Tasty ants, storm-chasing birds, and mathematical art

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

1. There is a man in northern Bosnia whose house was hit by five meteorites in less than two years. The man in question, Radivoke Lajic, says he’s being targeted by aliens. Scientists are studying the magnetic fields around his house to try to explain the anomaly, writes Mark Miodownik in Stuff Matters.

2. Muscles themselves have memory. “When we move a muscle, the movement may appear to begin and end, but these little changes are actually continuing to happen inside our muscle cells. And the more we move, as with riding a bike or other kinds of exercise, the more those cells begin to make a memory of that exercise,” explains Bonnie Tsui in this article for MIT Technology Review.

3. How to tell the difference between an eel and a hagfish. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” writes deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler, quoting biologist Milton Love. “Is it completely covered in slime? Then it’s a hagfish.”

4. Ants communicate through chemicals, which can smell like chocolate, blue cheese, citronella, and many other things. The Nordic Food Lab in Denmark, an organisation “that investigates food diversity and deliciousness”, is looking into how to incorporate ants and their flavours into tasty dishes.

5. There is a piece of sidewalk in Chicago with a perfect impression of a rat in it. But it probably wasn’t made by a rat. Researchers used palaeontological techniques to work out that it was probably – spoiler alert – a squirrel that made the hole. (Oh, and that hole has been lovingly named “Splatatouille.”)

6. If you want to get 20 people to clear a room faster, put an obstacle near the door. Under certain conditions, people start to act like particles, and the laws of physics kick in, reporter Ari Daniel finds when hanging with applied physicist Iker Zuriguel in this programme for NPR. Zuriguel is studying how people and particles move in order to improve public safety.

7. Venoms provide an ideal template for drug development. They’re perfectly adapted to find targets while evading the body’s natural defences, explains Andrew Zaleski in this article about how a lizard venom led to the development of Ozempic. From the same Popular Mechanics article…

8. A Gila monster can get all the energy it needs in a year from three or four meals. It stores the energy as fat deposits in its tail.

9. Desertas petrels chase tropical storms, seeking out the sea creatures they draw to the surface. Follow the journey of one such petrel named Marlo in this gorgeously illustrated piece for the Guardian.

10. There is an annual conference that looks at the maths in art, music, architecture, and culture. One exhibit at this year’s Bridges conference was ‘Fabric Hexaflexagon’, by retired maths teacher Jill Borcherds, a flat quilted geometric structure that reveals new faces with different folds. Watch and be mesmerised.

Thanks for coming! See you next week x