Brain Food

A suggested assortment of intellectual vittles to satiate your curiosity.

Aug 12, 2024

There has been an influx of new readers in the last few months, so some of you may not have come across my regular Brain Food editions, in which I humbly suggest interesting ideas that may quench your cerebral thirst. Sorry in advance if you hate my suggestions. If you like them, or if you sort of like me, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription—or buy my new book FLUKE—which was recently named a “best book of 2024 (so far).”

Ant Surgeons

The natural world is a weird and wonderful place. Most of us ignore it most of the time—a serious blunder. If you look closely enough, though, you could be rewarded by observing the most extraordinary behaviors, lurking in plain sight. For example, a new study has shown that the common brown Florida carpenter ant will routinely treat wounded individuals by either systematically cleaning their wounds, or by amputating them.

What’s even more extraordinary is that researchers discovered that the ants first diagnose the severity and type of injury before deciding on a course of treatment—and that the treatments actually work. These are rudimentary ant surgeons.

As one of the authors, Erik Frank, explained: “When we're talking about amputation behavior, this is literally the only case in which a sophisticated and systematic amputation of an individual by another member of its species occurs in the animal kingdom.” There are other species of ants that treat wounds with specially evolved glands that secrete a substance that kills microbes, but these Florida carpenter ants are just using their bodies to treat each other, no special substances involved.

In the study, a wounded individual ant would only survive an untreated femur injury about 40 percent of the time, and just 15 percent of the time when their tibia was hurt. Once treated, however, with amputation or wound cleaning by their ant brethren, those survival rates shot up to 95 percent and 75 percent.

While other species use medicinal plants or self-medicate to protect against parasites, as far as the researchers are aware, the only known health care system in the animal world that rivals ant surgeons for its sophistication is…our own.

Sin Eaters (Atlas Obscura)

If you were looking for a job in 1700s and 1800s Britain, you would exhaust most alternatives before resigning yourself to the role of a “sin eater.” As Natalie Zarrelli explains, a grieving family would pay the sin eater the equivalent of a few dollars, place some bread on the body of their dead loved one, then watch as the sin eater consumed the bread. It was widely believed that the bread could rapidly absorb all the sins of the departed soul, which, if eaten by another, would be passed to them, the moral weight lifted from the sinner.

This came at a cost, Zarrelli notes, as “most of the time being a sin eater meant you were homeless and a social pariah.”

The last known sin eater, a man named Richard Munslow, died in 1906. He adopted the practice after four of his young children died. Munslow absolved their sins, then took to doing the same for others as his tragic grieving process.

How Laughing Gas Changed the World (Guardian)

In 1799, Thomas Beddoes set up a medical facility known as the Pneumatic Institution. At the time, it was widely believed that many diseases were derived from “bad air,” a general miasma of invisible toxins. If bad air could harm the body, Beddoes reasoned, then good gases surely could cure it.

One day, as Mark Miodownik recounts in a Guardian excerpt of his book, Beddoes stumbled upon a new gas that seemed to have some rather pleasant effects:

“Davy tried many gases, none of which seemed to be much help – in fact, quite the opposite: when he tried a new gas called carbon monoxide on himself, he almost died.
Undeterred in his zeal to make great discoveries and help humankind, Davy then inhaled another newly discovered gas, nitrous oxide. The gas tasted slightly sweet and had a very strange effect on him. He started dancing round his laboratory “like a madman”, as he noted later. He laughed. He giggled. It was highly inappropriate, given that he was working in a medical institute, but he couldn’t stop.”

Poets and creatives flocked to try the new gas. It developed a following, establishing the reputation of the Pneumatic Institute, but it also had a surprising benefit: it could eliminate the sensation of pain, a property that would embed its place in the future of medicine.

Not too long after Beddoes discovered its benefits and joys, Samuel Colt—better known for his pioneering gun technology—first dabbled with laughing gas, as the money from his stage shows with the substance enabled him to devote himself to firearms.

Miodownik traces how laughing gas evolved over time, revolutionizing medical treatments and later emerging as a recreational drug. I must say, this whimsical 1840 etching makes it look rather enjoyable. (The guy on the right offers an uncanny portrait of exactly how I celebrate when I get a new paid subscriber; please don’t make fun of my cartoonishly pointy feet I was born that way and no Camponotus floridanus surgeons were willing to operate).

