did you know that penguin poop can produce laughing gas researchers based in denmark and china were studying the effects of king penguins on the environment when they began to feel loopy it turned out they had been breathing nitrous oxide that formed from penguin guano breaking down in the environment as professor beau elberling said quote after nosing about in guano for several hours one goes completely cuckoo it is truly intense hi i'm erin mccarthy editor-in-chief of mental floss.com and welcome to the list show from my living room the psychoactive potential of penguin poo is just the first of 100 fascinating facts we learned in 2020 that i'm going to share with you today animals can do more than get scientists high with their excrement the world learned of the heroics of an african giant pouched rat in cambodia this year magawa the rat was rewarded a prestigious gold medal for saving lives by sniffing out unexploded landmines we also learned that some wolf puppies like to play fetch researchers from stockholm university in sweden published a study demonstrating that three wolf pups would play something resembling fetch even with a stranger the fact that these three puppies all belong to the same litter while unrelated wolves seemed uninterested in fetch suggests that this type of playfulness may be an inherited trait in wolves in february researchers from saint cloud university in minnesota shed light literally on a phenomenon thought to be rare among amphibians it turns out that most if not all species of amphibians biofluoresce under certain lighting conditions kind of like nature's psychedelic black light posters scientists don't know why frogs and newts glow green but speculate that biofluorescence may be an aid for locating each other on the forest floor back in the ever fertile world of animal excrement we learned that not unlike humans cows poop whole corn kernels this came as a bit of a surprise since cows are ruminants a group of animals that have a number of physiological traits that help them break down the tough plant matter in their diet and while they're not consuming the same corn as human beings if the thin exterior of a corn kernel can pass through their digestive system unscathed it means the grain is especially resilient in a story that is hopefully completely unrelated 2020 taught us what happens when you have a massive popcorn surplus when covet 19 forced the mass closure of movie theaters across the nation farmers suddenly found themselves with mountains of unsold popcorn kernels with no customers in sight preferred popcorn one of the largest popcorn distributors in the u.s had to build seven silos to store the excess supply that's about 80 million theater tubs worth the company also turned to the internet to sell 30 and 50 pound bags of the stuff so it might be time to grab your credit card and queue up some netflix and if you're roughly one pandemic's worth of time behind the zeitgeist maybe you'll want to check out tiger king the show taught us a lot about something presumably but in the aftermath of the viral series we also learned the music heard in joe exotic's ridiculous music videos was shockingly not performed by him the vocals were recorded by musicians vince johnson and danny clinton who gave joe the songs to use on a proposed reality series but didn't know he would lip-sync to them among other things the series describes the unusual circumstances surrounding the 1997 disappearance of carol baskin's first husband don lewis joe exotic repeatedly accused baskin of murdering her husband so she could inherit his money and in june we learned from hillsborough county sheriff chad chronister that two handwriting experts he consulted deemed lewis's will of forgery with a signature from lewis that appeared to have been traced from a 1991 marriage document in happier news related to predatory animals we found out that wolverines were spotted in mount rainier national park for the first time in more than a century according to the cascades carnivore project and park officials wolverines need snowpack to build dens and cash prey making them vulnerable to the effects of climate change by the way that's cash-like store for later use not like cash me outside i'm a belligerent wolverine anyway the detection of the wolverine mom and her two kits in the forest of washington is a good sign for the species and during the late spring we officially welcomed the not at all melodramatically dubbed murder hornet to u.s soil the up to two inch long pest has a sting that one victim described as red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh it was spotted in washington state and while it isn't likely to kill many human beings it poses a serious threat to the region's honeybees murder hornets are so named because they like to decapitate all the bees in a hive and then feed the bodies to their offspring honestly same what do you get when you cross an american paddlefish with a russian sturgeon the answer as we learned this year is a sturdy fish the latest happy accident from the field of ichthyology scientists at hungary's research institute for fisheries and aquaculture were trying to breed sturgeon asexually when they united paddlefish sperm and sturgeon eggs producing a strange new hybrid the sturtlefish siblings don't all look alike but they do all eat meat like their mother since introducing a new kind of fish could negatively impact the area's native species the researchers are keeping their creations in the lab and they don't have plans to make anymore that last sentence will inevitably take on a new layer of irony next year as jurassic park like sturtlefish abominations wreak havoc on the world we learned that the pembroke welsh corgi is getting more popular as it cracked the top 10 of the american