Fun fact: peregrine falcons dive at ~200 mph, making them the fastest known animal. At such high speeds, air pressure can damage their lungs; to counter this they have little boney cones in their nose, similar to a jet engine
blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2016...
Watch: youtu.be/legzXQlFNjs?...

Fun fact: emerging evidence suggests we taste sweet more intensely in the morning and this has nothing to do with our blood sugar or insulin but does track well (seemingly causally) with a key fullness & body weight regulating hormone, leptin
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18633111/

Fun fact: cancer cells (in a petri dish) can hijack the mitochondria from immune cells via physical nanotubes. this depletes the immune cells of energy and may help the cancer cells grow
nature.com/articles/s41...

easy to read summary:
www.newscientist.com/article/2298...

Fun fact: drinks tins have a thin plastic coating inside to protect the drink from the can and the can from the drink
google.com/amp/s/www.sc...

Cool video here (and another one in the link above too 👆🏻):
x.com/JamieBGall/s...

Fun fact: platelets are often seen as just plugs to help stop bleeds. However they store & release many things (eg inflammatory proteins, neurotransmitters), & the way they work has been described as similar to circulating neurons
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Fun fact: bloodworms are venomous worms with super strong teeth that are partially made of copper, who evert their insides in order to catch prey
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/new...
Video: www.science.org/content/arti...

We can argue all day about the specifics of the trial, but fundamentally ME was NOT properly screened for and was NOT excluded during screening. This wouldn't happen in other diseases, it shouldn't happen with ME

Imagine justifying that by saying "participants gave informed consent" when they were not told there were no oncologists in the team nor that the intervention went against clinical guidelines, & when the information given did not actually explain the full scope of potential risks

Imagine running a cancer trial with ZERO oncologists on the team, doing something that is known to be ill-advised to cancer patients, then justifying it by saying "we stuck to our trial registration, got ethical approval, and with our poor assessments we saw no harm"

Oh good point!

Fun fact: Many people have heard of ghrelin as THE hunger hormone, but emerging evidence suggests insulin-like peptide-5 is also a hunger hormone.

pnas.org/content/111/...

We know loads of fullness hormones but we have not been as successful finding hunger hormones

Fun fact: figs are essentially inverted flowers; some figs require wasps for pollination who deposit their eggs in the fig and then usually die
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
hilgardia.ucanr.edu/fileaccess.c...
pnas.org/content/pnas...

Fun fact: NASA developed a foamless safe-to-ingest toothpaste for astronauts, that also has application for people with disabilities & kids, called NASAdent
ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation...

Though using regular toothpaste in space is less of a problem these days: youtu.be/3bCoGC532p8?...

Fun fact: a chemical in some vinyl gloves (DINP) has some structural similarities to a chemical that makes things spicy (nordihydrocapsaicin). This guy 👇🏻 used that knowledge to make hot sauce out of plastic gloves!
youtu.be/1B3Xi5L6siI?...
Short version:
www.facebook.com/NileRed2/vid...

Adorable fact: these 👇🏻 are skeleton panda sea squirts (Clavelina ossipandae) 🩻 🐼 🥹
www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/spec...
www.livescience.com/animals/skel...