Thursday Things: 250th Edition
23 May 2024. Vol 6 No 21. By Dan McGirt. #250
Welcome to the 250th edition of Thursday Things! This week we take a look back, shrink some brains, and visit a cotton candy planet.
If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
It wasn’t pretty, but we made it. Photo by Kai Gradert on Unsplash
250 Issues!
This week’s issue is the 250th edition of Thursday Things, which has been in continuous publication every Thursday since August 15, 2019. Whether you’ve been along for the ride from the beginning, or joined our merry band somewhere along the way, I offer a heartfelt thanks to all my scores and scores of Happy Subscribers! Thank you for reading Thursday Things!
Let’s review the mission of Thursday Things:
Thursday Things is a weekly grab bag of amusing, strange, absurd, uplifting, and inspirational items I find online or in my offline reading or real life experiences. The sort of things I might otherwise post on social media.
Thursday Things is mostly short bites, not meandering essays. I accentuate the positive. No politics here! (Except dog mayors. I love stories about dog mayors.) No rants. (Well, I may rant about Pluto. PLUTO IS A PLANET.)
I aim to have a new Thursday Things waiting for you first thing every Thursday. (But sometimes the new edition will come later in the day.) I hope Thursday Things will amuse, inform, and delight you.
I think this is still accurate, for the most part. Early on, I tried to get each week’s issue out at around 8:00 a.m. Now I typically send Thursday Things out around noon. So “first thing every Thursday” might need to be updated.
But my goal remains the same: to present you with a handful of interesting items each week that will amuse, inform, inspire, or delight you.
Whether I succeed — well, I don’t really know. I don’t get much feedback from Happy Subscribers in the form of comments or emails. There are a few of you — and you know who you are — who comment from time to time, which I appreciate!
And, of course, I do get a few clicks of the heart icon each issue. While not telling me exactly what you liked about that issue, at least suggests you liked something.
Or that you’re just being supportive. Either way, I’ll take it!
Top Editions
Most Happy Subscribers read Thursday Things via email when it is delivered to your inbox. Some of you use the Substack app. But did you know that every issue of Thursday Things back to the first is available on the website under the Archive link?
You can arrange past issues in chronological order or by Top issues, as ranked by likes, comments, and perhaps shares.
Here are the Top 5 editions of all time from the first 249 issues of Thursday Things:
Gone to the Dogs Edition 12 November 2020. (#66) Dog mayor! Stalin! 3-D printed body parts! New cancer drugs! Don’t cook chickens in the Yellowstone thermal springs!
Good Health Edition 3 March 2022. (#134) Get better sleep, lift weights, and drink milk!
Hacked and Pickled Edition 25 January 2024. (#233) Welcome to the Read Along! Have you been hacked? Food for gut health.
Use Your Brain Edition 22 October 2020 (#63) Missing lemurs! What is consciousness? Bulletproof wood.
Cheddar Cheese Edition 28 March 2024. (#242) Why is cheddar cheese orange?
Two are from the current year (which makes sense, as there are more readers now to boost the numbers) and two from 2020 (when people had a lot more time to read quirky newsletters for some reason).
Search bar
The Archive page also has a Search function. Just click the little magnifying glass icon and enter your search term. If you want to find all the past Thursday Things items about dog mayors, lasers, flying cars, old maps, airships, avocados, or any of our other obsessions, this is the place to do it!
Planet Fluffy
Okay, we’re not going to be completely self-indulgent and rest on our laurels. Here’s a new item:
Astronomers Uncover a Baffling “Cosmic Mystery” – A Giant Planet As Fluffy as Cotton Candy
A newly discovered planet, located approximately 1,200 light-years from Earth, is 50% larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive. This results in it having an extremely low density comparable to that of cotton candy.
“WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller,” explains Khalid Barkaoui, a Postdcotral Researcher at ULiège’s EXOTIC Laboratory and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy. Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure.”
That’s all very interesting. But I was told there would be cotton candy.
To their great surprise, the accumulated measurements revealed an extremely low density for the planet. Its mass and its size, they calculated, were about 0.14 and 1.5 that of Jupiter, respectively. The resulting density came out to about 0.059 grams per cubic centimeter.
Jupiter’s density, in contrast, is about 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter; and Earth is a more substantial 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter. One of the materials closest in density to the new, puffy planet, is cotton candy, which has a density of about 0.05 grams per cubic centimeter.
I choose to believe Planet Fluffy is in fact made of cotton candy, until there is hard evidence otherwise.
Or it turns out to be the home world of the Tribbles.
Our brains are shrinking!
There is a mystery right inside our skulls: The mystery over why human brains have shrunk over time
The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago. Exactly why is still puzzling researchers.
The smart aleck explanation would be lack of use. Use it or lose it, right?
And that actually may be not far off, depending on which explanation you buy.
Let’s read on!
Certainly, when compared with other animals of a similar size, our brains are gigantic. The human brain has nearly quadrupled in size in the six million years since our species last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. However, studies show this trend toward larger brains has reversed in Homo sapiens. In our species, average brain sizes have shrunk over the course of the last 100,000 years.
What’s going on? Well, it might be that our brains have simply become more efficient.
Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall has an idea:
Tattersall suggests that the shrinkage in brain size began around 100,000 years ago, which corresponds to a period of time in which humans switched from a more intuitive style of thinking to what he terms "symbolic information processing" – or thinking in a more abstract way to better understand your surroundings.
"This was the time when humans began producing symbolic artefacts and engravings with meaningful geometric images," says Tattersall.
In other words, we started writing things down. So we didn’t need as much brain capacity to remember things.
Other scientists disagree with the language explanation and tie shrinking brains to a warmer climate since the last Ice Age, with an obligatory climate change is shrinking our brains blah blah angle.
Still other scientists look to the rise of complex civilizations and the division of labor, malnutrition, and even the development of agriculture:
Marta Lahr of Cambridge “argues that a reliance on farming may have created vitamin and mineral deficiencies, resulting in stunted growth.”
The bottom line is, nobody can figure out exactly why human brains have shrunk.
That is probably because our brains shrank.
Thank you for reading!
Thank you again for reading Thursday Things!
Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!