Today I Learned

NASA found water on Mars
The whereabouts of all the water on Mars rendered scientists clueless for years.
There was already enough evidence that there once was water on our little neighbour, but what happened to it?
NASA's InSight lander finally solved the mystery. Its mission was to investigate Mars' seismic activity, heat flow, and internal composition by looking beneath the crust.

What they found is astounding: There's a massive underground reservoir of water so large that it could cover the whole planet with an ocean almost 2 kilometers deep.

Lungfish have the largest genome of all animals
The marbled lungfish, Protopterus aethiopicus (new tab), has more than 130 billion bases of DNA and therefore the largest genome of all animals. That's more than 43 times bigger than the human genome.

Checkmate originates from persia
In old persia, people said "Shah Mat" which literally means "the king is dead".
The German translation "Schachmatt" resembles it even closer.

Ash is an excellent fertiliser during crop rotation
Regular ash is an a great fertiliser with a great NPK ratio of 0-1-3.
The only downside is that it's very alkaline and therefore deacidifies soil.
Use a ph-test to make sure your soil can take it.

A 1 euro cent coin costs 1.75 euro cent in production
Due to coins being made of metals, they can actually cost more in production than what they're worth. In contrast, a 10 € bill only costs around 5 ct.

The woman photographed on the "Maggot Brain" album cover is Barbara Cheeseborough, who was one of the first Black supermodels in the late 60s / early 70s. Her husband William was a fashion photographer.

The oldest koi fish was 226 years old
Hanako, which translates to "flower girl", was born in Japan in 1751 and died in 1977 at an incredible age of 226 years.

Apple Health sleep data is showing false values
In my recent Year in Review: 2023 post, I shared that I had an average of 7:58 hours of sleep.
Eventually I got suspicious because that felt a bit high so I checked the values per month and it turns out the average is actually only 6:37 hours.

French kids used to get wine at school
Learned this bizarre one from a tweet (new tab) by History Vids (new tab).
Until 1956, french children attending school were served wine in their lunch break.

My writing method is called the Hemingway bridge
I'm not only writing technical articles, but also a fantasy novel in my leisure time.
In the beginning, I often struggled to get started, because I didn't really know how to. However, once the first couple of sentences were written it slowly started to flow again and I would find myself writing several pages in one sprint.
When I realised that, I started to do something that might feel odd at first: I would stop writing in the middle of a scene. That way, I could immediately continue writing, whenever coming back to my manuscript.

Just today I learned, that this method was also used by Ernest Hemingway (new tab) and is refered to as the Hemingway bridge.

Rock, paper, scissors is not actually pure luck
Research by Besty Levy Paluck (new tab) shows there actually exists a gender bias with two crucial findings.
Men tend to start with rock while women prefer scissors more often. On top of that, men repeat the same figure more often while women prefer switching up.

Graveyards can be beautiful places for mental retreat
I'm not a religious person and thus I never really had a strong urge to visit a graveyards. Actually the concept of visiting the burried remains of deceased loved ones feels super weird to me. To put it simply, I usually avoid such places.
However, I'm using my walks for self reflection a lot lately and thought I could check out the public graveyard of my hometown, Karlsruhe.
Within weeks it became my favorite place to spend time outside and I regularly plan it into my route. Not only is it the perfect place to calm down, but it also is probably the most beautiful site in the whole city. There are artifical water courses, thousands of different plants, bushes and trees as well as birds, squirrels and other animals everywhere.
It's probably a bit ironic, but in some way it's the most lively place in walking distance.