One Year of Learning 2025

Because Ethiopia is close to the Equator, daylight is pretty consistent throughout the year. So many Ethiopians use a 12-hour clock, with one cycle of 1 to 12 — from dawn to dusk — and the other cycle from dusk to dawn. Most countries start the day at midnight. So 7:00 a.m. in East Africa Time, Ethiopia's time zone, is 1:00 in daylight hours in local Ethiopian time. At 7:00 p.m., East Africa Time, Ethiopians start over again, so it's 1:00 on their 12-hour clock.

In early 1945, a fellow named Henry DeWolf Smyth was called into an office in Washington and asked if he would write this book that was about a new kind of weapon that the US was developing. The guy who had called him into his office, Vannevar Bush, knew that by the end of the year, the US was going to drop an atomic bomb that had the potential to end the war, but also that as soon as it was dropped, everybody was going to want to know what is this weapon, how was it made, and so forth. Smyth accepted the assignment. It was published by Princeton University Press about a week after the bomb was dropped. It explained how the US made the bomb, but it told a very specific kind of story, the Oppenheimer story that you see in the movies, where a group of shaggy-haired physicists figured out how to split the atom and fission, and all of this stuff. The thing is, the physics of building an atomic bomb is, in some respects, the least important part. More important, if you actually want to make the thing explode, is the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering that were left out of the story.

Based on my research, the earliest computer to use the term "main frame" was the IBM 701 computer (1952), which consisted of boxes called "frames." The 701 system consisted of two power frames, a power distribution frame, an electrostatic storage frame, a drum frame, tape frames, and most importantly a main frame.

FY 2024 unit costs increased for all circulating denominations compared to last year. The penny’s unit cost increased 20.2 percent, the nickel’s unit cost increased by 19.4 percent, the dime’s unit cost increased by 8.7 percent, and the quarter-dollar’s unit cost increased by 26.2 percent. The unit cost for pennies (3.69 cents) and nickels (13.78 cents) remained above face value for the 19th consecutive fiscal year

The Sun contains 99.8 percent of the mass in our solar system. Its gravitational pull is what keeps everything here, from tiny Mercury to the gas giants to the Oort Cloud, 186 billion miles away. But even though the Sun has such a powerful pull, it’s surprisingly hard to actually go to the Sun: It takes 55 times more energy to go to the Sun than it does to go to Mars.

Rum, a diamond-shaped island off the western coast of Scotland, is home to 40 people. Most of the island — 40 square miles of mountains, peatland and heath — is a national nature reserve, with residents mainly nestled around Kinloch Bay to the east. What the Isle of Rum lacks is artificial illumination. There are no streetlights, light-flooded sports fields, neon signs, industrial sites or anything else casting a glow against the night sky. On a cold January day, the sun sets early and rises late, yielding to a blackness that envelopes the island, a blackness so deep that the light of stars manifests suddenly at dusk and the glow of the moon is bright enough to navigate by.

Mexico notes that it is a country where guns are supposed to be difficult to get. There is just one store in the whole country where guns can be bought legally, yet the nation is awash in illegal guns sold most often to the cartels.

This is where pollen comes in. Like sperm, pollen contains one DNA set from its parent, but unlike sperm, pollen itself is actually its own separate living plant made of multiple cells that under the right conditions can live for months depending on the species... So this tiny male offspring plant is ejected out into the world, biding its time until it meets up with its counterpart. The female offspring of the plant, called an embryosac, which you're probably less familiar with since they basically never leave home. They just stay inside flowers. Like again, they're not part of the flower. They are a separate plant living inside the flower. Once the pollen meets an embryosac, the pollen builds a tube to bridge the gap between them. Now it's time for the sperm. At this point, the pollen produces exactly two sperm cells, which it pipes over to the embryosac, which in the meantime has produced an egg that the sperm can meet up with. Once fertilized, that egg develops into an embryo within the embryosac, hence the name, then a seed and then with luck a new plant. This one with two sets of DNA.

Littering is responsible for a very small percentage of the overall plastic in the environment. Based on this graph from the OECD, you can see littering is this teeny-tiny blue bar here, and mismanaged waste, not including littering, is this massive one at the bottom. Mismanaged waste includes all the things that end up either in illegal dump sites or burned in the open or in the rivers or oceans or wherever. The focus on littering specifically, it's an easy answer because obviously there's nothing wrong with discouraging people from littering, but it focuses on individual people's bad choices rather than systemic forces that are basically flushing plastic into the ocean every minute. Mismanaged waste includes everything that escapes formal waste systems. So they might end up dumped, they might end up burned, they might end up in the environment.

The eminent physicist Enrico Fermi was visiting his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that summer, and the mealtime conversation turned to the subject of UFOs. Very quickly, the assembled physicists realized that if UFOs were alien machines, that meant it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light. Otherwise, those alien craft would have never made it here. At first, Fermi boisterously participated in the conversation, offering his usual keen insights. But soon, he fell silent, withdrawing into his own ruminations. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but Fermi stayed quiet. Sometime later, long after the group had largely forgotten about the issue of UFOs, Fermi sat up and blurted out: “But where is everybody!?”

In fact, the habit of capitalizing “I” was also a practical adaptation to avoid confusion, back in the days when m was written “ııı” and n was written “ıı.” A stray “i” floating around before or after one of those could make the whole thing hard to read, so uppercase it went. And now it seems perfectly logical.

Early English Christian Bible versions follow the translation of the Septuagint and Latin Vulgate, which interpret azazel as "the goat that departs" (Greek tragos apopompaios, "goat sent out", Latin caper emissarius, "emissary goat"). William Tyndale rendered the Latin as "(e)scape goat" in his 1530 Bible. This translation was followed by subsequent versions up through the King James Version of the Bible in 1611: "And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat."

It was one of the first memes ever, a viral sensation that went mainstream back when people still used dial-up internet. Yet the cameraman behind “Leeroy Jenkins” still seems stupefied that anyone fell for it.

Ammonium chloride is a slightly toxic chemical most notably found in “salmiak,” a salt licorice candy, which is popular in northern Europe. In a new study, researchers found that the compound triggers a specific proton channel called OTOP1 in sour taste receptor cells, which fulfills one of the key requirements to be considered a primary taste like sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Ammonium is commonly found in waste products and decaying organic matter and is slightly toxic, so it makes sense that vertebrates evolved a specific taste sensor to recognize it.