The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

Solution caves are the most common type of cave, and are effectively caverns in which the rock has been dissolved. This typically happens when rainwater, made slightly acidic by CO2 in the atmosphere (and sometimes the soil it filters through) slowly dissolves the limestone, dolomite, gypsum, or salt rock it touches, creating caverns of all shapes and sizes.

Monday

Glacier caves form when glacier meltwater drains through vertical crevasses, then flows out of the mouth of the glacier. These caves can be especially beautiful to behold, yet dangerous to explore.

Tuesday

Sea caves (aka littoral caves) and eolian caves are created by erosion from waves and wind, respectively. These caves tend to be comparitively shallow.

Wednesday

Talus caves (aka boulder caves) are made in the spaces between piled-up boulders, usually on the side of mountains. They’re typically small, though there are some notable exceptions of these caves going over a kilometer.

Thursday

Lava tubes are caves formed when molten lava flowing from a volcano creates a moving stream, then the top layer of the molten rock cools and hardens while liquid lava continues to flow beneath it. When the sides have hardened and the liquid rock has then drained out, what remains is a tube, sometimes large enough for humans to explore.

Friday

South Africa’s 139 meter-deep Wonderwerk Cave, itself part of a natural rock formation 2.4 billion years old, contains evidence that early humans lived inside of it 2 million years ago and frequently since, though “modern” humans only rediscovered it in 1940.

Saturday

Although many creatures like to spend time in caves, troglobites are a category of creatures which live only in caves and are especially adapted to do so. They tend to have excellent hearing, smell, and touch, but are often blind or nearly so.

Sunday

The banana variety most people ate until the 1960s was a sweeter, creamier type called the Gros Michel, AKA “Big Mike,” but this was largely wiped out by a fungus called the “Panama disease.” The modern variety is called the Cavendish, but this too is at risk of a modern variant of the same wilting fungus.

Monday

India is the untouchable world leader in total banana consumption, but no country eats more bananas per person than Papau New Guinea.

Tuesday

The term “banana republic” was coined by author O. Henry and came to describe poorer, politically unstable South and Central American countries highly dependent on one export, often fruit, and run by a government heavily influenced by foreign fruit companies.

Wednesday

Bananas are actually a berry, since they contain seeds and grow from a flower. To make things stranger, the plant that bananas grow on is not a tree but the world’s largest herb.

Thursday

Early banana varieties were smaller, about finger-sized, so their name derives from “banan,” the Arabic word for finger. Fittingly, the bunch in which bananas grow is called a “hand.”

Friday

“Musa sapientum” is the scientific name for the banana, and it is Latin for “fruit of the wise men.”

Saturday

In addition to the tasty fruit, you can get paper and even fabric from the banana plant.

This week is dedicated to the creative and elaborate acronym-ing of space research.

Monday

BICEP = Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization

Tuesday

WISEASS = Weizmann Institute of Science Experimental Astrophysics Spectroscopy System

Wednesday

SMUDGES = Systematic Multiwavelength Unbiased catalog of Dwarf Galaxies and Evolution of Structure

Thursday

BOOMERanG = Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics

Friday

FLAMINGOS = FLoridA Multi-object Imaging Near-infrared Grism Observational Spectrometer

Saturday

TANGOinPARIS = Testing Astroparticle with the New Gev/tev Observations Positrons And electRons : Identifying the Sources (Wow!)

Sunday

Despite having more room, the big toe has just two bones in it, while the other toes each have three.

Monday

Since the thumb also has two bones in it, the surgical replacement of a thumb with a big toe has been one of the most successful way to replace “the king of the digits” for those who have lost their thumbs.

Tuesday

Humans and apes have many physical traits in common, but big toe function differs. Apes, with an opposable toe, mostly use it for grasping and climbing, while humans need it for standing upright and walking on two legs.

Wednesday

When the second toe appears to be longer than the big toe, this is called “Morton’s toe,” “Greek foot,” or “royal toe.” This trait appears in the iconic statues of Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David, and is more common in people of Greek and Bulgarian descent.

