52 things I learned in 2023

Here are some of the most interesting things I learned this year:

1. Every iron object made before 1200 BC came from meteorites. (“Bronze Age iron: Meteorite or not? A chemical strategy”)
2. Santa’s reindeer are all female. Male reindeer don’t start growing antlers until February, so any reindeer with antlers hauling goods on Christmas Eve wouldn’t be male. (FDA)
3. Cookie Monster eats approximately two dozen cookies for every Sesame Street episode filming. The cookies are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, and the ingredients—pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts, instant coffee, with water, and black glue for the chocolate chips—are optimized to explode into crumbs without getting stuck in Cookie Monster’s fur. The last human to eat the cookies was Adam Sandler, in 2009. (“Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?”)
4. Costco is responsible for 50% of all cashew sales in the world. (“Costco Clothing Is Cheap. WSJ Readers Love It. But Is It Actually Good Value?”)
5. One reason the United States didn’t adopt the metric system was because the ship crossing the Atlantic from France carrying a standard kilogram—yes, a real physical object—requested by Thomas Jefferson in 1793 was blown off course into the Caribbean and captured by pirates. (“How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America’s Metric System”)
6. Zoom fatigue is real! When people talk face-to-face, they respond to yes-or-no questions in 297 milliseconds, on average, but this number jumps to 976 milliseconds when talking over Zoom. This imperceptible delay interferes with the neural mechanisms that govern the normal back-and-forth of human conversation, and the body’s physiological response is fatigue. (Business Insider)
7. Pheasant Island, a 200-meter long island in the middle of the Bidasoa River between France and Spain, swaps sovereignty every six months. Spain holds the island between February 1 and July 31 each year, and France gets it from August 1 through June 30. It’s been this way since the end of the Thirty Years’ War. (“Europe’s island that swaps nationalities”)
8. The Windows 10 wallpaper wasn’t digitally created. It’s actually a photo! More than 3,000 photos were captured during the shoot. (gmunk.com)
   
9. One in five mammals is a bat. (“Why are there so many species of bat?”)
10. Mice don’t like cheese. (“Do Mice Really Like Cheese?”)
11. Like many other species, humans contain the proteins (cryptochromes) to detect magnetic fields, but our brains don’t have a way to decode the information. (“Human cryptochrome exhibits light-dependent magnetosensitivity”)
12. 44.4% of people have one joint on their pinkie toe and 55.3% have two. (“How many joints does the 5th toe have? A review of 606 patients of 655 foot radiographs”)
13. The common ancestor of vertebrates had four cones in their eyes, but when all mammals went nocturnal, they lost two of the cones. Plot twist! Then some primates, including the ancestor of all humans, re-evolved a third cone. (Wikipedia) And evolution is still happening: some women have four cones in their eyes and can see thousands of colors nobody else can. (Radiolab)
14. Women post sexier pictures of themselves on Instagram in areas of greater income inequality. This is because these areas have fewer high status men to date or marry, thus greater intrasexual competition. All else being equal, for every one standard deviation increase in income inequality in a city, the number of sexy selfies goes up by 31-34%. (“Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media”)
15. In the three-month period after Dobbs—the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade—the number of vasectomies rose 29%. (“Vasectomies rose by 29% in the three months after the end of Roe”)
16. Nobody knows what the “p” in “pH” stands for. (“When it comes to caustic wit and an acid tongue, mind your Ps and Qs”)
17. There have been 80,000 recorded UFO sightings since 1906. Four-fifths of extraterrestrials have chosen to visit the United States and likely speak English. (source)
    
    
18. Twelve plant species and five animal species are responsible for 75% of the world’s food supply. (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations)
19. Most of the pasta made in Italy is from wheat grown in Yuma, Arizona. (“Home Grown: From Yuma wheat to Italian pasta”)
20. Dirt is halfway in size between an atom and the Earth. (@engineers_feed)
21. The concept of moral decline—people today are less moral than years past and future generations will be less moral than the present one—is a belief that became widespread in 1949 and is now dominant in nearly every country. (“Illusion of moral decline”)
22. When a Walmart Supercenter opens in a town, average grocery prices drop 3%, but competitor revenue drops 16% and average income declines 10% in five years. (“Walmart Supercenters and Monopsony Power: How a Large, Low-Wage Employer Impacts Local Labor Markets”)
23. The maximum size of a PDF is 381km × 381km, roughly half the size of Germany. (Hacker News)
    
    
24. Half the protein in your body comes from artificially created nitrogen, a process invented a hundred years ago by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. This process combines nitrogen from the air with hydrogen to make ammonia, which is used in fertilizer. In the past century, the Haber-Bosch process improved crop yields, saving the lives of 2.7 billion people who would have otherwise starved to death. (“Nitrogen for nothing and your protein for free”)
25. Pound-for-pound, the energy output of the sun is 276.5 watts per cubic meter, roughly the same as a compost pile. (“Lazy Sun is less energetic than compost”)
26. Children who were injured from a fall before the age of nine are less likely to be scared of heights when they get older. (“Evidence for a non-associative model of the acquisition of a fear of heights”)
27. Food deserts are caused by lack of demand, not lack of supply. There’s a common assumption that food deserts don’t exist because grocery stores avoid certain neighborhoods. But that’s not actually true: food deserts exist because certain neighborhoods don’t want them. (“Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality”)
28. People who shop for groceries online instead of in store buy 13.6% fewer fresh vegetables, though they also make 5-7% fewer impulse purchases on items like candy, desserts, and salty snacks. (“Browsing the Aisles or Browsing the App? How Online Grocery Shopping is Changing What We Buy”)
29. Tic Tacs are labeled as sugar free even though they are 94% sugar. As long as there’s less than half a gram of sugar, the FDA permits products to be labeled sugar free. Each Tic Tac has 0.49 grams of sugar. (“The Sneaky Reason Why Tic Tacs Can Say ‘Sugar Free’ (When They Really Aren’t)”)
    