kennel club's list of most popular dog breeds for the first time ever this year to be clear that's the 2019 list that was published in 2020 it's kind of like how we never know what to call the oscars that happened in february of a given year with the key difference being that you can't take the adorable martin scorsese on walks in your neighborhood i can't prove that netflix is the crown caused the corgi breakthrough but i can say that it's hard to watch the show without wanting to get a corgi of your own we also learned one of elizabeth ii's greatest regrets of her decades-long reign this year in a new made-for-tv documentary royal expert ingrid seward said that it was elizabeth's delay in visiting the south wales village of abervan in the aftermath of a tragic 1966 mining disaster i by the way learned this year that the tragic event was the inspiration for the bg's first international hit song new york mining disaster 1941 which we talked about in our video detailing the unexpected origins of popular songs i realize it doesn't exactly fit the theme of this video but i've got 86 more facts to go so i'm gonna count it researchers at rudbad university medical center published an article this year indicating that bacteria from our planet would be able to survive on an extraterrestrial diet consisting of elements like nitrogen and phosphorus along with carbohydrates found in meteorites they found that the bacteria subsisting on this diet could mutate in a way that makes them less virulent but still potentially a risk for space travelers who are known to have compromised immune systems compared to human beings here on earth a more mundane discovery in the world of space exploration came from nasa in early october the space agency sent a payload from wallops island virginia to the international space station inside was what astronauts have been begging for for decades a new and improved toilet this new design is lighter than previous models but the real highlight is the sloped seat making it far more comfortable for women aboard the station after a trial run the design may be called into action for future lunar missions and in a move that will surely drive the science of flushing space toilets well into the future nasa presented their commercial invention of the year award to roboglove a special glove that can produce an additional 15 to 20 pounds of force for the wearer and up to 50 pounds in short bursts the plan is to eventually help astronauts combat physical fatigue while working with their hands in space the glove which is being developed by bioservo technologies in sweden will also be available to consumers at some point under the brand name ironhand on the subject of old stuff from space in 1969 a meteorite landed in australia and this year a study showed it contained traces of stardust from five to seven billion years ago the stardust from the meteorite is officially the oldest known solid material on earth it also smells like rotten peanut butter according to the scientists who studied it the idea of anything being that old is awe-inspiring but the real mystery to me is how scientists know what rotten peanut butter smells like here's a more appetizing space discovery this picture may look like a bucket of popcorn but it's actually an extremely detailed look at the surface of the sun each kernel-shaped blob you see is a plasma bubble that's roughly the size of texas captured by the daniel k in noe solar telescope this was the highest resolution photo of the sun ever when it was taken scientists discovered a new comet in 2020 the c2020 f3 neowize comet or comet neowise for short was first spotted by nasa's near earth object wide infrared survey explorer on march 27th it left the night sky a few months after it appeared if you missed it you'll have to be pretty patient and immortal neowise won't be visible from earth again for around 6 800 years it was also discovered that a comet can have its own northern lights data from the european space agency's rosetta mission has confirmed that comet 67p has a far ultraviolet aurora this marks the first case of documented far ultraviolet radiation on a celestial object that isn't a planet or moon fun fact from back here on earth the southern hemisphere's version of the aurora borealis is known as aurora australis you can see the southern lights from tasmania new zealand and antarctica amongst other places we didn't learn that in 2020 but it is from our 2021 amazing facts desk calendar which is filled with you guessed it 365 recipes for goulash sorry that's 365 fun and fascinating facts a second moon started orbiting earth up to three years ago but scientists didn't discover it until 2020. the object dubbed 2020 cd3 was no bigger than a compact car making it a mini moon any natural satellite that gets caught in a planet's orbit is technically a moon no matter how big or small it is sadly 2020 cd3 slipped from orbit just months after it was discovered making earth a one moon planet once again radar data from the european space agency's mars express spacecraft helped scientists identify three new possible bodies of water on mars this year the water is below the frozen surface of the planet so its existence is predicated on the researchers inferences about the data available to them being correct if they are though it would be evidence that makes the possibility of life on mars at some point more credible speaking of life on other planets astronomers this year discovered what they called a sign of life on venus the presence of phosphine in the venusian atmosphere could be explained by living organisms not all scientists are convinced of this conclusion or even of the presence of phosphine in the venusian atmosphere but if the discovery is verified it could give us another place to