Genuinely interesting stuff you learned at school/university/work

[MrsHathaway]

At a tangent from an otherwise rather tedious thread, some of us started talking about the history of the English language.

I did a paper called something like History and Structure of the English Language at university and honestly it didn't feel at all like work. The complicated bits have faded into the dusty corners of my brain, but some interesting snippets have remained within easy grasp.

For example, you can see a lot of the geopolitical history of the British Isles in what we now call English. Very basic words like low numbers (two, three) and natural features (sun, land, water) have their roots in our very earliest history and have scarcely changed since the Stone Age. They're also very similar to their equivalents in languages local at the time - northern European languages like Swedish, German, etc.

Place names come in odd clumps too - there are areas in eg Yorkshire and the Highlands which have very Norse names, and often there will be a geographical boundary between Norse place names and Anglo Saxon place names, such as a wide river or mountain ridge.

French came next, with the Normans in the eleventh century. A lot of our food words come from that period, including beef, pork, salmon, etc.

As English eyes looked further and further overseas we started adding more exotic ingredients to our kitchens and words to our vocabularies. Tomatoes, chocolate!

ANYWAY

We're often told that we won't use 90% of what we learn at school or even university, although we don't know which 90%. But I think it's almost always worth learning stuff for its own sake, if only because it's mildly interesting for one day or breaks the ice at one party where you happen to meet your soul mate.

So go on, what snippets have you retained from your years of formal education that are genuinely interesting in their own right? Can be a tiny thing or a major complicated theory, but it must be interesting - at least interesting enough for us to say "well, fancy that".

I'll leave you with this: in Japanese there was no word for "thank you". There were lots of ways of expressing gratitude, but no single expression in the European way. Then the Portuguese came, and suddenly the Japanese were trading with them. They used lots of hand gestures and gradually a kind of pidgin developed to allow them to communicate until there were enough on each side speaking the other's language. But one legacy from that time and that pidgin is a single-word "thank you" in Japanese: arigato. Which you'll notice is remarkably similar to the Portuguese obrigado.

cote I'm ashamed to say that I did join 50 book challenge thread, but two small children means that I am woefully behind. I'm currently at 12 😳 I enjoy reading the threads, though- great for book recommendations! Speaking of which, one of my favourite science books was recently serialised on Radio 4. The Periodic table by Primo Levi is a series of short, autobiographical stories about the elements and their influence on Levi's life. He was an industrial chemist and auschwitz survivor and his science writing is peerless IMO.

notcitrus As a 80s/90s child, I hadn't even thought that the young uns might not get the reference! Wonder what they thought of Tribbles

Cancer genetics is a fascinating field. I worked on a cancer that is caused by a single chromosomal translocation (where the bits of two different chromosomes are swapped and fused together). Other mutations contributed to the disease but you could drive it in models with just the translocation. Unsurprisingly, it's a very aggressive disease.

Ooh, ooh- this leads me on to another fact! One of the early, successful trials of gene therapy (to help children with severe immunodeficiency) was stopped because the virus they used sometimes inserted itself into an important white blood cell gene and a few of the kids ended up with leukaemia. Thankfully, they found a better way to insert the gene and the therapy is now much safer.

When sun damage causes skin cancer, the cancer-causing mutations often come not directly from the sun damage but from the body's attempt to repair the damage.

You are making new skin cells all the time, and to make a new cell you need to duplicate your DNA. So the DNA-replication machine comes along and says "eurgh, don't know what that is", and another machine jumps in and has a guess. If the guess is right, great. If the guess is wrong, you now have a mutation.

Drosophila genes all have fun crazy names like "son of sevenless".

"Sevenless" = flies with mutations in this gene have the seventh something in their eye missing.

"Son of sevenless" = a gene that works downstream from that one.

The toll-receptor is so-called because 'toll' means 'super, fantastic, groovy' in German.

(I've studied chemistry, biochemistry/molecular biology, and law at various universities - I was something of a serial student).

Imagine if we went to Germany and the motorways said "you have to pay the FUNKY to use this bridge" :)

I think in the forties men were very much obliged to get married if they got a girl pregnant, there was no just walking away from it, the whole "shotgun marriage" thing was the norm.

A great aunt of mine got pregnant out of marriage in the large thirties/early forties and the story in our family is very much along the lines of shame on the man for not stepping up rather than shame on my aunt for getting pregnant.

Just as a caveat - this is all from over 20 years ago but my tone lowering contribution is - I took an animal behaviour course at university called something inocuous and slightly dull which turned out to be about- amongst other more forgettable things- the relationship between genital size in primates and their social set up. So chimps who are very promiscuous have huge testes relative to their body size , to produce lots of sperm possibly as sperm competition was happening inside females,and orang-utans had small testes as they are solitary and mate infrequently. What really stuck with me is that although human testes are inconclusively medium sized, the human penis is FAR bigger than it needs to be and therefore is likely to have evolved via sexual selection ( in the same way that the peacocks tail got so out of hand). I am now outing myself to the 8 other people in that tutorial but our very lovely gentle lecturer at this point said that he personally felt it was unlikely to be a feature selected for by intersex pressures as woman generally found penises funny rather than impressive and he thought it was an intrasex pressure- ie men literally willy waving. Also from that course - we are the only animal that suppresses signals of ovulation, not only from males but from ourselves. Prompted me to read around about it and the two theories that I can remember were that it either forces the men to stay with you to ensure it is their children you are raising - as they can not be sure when you are ovulating and can't just bugger off once they know genetically they have it in the bag/ or that childbirth was so dangerous that once a link was made between birth and ovulation sensible folk avoided sex when ovulating. I'm not convinced by either really but it is so odd from an evolutionary point of view to not have some sensible obvious ovulation signal.

