Flashing Palely in the Margins
Things I learned these past few months
Below, a quick roundup of a few of the things I learned over the past few months.
It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 2025, every single one of them — including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. (Grist)
On the early months od 2025, all seven of the other planets in the Solar System will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all lining up in a neat row — known as a great planetary alignment. (ScienceAlert)
Global electric-vehicle sales rose 25% to a record 17 million cars in 2024. (Semafor)
Sea turtle populations are booming worldwide. Loggerhead nests off the northwest African coast have jumped to 35,000 in 2020 from 500 in 2008. Kemp’s ridley nests have grown to 17,000 in 2022 from 702 in 1985, and a 2023 survey discovered 150,000 green turtle nests in New Caledonia. (Bloomberg)
Human ancestors like Australopithecus — which lived around 3.5 million years ago in southern Africa — ate very little to no meat. (Wits University)
A new storage technique can keep protein-based drugs and vaccines stable without keeping them cold. The discovery could eliminate the need for refrigeration for hundreds of life-saving medicines like insulin, monoclonal antibodies and viral vaccines. (Penn State)
Archaeologists are finding dugout canoes in the American Midwest as old as the great pyramids of Egypt. (Smithsonian)
Forestalgia-focused destination ads — those that emphasize an idealized future — are more effective at enticing travelers to click the purchase button for a vacation than ads based on fond recollections. (WSU)
Purple exists only in our brains: Purple is a mix of red (long) and blue (short) wavelengths. Those colors are on opposite ends of the spectrum. To cope, the brain improvises. It takes the visible spectrum — usually a straight line — and bends it into a circle. This puts blue and red next to each other. (ScienceNewsExplores)
Since the pandemic, human challenge trials—drug trials that purposely make people vomit, shiver and ache—have become a research area of growing interest. (NYTimes)
Billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024 alone, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day, at a rate three times faster than the year before. An average of nearly four new billionaires were minted every week. (Oxfam)
OverDrive, which provides apps for digital borrowing of e-books, audiobooks and magazines, reported that worldwide borrowing totalled more than 739 million checkouts at the libraries and schools that use its Libby and Sora apps. (Publishers Weekly)
Over the past 20 years, archaeologists working in the Amazon have found evidence of an ancient civilization that reached a peak population of 1 million around 150 CE. (RTVE)
Canada’s wind, solar, and energy storage capacity grew 46% in five years. Since 2020, the industry increased its installed capacity by nearly 7.6 GW. This includes over 4.7 GW of new utility-scale wind, nearly 2 GW of new utility-scale solar, more than 600 MW of new onsite solar, and more than 200 MW of new energy storage. (Electrical Business)
In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. (University of Potsdam)
Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of cancer. Research has shown that tattoo ink does not just remain where it is injected. Particles from the ink can migrate to the lymph nodes, where they accumulate. (SDU)
In 1995, bands occupied 41% of the music charts. By 2023, that number had fallen to just 4%. (Voronoi)
According to YouTube, the platform is now the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the US. It recently reported that there are more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content on YouTube. (YouTube)
Archaeologists have found 1.5-million-year-old bone tools in Tanzania. This finding has pushed back systematic bone tool production by more than a million years and challenges previous assumptions about the technological capability of early hominins. (Archaeology Magazine)