look for life beyond our planet that could lead to interesting discoveries in the future but some astronomical discoveries are actually about the past the gaia mission sent out to map the positions and velocities of about a billion stars to tell us about both the future and past of the milky way galaxy one insight announced in 2020 was about the encounters between the milky way and our smaller neighbor the sagittarius dwarf galaxy as the sgd enters the milky way's orbit the two entities interact in a way that's been described as a gravitational slam the researchers tried to map out the history and importance of these slams and called the sagittarius dwarf galaxy the main dynamical architect of the milky way disc there were even suggestions that the formation of our own sun might have been caused by one of these galactic encounters interactions between galaxies are one thing interactions between black holes are another a 2020 report published in the astrophysical journal letters announced that a team of researchers was able to accurately predict when a flare caused by the intersection of two black holes would occur within four hours the accuracy of this prediction may help confirm some of the underlying assumptions astronomers make about black holes such as their symmetry along their rotational axes and the nobel prize in physics this year was awarded to a black hole well okay it was awarded to three brilliant scientists but their work was all about these massive and slightly terrifying space anomalies it was awarded to roger penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity and to reinhard genzel and andrea gays for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy that object they believe is a black hole astronomy isn't the only way we can look into the past this year a whole lot of interesting things were dug up or announced in the field of paleontology among them the world's oldest known sperm cells dating back a hundred million years ago the cells were found in the reproductive tract of a small fossilized crustacean and are about twice as old as the previous record holder for fossilized sperm cells they were so-called giant sperm cells most animals including humans produce a large number of very small sperm cells but others like some types of fruit flies and these crustaceans produce a smaller number of sperm that can actually be longer than the animals themselves as one of the geobiologists who analyze the fossil said quote from an evolutionary point of view sexual reproduction with the aid of giant sperm must therefore be a thoroughly profitable strategy i appreciate the professor clarifying that she meant profitable in the context of evolution because that's one etsy store i really don't need to see and while we're on the subject of sperm because apparently the mental floss team is on a mission to embarrass me on the internet we learned new information about sperm motility in 2020.
ever since anthony von leyvenhook described sperm as a small earth nut that lashes its tail like that of a snake or an eel swimming in water in the late 17th century scientists have believed that they move by slithering and if you watch them in 2d that definitely seems correct but researchers from the uk and mexico recently captured their movement in 3d and found that they actually corkscrew like otters a sperm's tail can only move to one side so it propels itself forward by rotating its whole body from very small to very large we figured out the approximate size of a megalodon this year the ancient and monstrous shark species has been the subject of curiosity for years now but researchers at the university of bristol have now gotten a good idea of its full size according to their research the megalodon would be about 52 feet long it's head alone about 15 feet with a dorsal fin that's about as tall as i am its bite would have had the strength of 10 tons of force i don't care if it's been extinct for millions of years i'm never swimming in the ocean again a team at mcmaster university in ontario announced a new dna extraction method that allows them to pull the genomes of hundreds of animals and thousands of plants from less than a gram of soil this technique could help researchers fill in knowledge gaps left from the available fossil record and a team from yale used raman spectral analysis to analyze the chemicals of fossils in search of biochemical signatures that can give us new information about old fossils they've already been able to use the technology to differentiate for example between insect cuticle and vertebrate cartilage allowing them to identify an ancient creature known as the tully monster as a probable vertebrate on the subject of spectroscopy researchers at the university of tokyo developed a new method of the chemical analysis process that is about a hundred times faster than the current standard while this probably isn't super important when analyzing fossils it could have important implications for exploring the stages of certain chemical reactions that happen on very short time scales as sciencedaily explained this could provide better insights on short-lasting chemical processes like combustion by measuring a large number of events within a short time it could also enable improvements in biomedicine like liquid biopsies of human blood which may eventually prove preferable to the current standard of tissue biopsies when trying to detect cancer in september findings related to the 13 million year old fossil of a newly discovered ape were published in the proceedings of the royal society b this ancestor of modern day apes could give us new information about the migration history of gibbons its discovery relied on considerably less advanced technology than novel dna extraction methods or raman spectroscopy