Thursday

Toeprints are as unique as fingerprints, and have also been used to catch barefooted criminals.

Friday

The current record for the most toes on one person is fourteen. Polydactylism is the condition of having extra digits, and this same individual has 14 fingers. Toes are also the site of the most common birth abnormality, fused or “webbed”toes, AKA syndactyly, when the skin between the toes does not separate during fetal development.

Saturday

To “toe the line” means to follow the rules and meet the standards, but the origin of this term has been alternatively credited to traditions in sailing, boxing, foot races, and even British politics.

Sunday

The daily wind cycle occurs because our planet has land and water. Sunlight shines on both, but air above land heats faster than air above water, causing the air over land to warm and rise, with the cooler air rushing in to fill this low-pressure space left behind. This process is reversed at night when the air over land cools faster.

Monday

This phenomena of “diffusion,” or the natural tendency to equalize low and high pressure areas, also drives the winds that circle the earth and the larger air currents at various latitudes, since sunlight makes the air hotter near the equator.

Tuesday

Named for Sir Francis Beaufort of the British Royal Navy, the Beaufort Scale measures wind intensity on a scale which generally goes from 0-12. 0 is windless, with smoke rising straight up, and at 12 you also have a category 1 hurricane or tornado. The scale actually goes up to 17, but these highest five numbers are reserved for tropical typhoons.

Wednesday

The highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth was 253 mph at Barrow Island, Australia in 1996.

Thursday

Wind alone kills about 48 people per year in the US.

Friday

The term “second wind” first came from breath, specifically, when it becomes easier to breathe again after a first round of physical exertion.

Saturday

While electricity generation from all renewable energy sources has already surpassed coal in the US, windpower alone is on track to pass coal-fired generation in the next few years.

Sunday

Leaves, bark, silk, parchment, and cloth were used to record information since ancient times, but it was not until 200 BC that the Chinese first pulped, spread thin, and dried natural fibers to make paper sheets, a process still used today.

Monday

DIY crafty types can “make” their own paper at home with a blender and some other common household items. However, since most people don’t have the machinery to produce wood pulp at home, the raw material for homemade paper is also paper, which is then soaked and reconstituted to your own preferences (color, thickness, texture, etc.).

Tuesday

While most paper is made from wood (mostly pine), other natural fibers in modern paper include cotton, straw, hemp, sugarcane, sorghum, rice, and flax.

Wednesday

In the US, paper has the highest recycling rate of recyclable materials at about 68%, as opposed to only about 5% for plastic recycling.

Thursday

Dutch papermakers of the 1660s settled on the size of 44 inches for the paper molds to accommodate the armspan of the average worker who dipped the frames into the pulp, and that divided by four is 11 inches, which is still the standard paper length today.

Friday

The word paper comes from papyrus, the plant whose stems were cut into thin strips, dried, and pressed together by the ancient Egyptians for an early writing surface.

Saturday

In studies of Rock Paper Scissors games, the likelihood of your opponent’s throws are in that same order: rock (35.4%), paper (35%), and scissors (29.6%).

Sunday

Though early zoologists leaned plant-y, we now know that sponges are animals, albeit without muscles, organs, or specialized tissues, and may have indeed been the first multicellular animals ever.

Monday

Most sponges are filter feeders and create the water currents that bring in the plankton, bacteria, viruses, and detritus which sustain them. Not all sponges, however, are so passive. Some species insert tentacles into living hosts to feed off of them, and others bore holes into their hosts to eat. Sponges living where there is very little biological matter to eat go very retro, digesting the 1000+ year-old fossilized remains of invertebrates from the ocean floor.

Tuesday

As sponges eat, so too are they eaten. “Spongivore” animals specialize in eating…sponges. Most are sea slugs, but several fish, nudibranchs, and the Hawksbill turtle also join the feast.

Wednesday

Sponges can completely regenerate themselves, not just to repair damage, but from single cells taken from the original sponge. No other plant or animal can regenerate to this extent.

