Five Times Amazed
Every day I collect the things that make me stop and look twice. A fact that rearranges the furniture in my head. A story I saved for the next dinner table, knowing I’d ruin the punchline from excitement. Here are five from the past weeks. No grand thesis connects them, except the one I keep coming back to: look at the world with a stay amazed every day gaze, and it refuses to be boring.
1. The internet is 530 million years old
👉 What’s Creating These Mysterious Seafloor Hexagons? (Nautilus)
And we have the arthropods to thank for it. Researchers (Baucon et al., Earth-Science Reviews) suggest the honeycomb structures on ocean floors worldwide once served as a distributed communication network for colonies of these invertebrates.
Only a joint-legged body under a rigid exoskeleton can scrape burrows with corners this clean, and the design reads like an engineering brief. The mesh grows “by simply adding hexagons while preserving communication efficiency.” It “promotes an even distribution of signals in all directions,” so “every member of the colony receives information uniformly.” And because “several alternative paths connect any two points,” connectivity survives “even with significant network damage.”
That is almost exactly what the Pentagon had in mind when it built the ARPANET. Which is now delivering this content to you. Technology with a 530-million-year track record of uptime.
💡 Context: For 250 years we assumed these hexagons were accidents of geology, blamed variously on algae, tadpoles, and fossilised beehives. Turns out it was active infrastructure all along, built by creatures coordinating without a single neuron devoted to PowerPoint.
Relevance: Whenever someone sells you an “innovative” new concept, check the fossil record first. Most things have already been invented once. The real game isn’t inventing, it’s applying: a proven design, put to work in a new context. Half a billion years of field testing beats a pitch deck.
2. Put your money where your mouth is. The Truman Show edition
👉 Dyson launches £420 toothbrush that films ‘live cleaning footage’ inside your mouth (The Guardian)
Too bad James Dyson works for Dyson and not for Apple, otherwise I could have headlined this piece iBrush. Our Inventor Of Products That Solve A Problem That Was Never There has found a new hole to fill: your mouth. For just under 500 euros (yes, you read that right), James wants you to brush, floss and flush your teeth. Price tag wise, he just pulled an Apple.
So where’s the Truman Show in all this? The gadget is officially called the Dyson CameraJet (registered trademark) electric toothbrush. If you’re afraid of the dentist, you can now take that fear home: this “complete dental system” films your teeth with a 100k pixel macro lens camera, powered by Gap Optical Targeting (also a registered trademark). Not sure how the stroboscopic light fits in, but the gadget does, of course, come with an app and an “AI machine-learning algorithm”.
All specs are on Dyson’s website, including the astonishing fact that this product is already out of stock. Apparently the market for being watched while drooling is bigger than I thought.
3. The island that plays hide and seek
👉 How a Phantom Island in a Canadian Lake Appeared, Vanished, Then Reappeared (New York Times)
👉 Peekaboo island: the floating forest confounding nature watchers in western Canada (The Guardian)
One time, in the early eighties, I was doing the dishes when my mother asked: “Imagine Italy sinks into the Mediterranean Sea tonight, and nobody reports it. How would you know what’s true?” I pushed back. Of course someone would cover it, some journalist, radio, television, a headline. At twelve, I thought she was being difficult. Instead, she was teaching me to be critical of what we see, and, more importantly, what we don’t see.
Forty-odd years later, I found out. An island appeared in Williston Lake, a big reservoir in British Columbia. Then it vanished. Then it turned up again, thirty kilometres from where it was last seen, because apparently islands do that now. Complete with trees, decades old, none of it on any map, in a lake where all the islands are mapped and known to boaters.
A boater filmed it and reported it to the government agency that runs the lake. Their response: “Must be AI.”
They were wrong. Satellite images confirmed the island was real. It’s fifty years of decomposing logs and woody debris that got so fertile it sprouted a forest and then, when the water rose, packed up and went for a float. Nature building a compost heap with ambition.
💡 Is this what we’ve become? So conditioned by generated slop that “probably fake” beats our own eyes? My mother’s hypothetical used to be paranoia. Now it’s Tuesday. A country could sink into the sea, and half of us would scroll right past it, because every day something impossible shows up in our feed, and it’s fake by default.
Seeing is believing? Not anymore. Seeing is a first draft.
4. Your underwear reveals how healthy your soil is
👉 Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants? (Ars Technica)
You may have stopped reading right there. Understandable. But bear with me, because this is actual, prize-winning science. The “Proof by Underpants” project is about the potential of citizen science for research, and it just won an Ig Nobel Prize.
A thousand volunteers from 25 countries buried 100% cotton underwear in the ground to measure and map soil biological activity. Soil health matters: it’s the foundation of agriculture and functioning ecosystems. The team wanted to improve on the “teabag index”, a predecessor method you can still contribute to, because “unlike TBI, the underpants provide a direct visual and haptic measure of decomposition that is easier to interpret,” according to the study’s authors. Fast-decomposing underwear means lively soil.
The results? Underpants rotted fastest in private gardens, home to more insects, fungi and bacteria than intensively farmed land. The scrubbiest backyard patch outperformed industrial agriculture at what industrial agriculture is supposed to be good at: growing things.
💡 I love this one. Science at eye level with anyone willing to spend two months burying, then unearthing, their underwear. And it was clean underwear, for your comfort.
5. A broken heart is now in the lab results
👉 New Test for Broken-Heart Syndrome Offers Insights into the Mysterious Disease (Nautilus)
There’s a heart condition called broken-heart syndrome, and it’s not a metaphor. After an intense emotional shock, like losing a loved one, the heart’s main pumping chamber can suddenly weaken. The symptoms mimic a heart attack, but the doctors find no blocked artery, because there isn’t one. Japanese physicians named it Takotsubo syndrome, after the octopus trap it resembles: a stricken heart swells into the shape of a fishing pot. If that’s what catastrophic grief does to an organ, it earned a nickname.
Until now, the only way to tell it apart from a real heart attack was threading a catheter into your arteries to have a look. An international team led from the University of Zurich analysed blood samples from over 3,600 patients and used AI to identify five biomarkers that, combined with biological sex, recognise broken-heart syndrome in nearly 90 percent of cases, before anything invasive happens. (Fittingly, the second Zurich study in this edition. The underwear team got there first.)
💡 Context: The researchers don’t oversell it: the BioTAK score doesn’t replace catheterisation when that’s truly needed. It just spares the wrong patients an unnecessary procedure in the middle of the worst week of their lives.
Relevance: After the toothbrush spyware, note the difference between AI that watches and AI that witnesses. Your emotions have a chemical signature, and machines are learning to read it.
Written by Krispijn Plettenberg. AI tools were used for editing and refinement.
