The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

Dams are old. History’s oldest known dam, the Jawa Dam in present-day Jordan, was built about 2,400 years ago. The oldest known still-operational dam is the Lake Homs Dam (AKA Quatinah Barrage), built between 1319 and 1304 BC. Remarkably, it is one of many still-working dams, mostly in Spain, Japan, and India, now nearly 2 millennia old.

Monday

China boasts both the largest and most dams on Earth, over double that of #2 United States. Fully 45% of all the world’s dams are in China.

Tuesday

Massive government-built hydroelectric dams may dominate headlines and imagination, but about half of all dams worldwide are for irrigation projects. Hydroelectric dams are a distant second at about 17%. Also, the large majority of dams are privately owned, at least in the United States.

Wednesday

Dams occasionally collapse, sometimes with tragic consequences. The worst dam breaches have killed thousands, with one especially horrific 1975 collapse in China killing an estimated 171,000 and causing history’s third largest flood. However, the structure itself is not always to blame. Often the surrounding rock in which the dam is anchored simply cannot bear such extraordinary water pressure and gives way.

Thursday

Dams, dikes, and levees all restrain water, but aren’t the same. Dikes are wet on one side and “reclaim” land, keeping water off of land which would otherwise be underwater. A levee is also meant to be wet on just one side, but is more of a flood control device than one to reclaim wet land. Dams have water on both sides, but often with a much higher level on one side than the other.

Friday

Besides humans, only beavers build dams. With their felled-tree dam and “lodge” homes, they get a cozy, insulated, two-chamber, two-exit fortress against predators and also create a pond for still water, perfect for storing food in the unfrozen water at the bottom during winter months.

Saturday

There are four basic types of dams. Embankment dams and gravity dams, built of earth and rock vs. concrete, respectively, rely on the structure’s weight to restrain the water. Buttress dams are reinforced with separate downstream supports. Arch dams are curved and comparatively thin, as they transmit the weight of the water to surrounding rock walls.

Sunday

“Per curiam,” or “by the court as a whole” means a certain court decision is not signed by individual judges, such that it was unanimous (more or less) and typically shorter in length.

Monday

“A priori,” also a philosophical term, means “from what is before” and refers to conclusions derived from logical deduction and legal concepts, rather than empirical evidence and observation.

Tuesday

“Res ipsa loquitur” means “the thing speaks for itself” and is a principle that puts the presumption of negligence on the defendant by showing the accident or injury at issue does not normally happen without someone’s negligence.

Wednesday

“De novo” means “anew” and typically refers to a higher court reviewing the evidence and legal questions of a matter as if for the first time, without reference to a lower court’s conclusions.

Thursday

“In forma pauperis” means “in the form of a pauper” and permits a litigant to proceed without paying the usual court fees due to financial hardship.

Friday

“Certiorari” means “to be informed of / made certain” and is issued from a higher court to a lower one directing it to send the case materials for the higher court’s review. If a case is not granted this, the lower court’s decision stands.

Saturday

“In limine” means “at the threshold” and refers to a pre-trial motion seeking that certain evidence be ruled inadmissible at trial. The familiar yell of “objection” is the process for seeking the same result during trial.

Sunday

The first real battery was developed in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, for whom the volt is named. Made of stacked zinc and copper discs separated by brine-soaked fabric (“a salt in battery” wakka wakka), he later demonstrated the “Voltaic pile” to Napoleon and was made a count. Other devices to store electric charge had been developed before, but were essentially capacitors that discharged quickly as a shock, as opposed to the battery’s steady current from its internal chemical reaction.

Monday

Benjamin Franklin coined the term “battery” when he connected several of the above-mentioned early capacitors, known as “Leyden jars,” to amplify the shock they discharged. They reminded him of a battery of cannons working in unison.

Tuesday

Since electricity is really just the flow of electrons, a battery is fundamentally the pairing of one material with a lot of available electrons with another having far fewer. When installed in a device and connected through a circuit, the electrons flow from one material to the other, providing power for the device along the way. When all available electrons have travelled from one electrode to the other, the battery is spent until recharged. Common battery types include lead acid, nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride, and lithium ion, to name just a few.