hunter college's christopher gilbert just happened to see a primate tooth shining in a small pile of dirt while he was pausing for a rest a powerful argument for stopping to smell the 13 million year old primate teeth we also learned this year that juvenile titanosaurus had an elongated snout or horn that may have helped babies break through their shell this new insight was enabled by the discovery of a remarkably preserved embryo another long-necked creature from the past was demystified this year when scientists used ct scans to conclude that tanastrophius a prehistoric reptile with a 10-foot neck lived underwater features like nostrils on top of the snout like a crocodiles led to this conclusion and to my nightmares of a 20-foot long water monster with a scary long neck back in 2011 chilean scientists unearthed a mysterious football-sized fossil in northern antarctica and nicknamed it the thing this year a study published in nature revealed what it was the largest soft-shelled egg ever found and the first fossil egg discovered in antarctica scientists believed it may have belonged to a mosasaur a marine reptile that lived in the late cretaceous period and could grow as long as 50 feet if it is a mosasaur egg that means not all mosasaurs gave birth to eggless offspring as was previously thought though scientists did speculate that the thing may have hatched virtually instantly new research was also published this year identifying the first ever known case of a malignant cancer found in a dinosaur one of the researchers called the finding very exciting but not you know if you're the dinosaur in better news for organisms that are millions of years old a study published in july showed that microbes roughly 100 million years old could be coaxed back into growing and were even capable of eating and multiplying let's move a little closer to the present a study published in june proposed a connection between a volcanic eruption in alaska and the fall of the roman republic around 43 bce according to an analysis of ice cores ash from the massive eruption entered earth's atmosphere and caused widespread climate change leading to crop failures and famine in europe those forces may have exacerbated rome's civil unrest following the assassination of julius caesar in 44 bce and hastened the republic's dissolution speaking of ice greenland home to the northern hemisphere's largest ice sheet lost 600 billion tons of ice over the unusually warm arctic summer of 2019. according to nasa this was enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters the small town of verhoyenska in siberia has a monument designating it as one of the coldest places on earth with winter temperatures routinely exceeding 50 degrees below zero june temperatures are much warmer around 68 degrees fahrenheit but a 100 degree day is almost unheard of almost this past june rajoyensko recorded a record high for siberia 100.4 degrees fahrenheit the official culprit was a heat dome which happens when a ridge of high atmospheric pressure sits above an area and keeps heat from escaping that said large regions of siberia experienced abnormally high temperatures this year which you can blame on climate change in february canadian archaeologists announced that they had found a motherload of artifacts in a famous arctic shipwreck the hms erebus one of two ships carrying sir john franklin and a crew of 128 sailors on a doomed quest for the northwest passage disappeared in the 1840s when the wreck was located in 2014 divers began studying it for clues to the premature demise of the expedition's crew this year they retrieved more than 350 objects including dishware ceiling wax and a pair of epaulettes from a naval uniform titanic sank in 1912 and we may have learned something new about its final hours in 2020. according to first-hand accounts the northern lights were visible over the waters where the ship went down that night the lights didn't have anything to do with the accident but the solar storm that produced them may have been a factor the same solar activity that causes the aurora borealis to light up can also influence magnetic equipment and radio waves a study released this year posited that interference with the compass aboard the titanic may have led the ship off course into the path of the fateful iceberg after that the same solar storm could have theoretically contributed to the radio interference the ship experienced as it tried to make a distress call this entire theory flies in the face of my supposition that the ship's lookouts were distracted by the makeout session going on between jack dawson and rose dewitt decatur i fought for that titanic joke near far in another freezing part of the northern hemisphere specifically russia archaeologists announced a bizarre and mysterious discovery in march a huge circular structure of mammoth bones at the site about 300 miles south of moscow scientists said the circle which has a 40 foot diameter have been constructed with the skeletons of about 60 mammoths roughly 25 000 years ago why did this happen the tragic results of the world's first mammoth-based game of zip-zabs up nope i'm seeing here the answer is scientists aren't sure speaking of super old human-made objects we might finally know where stonehenge's largest stones actually came from a question that had been debated for years researchers tested the chemical signatures of stonehenge's biggest blocks and found they almost all had similar makeup so they likely originated from the same location then they compared the stone's signature to those of rocks from quarries all over england and matched it to a site about 15 miles north of stonehenge mystery mostly solved the origins of two of the 52 stones sampled remain unknown the final resting place of the uss nevada was another mystery solved in 2020.
