Nowadays, gorillas and chimpanzees get hunted by leopards. Orangutans are hunted by Sumatran tigers. Great apes aren't naturally apex predators.
Early hominids were significantly physically weaker than those apes even. Australopithecines were like 70 pounds and under 4 feet tall. They were consistently killed by big cats (lions, leopards, etc.)
Obviously, when we developed tools and fire and community, we became much harder to kill. I wondered, how do lions know not to attack humans anymore? Do they still try to eat humans but just lose over and over? Probably not. How can they know intuitively that we can defend ourselves?
The answer, it turns out, is very social. They learn from their parents, who learn from their parents, etc, etc. Even if they never encounter a human in their life, they learn to fear them. Lion cubs see their parents avoid humans and internalize they must avoid them too. On the other hand, wolf packs raised in complete isolation show very little fear coming up to humans.
Now, humans are the most feared animals in the savannah. Scientists played audio of humans talking vs. lions growling at a national park in South Africa, and almost all species were far more likely to run from human voices (not shouting, just conversational speech) than lion sounds.
If you mix 1L of ethanol with 1L of water, you get ~1.9L, not 2L! My initial thought is perhaps there's some evaporation that occurs due to the mixture itself. I also sent this to some friends of mine and they thought the same. That's not the case!
Simple piece of intuition: Mix 1L of sand with 1L of gravel. It turns out that results in a ~1.5L mixture! The sand fills the gaps in between the gravel. Similarly, the small water molecules fill in the gaps between the larger ethanol molecules.
This makes way more intuitive sense to me with the sand but I had trouble imagining liquids compressing down.
Okay, I didn't look this up recently, but I was part of this eight week study about the difference between historical Jesus vs. the biblical one.
I had assumed that Jesus's legend grew as he was alive and people were talking about him performing these miracles, but turns out that's not the case. Essentially every single "miracle" by Jesus was first written about 40+ years after his death. Jesus also didn't walk around announcing he was the messiah.
Perhaps the legend of Jesus was written by early Christian writers to transform this rabbi with a relatively small following (Acts reports only ~120 believers, much smaller than many other messianic movements at the time) into what would become the largest religion in the world.
Before the Green Revolution, a mainstream scientific thought was population collapse due to famine. The first sentence of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb says "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
Thankfully, the Green Revolution came just in time, and genetically-modified wheat saved billions of lives.
In the land of GMOs, there's been another remaining holy grail research topic: C3 → C4 genetic modification. As basketball players dream of making the league, plant biologists dream of solving that.
The way plants grow is they convert carbon dioxide into usable carbon, called carbon fixation. There's a big issue with it: photorespiration. During the process, instead of carbon dioxide, some oxygen is consumed, going directly against the process of photosynthesis. This happens roughly 25% of the time. If we're able to fix that, we can instantly improve the efficiency of photosynthesis by 30%, improving crop yields as much.
Thankfully, biology solved for this exact issue across many different kinds of plants. Most crops in water scarce regions couldn't afford to waste energy on photorespiration, so they had to develop a more efficient method. C4 Carbon Fixation uses a different enzyme which doesn't accidentally consume oxygen.
Scientists are trying to apply this to wheat and rice. Wheat's a bit of a stretch goal, but researchers believe they can genetically modify rice to use C4 by ~2040.
The impact would be dramatic. Rice makes up 76% of total calorie intake in Southeast Asia (billions of people). C3 → C4 conversion could improve yields by up to 50%, so this could save millions/billions of lives in the future. Even a 20% improvement of rice yields would be one of the most impactful agricultural innovations in human history.
On the Beatles' "I'm Only Sleeping" (along with a bunch of other songs), there's a backwards guitar, meaning the entire guitar part is a normal guitar recording that was flipped backwards. You should listen to it, super interesting sound. The strumming part is way more pronounced.
The Beatles stopped touring in 1966 (also a crazy fact I had no idea, because they broke up in 1970), so they started experimenting with more studio effects, because they didn't need to perform it live.
They did a bunch of other weird stuff: using a loudspeaker as a mic, changing playback speeds of background tracks, John Lennon singing through a leslie cabinet (essentially an organ speaker).
It's a blessing they stopped performing live because it led to some of my favorite Beatles songs.