Wednesday

Battery-powered electric cars are far older than you might expect. The first appeared in the 1830s, a quarter century before the invention of batteries which could be recharged rather than wholly replaced when spent. In the early 1900s, fleets of up to 600 battery-powered taxis were running in New York, Boston, and Baltimore, and automotive pioneers like Henry Ford, Ferdinand Porsche, and Ransom Eli Olds (of Oldsmobile) dabbled in electric cars. When US President William McKinley was shot in 1901, an electric ambulance took him to the hospital. However, in those more rural times, gasoline was more easily transported than bulky batteries, and the electricity to recharge them was more available in bigger cities, curbing the appeal of electric cars beyond city-only fleets.

Thursday

The useful electrochemical power in batteries often comes from corrosive and toxic chemicals as well as rare metals which should be recycled at the end of a battery’s life. Car batteries contain sulfuric acid, which can badly burn the skin and should be treated with extreme caution.

Friday

Batteries are at the heart of the Clarendon Dry Pile, “the world’s longest science experiment,” which involves early dry pile batteries set up in 1840 at Oxford University to ring two small bells with a suspended clapper hanging between them. The bells have been “ringing” continuously for 185 years on the same batteries – about 10 billion times – though the clapper’s movement is so minute that the ringing is nearly inaudible. The secret to this power cell’s longevity can only be studied when it stops, or else the “experiment” would cease.

Saturday

These days, thousands of individual batteries are often connected at a single site to store power generated with renewable energy, typically solar and wind. As of now, the biggest of these is in California, where 120,000 batteries connected to an enormous (46,000 acre) solar array store far more power than a typical coal power plant generates.

Sunday

Olives were one of the world’s first domesticated crops, starting at least 6,000 years ago. There are over 1,000 varieties of olives, but only about 140 are regularly grown for human consumption.

Monday

The ancient Greeks were nuts about olives, which had practical and religious importance. The tree grew well in the Mediterranean climate, and Athenians believed the olive tree was a gift from Athena, their patron goddess. Like today, the Greeks grew most of their olives for oil, which was beloved at home and a profitable export. Beyond eating, Greeks also used the oil for hair care, skin care, perfumes, medicine, lamp fuel, religious rituals, general lubricant and even animal feed. Victorious Olympians wore an olive branch crown and that branch extended also became a symbol of peace.

Tuesday

On average, olive trees live between 300-600 years, but a 4,000 year old tree grows on the island of Crete, still producing olives. “Plato’s Olive Tree” which was situated where Plato’s Academy once stood in Athens was estimated to be 2,400 years old when it was hit by a bus and uprooted in 1975.

Wednesday

Being a symbol of peace, olive branches appear on many flags, including that of the United Nations, seven countries, four US states, and various global government offices and departments. It also adorns many coats of arms and seals.

Thursday

Olives are a fruit, but don’t eat one straight off the tree. A chemical called oleuropein makes fresh, raw olives so bitter that they are essentially inedible. Before they can be eaten, they must be cured to neutralize that bitter compound, often with salt, brine, or lye.

Friday

Olive oil is healthy for several reasons. Though most of its calories come from fat, Oleic acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid, the “good” kind, which has antioxidant and cancer-fighting properties. Another olive oil component, polyphenols, also seem to fight cancer as well as cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.

Saturday

With the great number of varieties out there, you might think green and black olives are wholly different breeds, but in fact they are just different levels of ripe. Green olives are young and often underripe olives, while darker olives like purple and black have been allowed to ripen on the tree before being picked, cured, and eaten.

We all know everything is made up of atoms, but what makes up atoms? A very condensed version:

Sunday

Neutrons are the atom’s well-known neutral particle, but they are further divisible. Like the proton, the neutron is a “composite” particle, made of even more “elementary” particles.