Why We Need Madcap Science (Aeon)

Two common assumptions in scientific research are that any new ideas should be:

Observable
Falsifiable (able to plausibly be proven wrong)

This article makes a persuasive case that those two traits can sometimes hold back science, because it forces research to look within the box of the unknown but knowable, rather than postulate what may be unknowable. (I’ve previously written about the differences between puzzles and mysteries). Adam Becker makes the case that we would be better off indulging in some madcap ideas, weird and wild theories that may sound crazy—but could also be true:

For a theoretical physicist, designing sky-castles is just part of the job. Spinning new ideas about how the world could be – or in some cases, how the world definitely isn’t – is central to their work. Some structures might be built up with great care over many years, and end up with peculiar names such as inflationary multiverse or superstring theory. Others are fabricated and dismissed casually over the course of a single afternoon, found and lost again by a lone adventurer in the troposphere of thought.
That doesn’t mean it’s just freestyle sky-castle architecture out there at the frontier. The goal of scientific theory-building is to understand the nature of the world with increasing accuracy over time. All that creative energy has to hook back onto reality at some point. But turning ingenuity into fact is much more nuanced than simply announcing that all ideas must meet the inflexible standards of falsifiability and observability. These are not measures of the quality of a scientific theory. They might be neat guidelines or heuristics, but as is usually the case with simple answers, they’re also wrong, or at least only half-right.

Dinosaurs Died So We Could Have Wine

One of the hidden joys about being an academic is that you peruse various scholarly journal articles (that relatively few people read) in which a scholar has developed this incredibly niche expertise, and then, without warning—BAM!—their research discovers something that has crossover appeal to a huge audience.

So, you can imagine that bewildering excitement that occurred when a paleontologist with a strong expertise in grape fossils (yes, grapes sometimes leave fossilized seeds behind) chronicled some of the oldest extant fossils that start around 66 million years ago.

You may notice that number—66 million—is familiar and that’s because that’s the same number of years ago that a giant space rock walloped the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. And, as readers of Fluke will recall, if that space rock had arrived a second sooner or later, mammals might not have risen and humans would likely not exist.

But, as it turns out, we probably wouldn’t have wine, either, or at least not the same kind as what we currently drink.

Prior to the asteroid impact, it’s hypothesized that dinosaurs lumbered about in ancient forests, “likely knocking down trees, effectively maintaining forests more open than they are today," says Mónica Carvalho, a co-author of the paper and assistant curator at the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology. That was bad news if you were a vine plant, because the forest canopy wasn’t particularly dense. When the dinosaurs went extinct, however, the forests got denser, and “the diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may have also aided grapes by spreading their seeds.”

Regardless of the mechanism—which, I admit, sounds a bit too wishy-washy—there’s an explosion of grapes in the fossil record relatively soon after the dinosaurs disappeared.

As described in ScienceDaily:

In 2022, Herrera and his co-author Mónica Carvalho were conducting fieldwork in the Colombian Andes when a fossil caught Carvalho's eye. "She looked at me and said, 'Fabiany, a grape!' And then I looked at it, I was like, 'Oh my God.' It was so exciting," recalls Herrera. The fossil was in a 60-million-year-old rock, making it not only the first South American grape fossil, but among the world's oldest grape fossils as well.

I love this description of science, because it’s often the largely anonymous unsung heroes like this—the kind of diligent nerds who woop with joy when they see a little grape seed encapsulated in ancient rock. They do the hard work of science to help us understand our world. We, curious people of the world, salute you!

But here’s the kicker: this strand of research also offers the likely origin story of the common grape vine, Vitis, from which all our wine is derived. And that is why scientific evidence now suggests that next time you enjoy a bit of Merlot, you should do the decent thing: raise your glass to the pachycephalosaurus, who was lamentably martyred for your Dionysian pleasure.1

The Past, Present, and Future of Lager Yeast

This is a deep-dive into the fascinating history of the yeast that is used to make lager—and where it came from.

Anyone who has read Fluke also knows that I love contingent events that have long-tail consequences. One of those is the emergence of a specific strain of yeast that just so happens to make really tasty lager. And it seems to be both a mystery of how this strain spread—and how it was, perhaps, a one-off event:

“At some point in time, a single yeast cell was born into a great vat of beer, one cell among billions of others. Somehow, that one cell now has its DNA in nine out of every 10 beers drunk in the world. That’s remarkable. These new details reveal something of that origin, but it still remains teasingly incomplete.”

Whichever the case, a single hybridization event created one new yeast cell. That yeast came to thrive, and then dominate, in the cold environment, gradually taking over the culture. As a prominent brewery, the Hofbräu would have shared its yeast with other local brewers, and it would have spread from there. Eventually, lager yeast would be used throughout Europe, and then the world. And the rest, as they say, is history…

Thank you for reading! I’ll be back in your inbox soon with a full essay. In the meantime, feel free to recommend The Garden of Forking Paths to your closest several hundred friends on your social media network; or in glowing forwarded e-mails to colleagues, friends, relatives, mortal enemies, etc. Every little bit helps.

"Why would he choose such an unusual dinosaur for this example?” you may have asked yourself. Well, dear reader, the answer is simple: my nephews are well-versed in all known dinosaurs and have decided, by unequivocal acclamation, that pachycephalosaurus is the finest among them, so who am I to argue?