the world war ii battleship survived the attack on pearl harbor and went on to fight on d-day in normandy and in the battles of okinawa and iwoma after the war it participated in the first atomic detonations on bikini atoll but in 1948 the navy sunk the potentially radioactive ship off of the coast of hawaii in may archaeologists located the nevada 15 000 feet below the surface in february the uk parliament shared that a long forgotten passage in london's westminster hall had been found after historical consultants found old plans for a doorway the passage which was likely built for charles ii's coronation in the early 1660s leads from westminster's west cloister right into the hall parliament members probably used it as a shortcut before it was presumably sealed sometime after world war ii there's even some 19th century graffiti on the walls one message reads this room was enclosed by tom porter who was very fond of old ale and renovations at oxboro hall in norfolk england unearthed two centuries-old rat nests filled with a frankly admirable cache of stolen goods sometime between the 1500s and 1700s these greedy rodents pilfered more than 200 swatches of precious textiles fragments of handwritten sheet music and even parts of a valuable catholic psalm book from 1568. the discovery supported the belief that the estate's human residents the betting fields were both extravagant and deeply religious as for the excavation project itself archaeologist matthew champion called it utterly filthy work a more recent artifact was unearthed when ernest hemingway's grandson sean found an unpublished short story by his grandfather titled pursuit as happiness believed to have been written between 1936 and 1956 it's about a fisherman hunting a huge marlin reminds me of that other hemingway classic the senior fellow in the ocean another long forgotten piece of writing was rediscovered this year and taught us a bit about the long-running debate over the role of monuments in shaping the united states history a letter from frederick douglass was discovered by scott sandage of carnegie mellon university douglas wrote in 1876 about a statue portraying abraham lincoln standing over a shirtless hunched over newly emancipated man the famed abolitionist says the monument quote does not as it seems to me tell the whole truth of emancipation his ambivalence towards the statue presages perhaps the contentious conversations that continue to unfold about how best to memorialize our nation's past an incomplete story by louisa may alcott sat hidden in harvard university's houghton library archives until strand magazine managing editor andrew julie came across it this year aunt nelly's diary which alcott wrote when she was just 17 years old follows two friends who vie for the affections of a dashing young man named edward clifford you'll have to decide for yourself who wins is hard in the end the story cuts off right in the middle of a sentence another unpublished manuscript from an esteemed author surfaced this year a 53-page sequel to philip roth's 1972 novella the breast written by roth was offered through the auction house bonhams in march and if you're a twilight fan you'll be happy to know the story isn't quite over author stephanie meyer who some say is the philip roth of young adult vampire romance sagas published midnight sun this year which relates the story of a vampire human romance from edward cullen's point of view meyer was working on it in 2008 but an online leak led her to hold off meyer has said that she has two more twilight books planned in his 2010 autobiography titled the thrill of the chase art dealer forrest fenn dropped clues as to the whereabouts of a treasure chest he had hidden somewhere in the rocky mountains that contained gold jewelry and other valuables worth more than one million dollars what could have been purely a fun story of an eccentric endeavor turned out to have a dark side at least five people lost their lives in pursuit of the treasure in june 2020 though someone finally found it fenn announced the man who did not wish to be identified located the treasure based in part on a 24-line poem found in the book fenn knew the man was telling the truth because he received a photograph of the discovery the saga of one of the biggest book heists in history came to a satisfying conclusion this year three years after they were stolen from a london warehouse 200 rare books were found buried under a house in romania the stash included works by isaac newton and galileo adding up to 3.2 million dollars in total value the recovery was the result of tireless work by investigators in italy romania and the uk in his book the office the untold story of the greatest sitcom of the 2000s author andy green revealed that breaking bad and better call saul star bob odenkirk was close to getting the role of michael scott which ultimately went to steve carell paul rudd and colin hanks were considered for the part of jim in other office news jenna fischer disclosed what was written on the note that jim gave pam that was stuffed inside of a teapot during the second season a note that pam didn't read until the ninth and final season on her podcast the office ladies fisher said that the note which viewers never see was actually a genuine farewell message to her written by john krasinski a bonus feature included on the home video release of star wars the rise of skywalker pulled the curtain back on a very cool cameo you probably missed sally guinness the granddaughter of obi-wan kenobi actor alec guinness played an officer but she wasn't part of the resistance the younger guinness was a first order loyalist not everyone was satisfied with the conclusion of hbo's game of thrones in 2019 to put it mildly