Monday

Protons are the atom’s positively charged particles, though they are also composite particles. Hydrogen, the lightest possible element, has just one proton and one electron.

Tuesday

The electron is usually portrayed as spinning around the atom’s nucleus, though the reality is a bit more complex. This elementary particle has a negative charge, and while the neutron and proton have about the same mass, the electron is only about 1/2000 the size.

Wednesday

The Standard Model of particle physics describes four classes of subatomic particles which make up larger composite particles. The first of these are quarks, which themselves form protons and neutrons. There are six types, or “flavors” of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange.

Thursday

While the electron is the most famous lepton, there are six other types, the muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. The electron is the smallest and most common of these, and other leptons often decay into electrons readily.

Friday

Gauge bosons are elementary particles known as “force carriers” and have four varieties, the photon, gluon, W and Z bosons.

Saturday

Finally is the Higgs boson, named for physicist Peter Higgs. This highly unstable particle is only observed in massive particle accelerators, and wasn’t seen until 40 years after first being theorized.

All facts this week:

Sunday

A liquid boils when it reaches a pressure equal to that exerted it by its surroundings, particularly the atmosphere itself. At this point the liquid is “pushing back” against the atmosphere at matching pressure, and so can turn to vapor. For this reason, liquids boil at a lower temperature at higher altitudes, since there is less atmosphere pushing down on them.

Monday

You’ve probably noticed that most of the bubbles in a boiling pot come from certain points. These are tiny bumps, scratches, or imperfections where the bubbles can most easily form, and this is called “nucleate boiling” and these points “nucleation points.”

Tuesday

Chefs know about cooking at temperatures below boiling. To simmer is to cook food at between 185 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit, with just tiny bubbles forming on the pan bottom. Poached food is cooked between 160 and 180 degrees Fahrenheit, and both simmering and poaching have their variations within each category.

Wednesday

“Boilerplate language” is routine, formulaic, standardized text often found in legal documents. This term comes from the early days of the printing industry, when smaller newspapers relied on news syndicates for feature stories, often delivered on pre-cast metal plates ready for immediate use in printing. Since these standardized plates resembled those used by boilermakers, this standardized language run in many papers came to be known as “boilerplate.”

Thursday

People often say that a situation “boils down to…” before stating its summary or main focus. This idiom has a very literal origin, describing what is left when excess water is boiled off of a liquid, leaving only the undiluted essence of the substance.

Friday

Cooking your food by boiling it isn’t fun for all. Lobsters are traditionally boiled alive before eaten by humans, a controversial practice which has now been banned in several European countries as more studies of crustacean nervous systems suggest they perceive pain.

Saturday

Few common germs can survive boiling, so boiling potentially contaminated objects, such as medical instruments, foodservice equipment, baby bottles and breastfeeding equipment, and anything else which may have dangerous germs on it is a longstanding and effective way to disinfect.

We all know what the brain, heart, and lungs do, but here’s what some of your other many organs do:

Sunday

Your pancreas produces several liters of enzyme-packed fluid everyday to help with digesting the food you eat. It also produces the hormones which regulate blood sugar, insulin and glucagon.

Monday

Your gallbladder, a small organ which sits right under your liver, stores and releases the bile produced by your liver to help break down fats in your food.

Tuesday

The thyroid, a butterfly-shaped organ in your neck, is one of the nine glands of the endocrine system. These glands have the job of secreting hormones, and hormones released by the thyroid have the job of regulating metabolism, including energy and growth.

Wednesday

Your spleen, a neighbor to your ribs and stomach, is a great manager of blood. It removes old and damaged blood cells, controls the relative levels of platelets, white blood cells, and red blood cells, and also fights blood-borne germs by sending white blood cells to attack them.

Thursday

Everyday your kidneys filter enough blood to fill a bathtub, removing toxins and wastes for you to pee out. Kidneys also manage blood pH, pressure, and sugar levels, as well as producing other useful hormones.

