are hoped to become useful in delivering humanitarian aid.

3. Bears can pause their pregnancy until the conditions are right. The embryo will only implant after Momma Bear puts on enough weight. (Also, congratulations to Fat Bear Week winner Chunk. “Chunk’s ability to eat huge quantities of salmon and grow fat despite his debilitating injury [a broken jaw] led him to victory in the public competition,” the Guardian reported.)

4. Some plants can tell which their siblings are, and will rearrange their leaves to avoid shading them. This is just one of the incredible things I’ve learnt about plants in Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters (absolutely loving this book).

5. 96 weighted lorries were driven in formation over the world’s new highest bridge in a final test.

6. This recently rediscovered coffee variety is delicious *and* robust. Stenophylla was found in Sierra Leone in 2018 after years of searching, and researchers are excited about it because it tastes good and thrives at higher temperatures. “[Stenophylla] occurs in a completely different environment. It’s got black fruits instead of red fruits... if you’re a coffee nut, it’s kind of mind blowing,” Kew Gardens botanist Aaron Davis says in this Chemical & Engineering News article.

7. There’s a huge experiment in Biosphere 2 investigating how life transforms barren landscapes over time.

8. The smell of smoke in on a cold morning may indicate a temperature inversion – when a layer of warmer air is sandwiched between two areas of cooler air. As Tristan Gooley explains in The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs, this traps the smoke from factories and home fires (I guess he’s in a rural setting) near the ground.

9. Transactions on quantum computers – when we’re able to make them – will be unhackable due to something called the no-cloning theorem. “It’s not allowed by the laws of physics,” Nobel laureate William Phillips explains in an interview for Physics World. (If you want to know exactly why, and you like proofs, and you have 10 minutes, minutephysics has you covered (along with a CGP Grey easter egg).)

10. Bees will roll little balls around, seemingly just for the fun of it. Of course there’s a video.

Thanks for coming! See you next week x