according to george rr martin who wrote the book series the show was based on things could have been a little different you could have watched the ending in a theater in january 2020 martin told german media outlet veldt that there were discussions about ending the series with the trilogy of feature films ultimately of course the story wrapped up on television or hbo are they still using that slogan if you enjoyed joaquin phoenix's performance in 2019's joker you might be interested to know he could have been part of the batman universe much earlier in a 2020 interview with empire magazine director darren aronofsky said that when he was developing a batman film years prior he wanted phoenix to play the dark knight one of the strangest relics in video game history hit the auction block earlier this year and it went for a cool three hundred thousand dollars plus an additional sixty thousand dollar buyer's fee the piece in question was the nintendo playstation and no i didn't just misspeak this gaming console was to be the end result of a proposed partnership between sony and nintendo in the early 90s and the auction item was one of the original prototypes the deal fell apart when nintendo backed out and struck an agreement for a cd-rom console with phillips sony went on to produce the playstation solo and well they did just fine how much would it cost to live in the original golden girls house the answer as we learned this year is about 4 million the house whose exterior introduced many as seen in the iconic series was put on the market for the first time ever in july of this year though the show takes place in miami the house is in los angeles and went for over a million dollars over its original asking price no word on whether cheesecake was included it's not quite as critical as knowing how much an old house using a sitcom's establishing shots can fetch on the open market but the ability to measure temperature accurately even when that temperature is only tens of billionths of a degree above zero kelvin is important in specific settings like conducting quantum experiments and harnessing quantum technologies to address this challenge researchers developed a thermometer for ultra cold gases that consist of just a single atom they publish their work this year and for decades scientists have been interested in a group of metal oxides that are able to store more energy than should theoretically be possible now in a technique called in-situ magnetometry an international research team co-led by the university of texas has shown that energy can be stored inside these transition metal oxides in a way that materials used in today's lithium-ion batteries are unable to do this could eventually lead to smaller more powerful batteries from a better battery to better screens for electronics or at least hopefully more environmentally friendly screens this year researchers developed a flexible film made out of fish scales instead of the more common types of plastic that are used as substrates for electronic displays since fish scales are often wasted the scientists hope that this will prove to be a more eco-friendly material at a reasonably low cost at the january consumer electronics show a company named manta 5 debuted their manta 5 hydrofoiler xe1 a bike that can propel you across water using pedals instead of wheels it has hydrofoils which create lift when water passes over them the bike has a retail price of nine thousand dollars are you sick of your car's clunky sun visors clocking you on the forehead you may not have to deal with them for much longer at the ces trade show this year bosch took home an innovation award for their virtual visor the device is see-through and blocks only the sunlight coming through so you can see more of the road it will even track your eyes as you move to make sure the sun stays out of your field of vision it's still in development but may one day become an option for consumer car purchases sony announced the release of a wearable air conditioner this year that can fit under your clothes called the sony re-unpocket this device can lower a person's surface temperature by up to 23 degrees and is controlled through an app also this year robots were developed that can give people personalized massages with varying levels of firmness and very little human contact people who sampled the technology were reportedly apprehensive at first understandable you know since you have a lifeless automaton pushing down on your back but they got over it fairly quickly speaking of robots engineers at the university of california san diego this year invented a squid bot the robot can swim freely underwater by generating jets of water to propel itself by attaching sensors and cameras the squidbot can be used for underwater exploration belgium has a bold new butter alternative insect larva ghent university researchers blended waterlogged black soldier fly larvae together and then used a centrifuge to extract a greasy substance that you can spread on toast they're still working out how to actually make it taste good but it supposedly works pretty well for baked goods if you mix it with actual butter taste testers reported that cakes with 1 4 insect butter and 3 4 regular butter were normal but a half and half cake tasted unusual enough that they wouldn't buy it if scientists can work out the flavor issues insect butter could end up being a healthy eco-friendly option and it's not exactly a new invention but we learned this year that you can now officially paint your bedroom a shade of blue called swim cap or a shade of green called forest elf earlier this year pantone added 315 new hues to its fashion home and interiors color system including 50 pinks and a whopping 70 blues the renaissance master painter raphael tragically never