Wednesday

Humans have been using real sponges to bathe and clean for the last 3,000 years, but artificial sponges arrived in about in the 1940s. They are far more common in households today than the real thing, and are typically made of cellulose and polymers.

Friday

When it comes to reproduction, sponges can have it both ways (sexual and asexual reproduction, that is). Some sponges reproduce alone simply by shedding parts of themselves, as described above, budding, or releasing gemules into the water to grow later. Some species are hermaphroditic, producing sperm and eggs, but these are produced at different times so as to avoid self-fertilization. Notably, this sperm can sometimes be released in dense “clouds” in the water, not unlike mushrooms releasing their spores in visible puffs (see Friday, week of 1/21/2024).

Saturday

That sponge in your shower does not hint at how big they can grow in the ocean depths. At 7 x 12 feet, a sponge “the size of a minivan” has been discovered in Hawai’i, and the aptly-named barrel sponge reaches sizes of at least 6 feet across.

Sunday

Habeas Corpus = “That you have the body,” is a writ to determine if the detention of an individual is valid.

Monday

Amicus Curiae = “Friend of the court,” usually a person or entity who is not a party to a lawsuit, but is permitted to offer information or advice to the court, including writing “amicus briefs” advocating a position in a pending matter.

Tuesday

Res Judicata = “The matter has been adjudicated,” is a legal principle against the relitigation of substantially similar issues and parties once the issue has been already decided.

Wednesday

Ex Parte = “From one side/party,” usually referring to motions or requests coming from one party without notice or input from the other, often in the form of direct contact with a judge.

Thursday

In Camera = “In chambers/private,” as opposed to in public or open court.

Friday

Nunc Pro Tunc = “Now for then” usually indicates correcting an innocent oversight or omission by retroactively applying the effective date of an order or filing.

Saturday

Ex Post Facto = “From a thing done afterward” typically refers to an act not criminal when done, but criminalized retroactively by law. Passing such laws is forbidden in the US Constitution.

Sunday

Leaves turn sunlight into sugars and starches to feed the plant with the help of the chlorophyll molecule, which reflects green light and thus appears green. This is the main reason so much of the natural world appears green, though a few other colorful molecules can also perform the same sunlight conversion work.

Monday

Conveniently for we oxygen-breathers, oxygen is a waste product of photosynthesis, just as the carbon dioxide we exhale is used in leaves as part of photosynthesis…a perfect cycle.

Tuesday

Needles are a highly modified form of leaf which evolved during the Mesozoic Era to reduce water loss. Since this needle-leaf split, trees have either had needles or conventional leaves, but never both (or neither) on a single tree.

Wednesday

Like the number of sand grains on a beach, the number of leaves that fall every year seems too vast to estimate, but it nonetheless has been done. In the US, about 203.58 billion trees drop about 40 quadrillion leaves onto forest trees every year. By this math, the worlds estimated 3 trillion trees drop about 1,200,000,000,000,000,000 leaves annually.

Thursday

Leaves can get really big, but some distinctions are needed for the title. The biggest non-split and non-floating leaf is the giant taro, with leaves up to 6 feet wide. The largest split non-floating leaf is the Raphia regalis palm, with leaves (comprised of leaflets) up to 82 feet long and 10 feet wide. Meanwhile, the massive Victoria boliviana water lily, with leaves nearly 10 feet across, can support the weight of a human adult on the water’s surface.

Friday

For all the green color it produces, chlorophyll is a short-lived molecule that needs constant replacement. So when the days shorten in the autumn and chlorophyll production slows, leaves can show off their other bright colors produced by pigments like anthocyanin and carotenoids.

Saturday

Whether you plan to or not, you likely eat a lot of leaves. Among the many common edible leaves in the human diet are spinach, lettuce, cabbage, kale, bok choi, chard, basil, arugula, oregano, watercress, spearmint, parsley, mustard greens, rosemary, endive, and many others.