Friday

Named for the Greek word for “soul” (since Greeks thought it lived there) the thymus gland lives high in the chest. This gland makes disease-fighting T-cells before your birth and continues to make and “train” T-cells through puberty.

Saturday

Many people first think about their appendix when it needs to get removed, and for years it was believed to be a vestigial organ without use in modern humans. However, more recent research indicates it has roles in the immune system and can act as a “safe house” for gut bacteria to live.

Many plant species living among us now are remarkably ancient. Among them:

Sunday

The ginkgo biloba tree isn’t just remarkable for being a 200 million year-old species. It is the only living member of its species, individual trees can live well over a thousand years, it has a massive (but largely repetitive) genome, it is the only tree on Earth with fan-shaped leaves, and ginkgos growing 1/2 mile from Hiroshima’s bombing survived the atomic blast.

Monday

Ferns are common, but also ancient, with a 380 million year history on Earth. This plant group predates the evolution of seeds, grass, and flowers, and prehistoric fern trees were a major food source for the dinosaurs. They can reproduce both sexually and asexually, and their leaves unfurl as they grow.

Tuesday

There are only a handful of Wollemi pines left in the world, but the species has history. The 91 million year-old species comes from a 200 million year-old plant family, and like so many “living fossil” plant and animals, they were believed long extinct before a very small group was discovered in a rainforested valley in Australia. With fewer than 100 individuals, however, the species is critically endangered.

Wednesday

Aptly-named horsetails descend from ancestors which grew tall and thick in forests 350 million years ago. Though the modern relatives are shorter, they’ve adapted well to modern Earth and grow on every continent but Antarctica, and the 15 species now alive now are the only members of the genus Equisetum.

Thursday

While some prehistoric plants predate the evolution of the seed, cycads are an ancient cone seed plant with a history predating the dinosaurs. They aren’t true palms, but are sometimes named that from a superficial similarity. Today over 300 species are still around, though in the Jurassic Period they were so diverse as to constitute 20% of the world’s flora.

Friday

After starting about 200 million years ago in the Triassic Period, sequoias dominated the tree population of Europe and North America while the dinosaurs roamed around. Now that the earth is cooler than in the Jurassic, these massive trees are mostly found naturally growing on the west coast of North America. Giant Sequoia is the largest tree species on modern Earth, with the oldest known specimen at least 3,200 years old.

Saturday

Takakia is a moss genus with only two surviving species, and scientists believe these branched off from their extinct ancestor 390 million years ago. If true, this tiny plant has lived on our planet longer than any other yet discovered.

Many animal species living among us now are remarkably ancient. Among them:

Sunday

With a half-billion year history, jellyfish are far more ancient than the dinosaurs. Despite having no brains, blood, bones, or heart, they’ve outlasted about 99% of all Earth’s other species and survived five mass extinctions events. Today, there are over 2,000 jellyfish species with a remarkable range of size and shapes, and some even glow in the dark.

Monday

Crocodilians have a quarter-billion year history on Earth, and ancestors of modern crocodiles walked amongst the dinosaurs in the Late Triassic period. In our time, the American and Orinoco crocodiles are the largest species at about 20-25 feet in length, but some ancient varieties were twice as long.

Tuesday

Sturgeon have been called “living fossils” for good reason, since their bodies have hardly changed 120 million years. They are the oldest of the bony fish, which first appeared about 419 million years ago and predate the cartilaginous fish which dominate modern waterways. These ancient fish live only in the Northern hemisphere, and the largest sturgeon ever caught was a mammoth 16 feet long and 800 lbs.

Wednesday

Another “living fossil” of the seas, the bizarre frilled shark looks the same as it did 80 million years ago. Growing to nearly 7 feet after a lengthy 3-year gestation period, this unusual shark swims in an eel-like serpentine motion. However, fairly little is known about this shark on account of it living at great depths, with only 40 specimens ever documented.

Thursday

Not many birds stand 6 feet tall, but the ancient cassowary, with a body structure 60 million years old, is one of them. Related to ostriches and emus, this big bird cannot fly but should not be trifled with, since it can swim, run 30 mph, jump 7 feet in the air, and has massive talons.