had access to forest elf and to add insult to injury for 500 years there's been a popular theory about his untimely death at age 37 that his promiscuity led to a deadly case of syphilis but according to a new study published in internal and emergency medicine the facts don't really add up for that diagnosis raphael reportedly suffered a severe fever for as long as two weeks which wouldn't have been a symptom of syphilis or any other venereal disease the researchers suggested that raphael may have come down with pneumonia which his physician tried to treat with bloodletting likely not knowing the cause of the illness themselves the loss of blood may have weakened him enough to ruin any chance of recovery in 2020 the journal annals of mathematics published a proof of the conway knot a problem that stumped geometry experts for decades it took then university of texas grad student lisa picarillo less than a week to demonstrate that quote the conway knot is not slice this completes the classification of slice knots under 13 crossings and gives the first example of a non-sliced knot which is both topologically sliced and a positive mutant of a slice knot i'd explain that but my producers are informing me that i have no idea what it means looks cool though and researchers at texas a m university developed a mathematical model to help engineers build safer planes after the 2019 crash of a boeing 737 max it was discovered that a failed pressure sensor was potentially the cause of the disaster this new model aims to aid engineers in selecting the right types and placements of sensors on planes in order to maximize safety and efficiency for years australian fairy circles were one of earth's unexplainable phenomena alan turing offered up a model explaining how strongly structured patterns like the fairy circles could emerge in nature his model explained that random disturbances in certain climates along with a reaction diffusion mechanism could be the cause this year researchers from several different countries tested the turing pattern theory using drones and data recording from weather stations finding that in the case of the fairy circles this reaction diffusion was responsible touring advanced mathematics in a number of ways but we now know how many math problems it's possible to solve in a minute thanks to nadub gill the 10 year old boy broke a guinness world record this year when he completed 196 problems in less than 60 seconds and scientists finally solved a 90 year old geometry problem this year maybe they should have gotten the 10 year old kid on it to save some time it was a particular section of mathematician edward ott heinrich keller's conjecture that had been an unsolvable puzzle for nearly a century but computer scientists at carnegie mellon university finally cracked it they used a computer program known as a sat solver to test the conjecture and after four months of programming and 30 minutes of computing they got the results proving the conjecture true in regards to areas in the seventh dimension believe me i don't understand it either but i had to include it for these bittersweet words from one of the professors who had been studying the problem for the last 30 years i was really happy when we solved it but then i was a little sad that the problem was gone oh also gone in 2020 holland well not north and south holland two of the netherlands provinces but people have long used the name holland when talking about the whole country and in january officials announced that this was now verboten the government is replacing holland with the netherlands everywhere government buildings universities companies marketing materials and so on since north and south holland boasts high traffic destinations like amsterdam and the hague the area was on the verge of an over tourism crisis popularizing the term the netherlands is a way to remind possible visitors that there are other places to go within the country okay we've been dancing around the biggest story of 2020 long enough it's time to finally address harry and megan stepping away from their roles as senior members of the royal family among other things we learned that there's a very interesting definition of financially independent when you're royalty which can include millions of dollars of inheritance alright the real story i was trying to avoid is the novel coronavirus aka kovid19 let's get this over with as quickly as possible by which i mean both this section of the video and this pandemic we learned that covet 19 is zoonotic that means it's a virus that first infected animals then jumped to people we know it's not the flu and that there's a relatively small risk of food packaging transmitting the virus so you probably don't have to wipe down your groceries with antiseptic wipes like i was doing in the middle of march we know that fewer people are dying of the virus than died during the devastating 1918 flu pandemic but the kovh 19 has taken more lives than any flu season since then we learned what social distancing means that most of us have been washing our hands all wrong for years and that maybe we should have appreciated those silly little office traditions a little bit more i cannot tell you what i would give right now to sign the birthday card of someone i have never met enjoy your day bob or bill or whatever your name is and if you found yourself craving nature while being stuck indoors your gut microbiome may have been to blame that's the theory laid out in a new study released this year anyway according to this new theory when our gut microbiome is starved for environmental microbiota it hijacks our brain to promote our nature seeking instincts this is called the love bug effect exposure to nature's microbes may boost our immune system and our mental health