    
30. One-third of all socks produced globally are made in Datang, China. (Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change in China)
31. People are willing to pay 3.5 times for seafood when they are within sight of an active fishing harbor. (“The importance of local fisheries as a cultural attribute: insight from a discrete choice experiment of seafood consumers”)
32. In Iceland, it was legal to kill Basque people until 2015. (“Basques safe in Iceland as district repeals decree to kill them on sight”)
33. Twice as many women get tattoos as men: 39% of women and 21% of men have tattoos. The ratio is the same for hidden tattoos, too: 30.2% of women have a hidden tattoo, compared to 16.7% of men. (“Tat will tell: Tattoos and time preferences”)
34. When companies are sued, every $183,000 spent in extra advertising that potential jurors might see leads to a 21% increase in the odds of winning a case. (“Buying the verdict”)
35. John Cage is famous for his song “4’33”,” but he also composed an organ piece that takes 639 years to finish. The Halberstadt Cathedral is currently performing the piece, which will conclude in the year 2640. The performance began on September 5, 2001 with 518 days of silence, followed by the first chord, which was held another 518 days. A schedule of the notes played through July 5, 2071 is posted on Wikipedia.
36. A ten percentage-point increase in the number of religious people in a county reduces its GDP growth rate by 0.14 percentage points. This is because the social capital created by being religious (attending church, being part of an in-group, etc.) subverts the market’s ability to replace low-performing business with higher-performing ones in a community. (“Religion and Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Counties”)
37. Houses in Amsterdam are narrow because of tax evasion. In the sixteenth century they were taxed by the width of a property’s canal frontage, rather than height or total size. Incentivized the construction of narrow, deep, and tall buildings, which, in turn, required steep, narrow staircases. This is why Dutch architecture contains “hoisting hooks” which can move goods to the upper floors without using stairs. (99 Percent Invisible)
    
    
38. In 2004, with the introduction of automated traffic lights, New York City disabled most of its 3,250 crosswalk buttons (it was cheaper than removing them), but pedestrians continue to press them, under the illusion that it changes the light so they can cross. (The Uses of Delusion)
39. Birds are evolving smaller eyes to adapt to the brightness of cities at night. For two species, the Northern Cardinal and Carolina Wren, the eyes of birds in San Antonio are 5% smaller than their rural counterparts. (“Urban Light Pollution Linked to Smaller Eyes in Birds”)
40. Only 11 adults were responsible for 60% of all book ban requests from school libraries during the 2021-2022 school year. (Washington Post)
41. When you lose weight, you literally breathe it out: 80% of the human fat you lose is exhaled as carbon dioxide. The oxidation of 10 kg of human fat requires 29 kg of inhaled oxygen, which produces 28 kg of CO2 and 11 kg of H2O. This process can be summarized as C55H104O6+78O2→55CO2+52H2O+energy, obviously. (“When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?”)
42. The flexibility that comes with remote work is worth, on average, an 8% raise. (@AdamMGrant)
43. Railroad construction contributed to 11% of the increase of new ideas in nineteenth century Germany. (“Spatial Networks and the Diffusion of Ideas”)
44. The threshold for identifying as African American is 28% of African DNA. (“The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States”)
    
    
45. In areas where people are more likely to divorce, birds are more likely to split up, too! There’s a strong geographic correlation between several human and animal behaviors, including distances traveled, population density, male parental involvement, age of first reproduction, food hoarding, and even divorce. (“Local convergence of behavior across species”)
46. Half the reason people are on TikTok and almost 80% of the reason people are on Instagram is only because their friends are. People would need to be paid $59 to quit TikTok and $47 to quit Instagram if everyone else continued to use it. However, they need only $28 and $10, respectively, if they knew everyone else was quitting, too. (“When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media”) Additionally, each Instagram user is worth about $270 to Meta. (source)
47. Languages are louder in the tropics because the extra moisture warmer air can hold allows for more flexibility and range for vocal chords. (“Temperature shapes language sonority: Revalidation from a large dataset”)
48. There’s a new accent developing among scientists stationed in Antarctica. (“Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter”)
49. When women talk to each other, they face each other. But when men talk to each other, they stand at an average angle of 120 degrees. When men face each other while talking, it’s because they’re about to fight. (Friends)
50. The presence of women’s tears reduces aggression in men by 43.7%. (“Sniffing women’s tears reduces aggression in men and alters brain activity, groundbreaking study finds”)
51. If Martin Luther visited a city, it was 18.6 percentage points more likely to become Protestant, but if he just sent a letter, it was only 13.6 percentage points more likely to become Protestant. A total of 36% of all cities Luther either wrote to our visited adopted the Reformation. (“Multiplex Network Ties and the Spatial Diffusion of Radical Innovations: Martin Luther’s Leadership in the Early Reformation”)
52. Human fingers can detect objects as small as 13 nanometers. If your finger was as large as the Earth, you could sense the size difference between a house and a car. (“Feeling small: Fingers can detect nano-scale wrinkles even on a seemingly smooth surface”)

Previous 52 things I learned: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018