Friday

Sea turtles, which includes seven species of marine turtles, have been swimming Earth’s waters and clumsily walking its beaches for about 110 million years, well into the time of the dinosaurs. Nowadays, they can be found in all but the polar seas, but still face significant threats to their survival.

Saturday

After first appearing about 170 million years before the dinosaurs, coelacanths were believed to have gone extinct with those big lizards before humans first saw one in 1938. A rare “lobe-finned” fish, its unusually-shaped fins are believed to be evolutionary precursors of the limbs of Earth’s first land vertebrates. If this doesn’t impress you, this fish can grow to be 7 feet long, lives over half a mile below the surface, may live to be a century old, doesn’t sexually mature until about 55, and even inspired the horror classic “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

About 6% of the world population is indigenous people with long historic connections to their land, despite often being a numerical minority in their countries. Among them, and listed by continent:

Sunday

In northern North America, native groups like Inuit, Aleut, Yupik, and others abound, making Alaska the state with the highest native population at about 20% and the Canadian province Nunavut fully 80% native. Greenland boasts a nearly 90% Greenlandic Inuit population. Further south, the largest native groups are the Cherokee, Navajo, Choctaw, and Blackfeet, though the US Government recognizes nearly 600 individual tribes. In Mexico, about 21% of the population identifies as indigenous, primarily descendants of the powerful Aztec and Mayan civilizations.

Monday

Western South America was once home to the vast Inca empire, the largest pre-Colombian civilization in all of the Americas, so many modern natives are now descendants of this empire. There are now 748 indigenous groups recognized in South America and the Caribbean, and the majority of Bolivians (62%) consider themselves members of an indigenous group. The most prominent theory for how the Americas were first peopled is the Bering Land Bridge Theory, which proposes Asians crossed to modern-day Alaska over a land bridge from modern-day Russia when sea levels were much lower during the last ice age, with many continuing south. If true, native Americans of North and South America are descendants of these Asian travelers.

Tuesday

Site of the earliest known fossils of human ancestors and home to modern humans for at least 300,000 years, Africa contains a vast variety of people from long before settlors and immigrants of more recent history. There are now at least 3,000 individual tribes and 50 million indigenous people on the world’s second-largest continent, including the ancient San (Bushmen) people, the oldest indigenous group in Africa and likely the world. Other well-known groups include the Pygmies, Maasai, and Berbers, and some African tribes remain wholly nomadic hunter-gatherers, building no permanent structures, just as they’ve lived for at least ten millenia.

Wednesday

If we consider continent-straddling Russia as Asian, Europe remains comparatively light on groups now considered indigenous. The most prominent is the Saami, native reindeer herders who occupy the Arctic regions of Sweden, Norway, and Finland and number 50,000-100,000.

Thursday

Three-quarters of the world’s indigenous people live in Asia, with far too many groups to cover here. Despite 92% of Chinese being the Han ethnic majority, this nation still contains the greatest total number of indigenous people at 125.3 million. India comes in second with most of the 700+ recognized indigenous groups in the country’s northeast. Similarly, Russia’s indigenous populations are concentrated in the colder regions of the north and east, with some smaller groups numbering as few as 350 people. Hundreds of distinct indigenous groups live in Indonesia, representing 1/4 of the population, while Japan has just two indigenous groups.

Friday

Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders make up the two main aboriginal groups of Australia. Like indigenous Africans, Aboriginals have a particularly long history on their land, occupying it for at least 65,000 years now. The Maori are indigenous to New Zealand, and ancient Polynesians, with remarkable navigation skills, spread across the vast South Pacific to populate Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, Fiji, Tahiti, and many other islands.

Saturday

The only continent without indigenous people is Antarctica, since this forbidding land still has no permanent human habitation, just settlements of rotating scientists. Notably, however, new evidence suggests the indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori, were the first people to discover the continent, and over 1,000 years before Europeans.