that could even explain why we're attracted to the smell of rain that scent known as petrichor is mostly the smell of rain hitting bacterial spores in the soil researchers discovered that when it comes to socially distanced restaurant seating customers prefer partitions between tables to unused table sat with mannequins i don't know why we needed a study to tell us this but we got one anyway let's move on to some good news the american cancer society announced in january that the number of deaths from cancer in the u.s dropped 2.2 between 2016 and 2017 the biggest one-year decrease in history the main driver behind the improvement was the decrease in deaths from lung cancer thanks in part to the decline in smoking and breakthrough immunotherapies that have saved lives and while you're kicking that nasty smoking habit maybe consider giving the black licorice a rest too in september the new england journal of medicine reported a case of death by black licorice a 54 year old man who had eaten a bag and a half of black licorice every day for weeks died from sudden heart failure and physicians determined that the man odd on glycerizic acid a compound in licorice root that can in large quantities cause high blood pressure cardiac irregularities and dangerous electrolyte imbalances the case in question may be a tragic outlier but the fda does say that quote if you're 40 or older eating two ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could land you in the hospital with an irregular heart rhythm or arrhythmia in october 2020 microbiologist emmanuel charpentier and biochemist jennifer a dudna made history as the first pair of women to jointly win the nobel prize in chemistry the duo received the honor for discovering the crispr gene editing tool in 2012 which was described by the fine folks at the royal swedish academy of sciences as genetic scissors that mean researchers can change the dna of animals plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision since its discovery the tool has been used in clinical trials for new cancer therapies and may have extensive applications in agriculture we also relearned the lesson that science beef will never die as scientists argued over who really deserves the credit for crispr technology while charpentier and dudena unlocked the so-called basic science behind the tool molecular biologist feng zhang translated the work to mammalian cells and the two sides have been engaged in years of high profile patent fights some feel lithuanian researcher virginia chiknis was unfairly denied publication of his own independent findings which were similar to charpentier and dudenas perhaps because he works for a less prestigious institution could we celebrate all of these scientists for their groundbreaking work sure but where's the fun in that give me that science beef some groundbreaking work happened involving memory this year a research team discovered that there are two distinct processes occurring during memory consolidation in the brain one involving the excitatory network and the other involving inhibitory networks this insight could prove important for future therapeutic interventions for disorders like alzheimer's disease we finally figured out the best time to drink coffee researchers from the university of bath in the uk discover that drinking coffee first thing in the morning after a night of poor sleep has negative effects on blood sugar levels subjects of the study who drank strong black coffee before eating had up to 50 increased blood glucose responses to their breakfast that could be concerning especially if you're susceptible to diabetes and heart disease you heard it here drink your coffee after you're done eating one of the weirder things we learned this year is that people are more likely to see ufos when they're stuck at home sightings of unidentified flying objects rose by 51 in 2020 over the same time period last year according to the wall street journal when people get bored of baking bread and playing animal crossing they apparently look to the skies in february we learned that a human being can pole vault 20 feet 3 inches this wasn't exactly a bombshell given that it eclipsed the previous record by just one centimeter but considering the olympics were canceled this year let's take the opportunity to shout out louisiana's armand duplantis even if he does represent sweden at the international level and while we're giving shout outs let's give one to matt barry who along with the creative team of the incredible what we do in the shadows tv show taught us all how regular human bartenders from tucson arizona behave and one shout out in the non-human category to yangying and lala two giant pandas in hong kong's ocean park who in the words of the zoo succeeded in natural mating for the first time after more than a decade of staff efforts to get the two pandas together by september it was confirmed that ying ying was not pregnant but surely the world has earned the right to some good news about a panda baby in 2021 finally a study came out this year showing that skin covered by a tattoo produces roughly 15 percent less sweat than skin without one on the same person it may be a result of the needle damaging glands during the inking process and it gives me a reason to reconsider the neck tattoo i was planning on getting that said i managed to shoot 40 youtube videos in a tiny apartment without killing my husband this year and all i got was this lousy neck tattoo wow our next episode is all about weird historical weapons drop one in the comments for a chance to be featured in that video or if you made it this far i don't know just write down your pet's name it's been a long year here's to a better 2021 and thanks as always for watching mental floss we'll see you soon
2020-12-18