Also from a language aquistion course that a gorilla called Koko who was very proficient at sign language was shown a lighter that she hadn't seen before and had no sign for and called it 'bottle match'

I did a term of map making as part of my degree. Before mass digital reproduction, it used to take map makers about 2 years to draw a "Landranger" sheet master copy. The cartographers didn't get credited, so they used to try and weave their names into the features they were drawing. Cliff faces were very popular for this!

cathpot - that's interesting about the ovulation signalling - there are still signs (mucus consistency for one) but not openly obvious, as you're saying. However that might also be partly due to men losing the ability to receive whatever information there is available - a friend of mine is sure her husband can smell when she's ovulating, as he becomes far keener on having sex with her at that time of the month! He has a hypsersensitive sense of smell though, so it's possible that he's picking up on pheromones or something.

There is a study in the journal of evolution and human behaviour which was discussed on one of those BBC human series
(Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human oestrus) which suggests men do know at some subconscious level when women are ovulating and find them more attractive then. I don't know if this has been replicated--but I do have a vague memory of this idea from studies of how attractive men found smell sample of women at various stages of their cycle. However it can't be a powerful effect or presumably we would all be buying perfume with the requisite chemicals in- and 'pheromone sprays' would be mainstream rather than mocked. It must be better in some way for social cohesion that we don't have obvious signals- any anthropologists about??

Ovulatory effects on lap dancers' earnings might not be men sensing it though - could be the women behaving slightly differently.

True.

I'm slightly randomly now trying to imagine the effects on society if we did signal ovulation- eyes turning orange or something. I'm thinking that in places with easy access to contraception it might not be significant? Would it have encouraged more mother-worship type religions or just some sort of horrible woman shaming cultural practice- like societies where women are excluded during their periods.

Research has shown when women are ovulating. they tend to behave more flirtatiously and dress slightly differently.

Mind control parasites! There's a fungal spore that's breathed in by ants in the Amazon rainforest (I think) and somehow affects their brain so they abandon all their normal eating/working/reproducing activities and focus all their efforts on heading for a high place where the sun reaches them. Once they reach a suitable place they die, and the fungus grows using their body as compost and enjoys the perfect location they've provided. (I'm very vague on the details of this, it was on a nature documentary I watched ages ago.)

A similar but much more subtle effect is thought to be caused by the toxoplasma gondii parasite, which I learned about at college. Its cysts can be carried by various hosts, but need to find their way into the digestive tract of a cat in order to reproduce. Again I don't have a concrete source to hand so I don't know if this is a genuine fact or just a theory, but the idea is that when rats/mice are carrying toxoplasma gondii, the parasite somehow affects their brain chemistry to reduce their self-preservation instincts and make them more reckless. This makes them more likely to fall prey to a cat, which will then ingest the rodent plus parasite and give the toxoplasma the environment it needs.
It's been suggested that this process could work similarly on humans, making toxoplasma carriers more likely to be involved in road accidents due to reckless driving. Of course there's no proof of causation there - maybe people who are laid-back about exposure to cat poo are also more likely to be laid-back about road safety - but it's an interesting idea.

This is fascinating. The thing about your position in the food chain dictating the shape of your pupils has blown my mind.

I remember in an A-level philosophy class our teacher explaining a theory (I forget which one through the mists of time...) by asking a student to walk from one side of the room to the other, which obviously they did. The teacher then proved that it was actually impossible (according to this philosophical theory) to walk across the room - they reasoned that, to be able to cross the room, you had to be able to cross half of it, which we all agreed with. To be able to cross half of the room, you had to be able to cross a quarter of the room. And so on, until the distances were so small that the guinea pig student wasn't physically capable of taking small enough steps Thus making it impossible for her to cross the room.

Obviously it's not a perfect metaphor for the theory (since, when crossing a room, you don't need to do it in impossibly small steps) but it was a good demonstration of reductio ad absurdum, to the point that I still remember it almost fifteen years later!

Actually (Google has refreshed my memory) - it's not because you can't take small enough steps. It's because you have to cross half of the room first. Once you've done that, you have to cross half of the remaining half. And then again. So, in theory, you never can actually reach the finish line - there is always a tiny half-distance left to go.

Silly, but fun.

JinRamen I am not sure if anyone verified your info on kiwis having the "flattest" accent but that interests me. DH is Canadian and has been the only person I know to talk about this. He insists Canadian is the flattest accent. I don't agree but don't know which accent is!

MrsHathaway, thank you for this thread. I've only just found it and am working my way through it slowly so I can absorb all the information. Early on you mention that you can never remember whether Nicaragua is in S America or Africa... Would remembering that the Latin-based word 'agua' means water in Spanish and therefore the country must be more likely to be in S America? (I don't think there are any Spanish-speaking countries in Africa?)

Wooterus (love your name!) isn't that one of Zeno's paradoxes? Greek fella? Something about a tortoise...

Not quite as good as mind-control fungus, but there is a (category of?) wasp species where the famale stings a caterpillar to paralyse it and then lays her eggs inside its body. Time passes, the eggs hatch, and the larvae eat the still-fresh-because-it's-not-dead-yet caterpillar from the inside out.

Zeno's paradox was that you cannot shoot a tortoise with an arrow. The point was that after the arrow had covered half the distance, the tortoise had moved. Breaking the arrow movement into halves and tortoise moving meant the arrow would never hit

Would remembering that the Latin-based word 'agua' means water in Spanish and therefore the country must be more likely to be in S America?

YES!!

Much obliged.