12 Farm-Fresh Trivia Tidbits for Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Scientists have pinpointed a gene that seems to be behind humans’ unique ability for complex language, and then GMO’d it into mouse brains. They found these mice displayed notably different speech habits in two specific scenarios: babies talking to mothers and males talking to potential mates.

The head of a King George V statue was severed and stolen from a Melbourne park last year, and it appears that Northern Irish rap group Kneecap brought it out on stage last week. It’s made occasional cryptic appearances on social media in the intervening months, being barbecued and dumped in a toilet.

Staff at The Verge put together a timeline of their coverage of Google hardware, updates and search features they’ve unceremoniously put down, like Chromecast, Google Podcasts and most recently Assistant.

A Pew poll found that 47 percent of Americans say they’ve clocked people being anywhere from “a little more” to “a lot more” rude since the pandemic hit.

The neurotransmitter GABA is responsible for calming the nervous system. The amount of GABA in your brain increases when you start drinking, but it later decreases and is overtaken by glutamate. Glutamate’s whole thing is jacking up neuron activity to heighten cognitive function, but when there’s too much of it at the wheel, it causes dysregulation.

Jim Best is a scuba diver who makes a living retrieving golf balls from water hazards, often inhabited by alligators. He makes a circuit of 65 golf courses: “I go there, and I make money, like a harvesting a crop, like a field of corn.”

A new study out of Stanford found that electrical charges in tiny droplets of water, aka “microlightning,” is capable of kicking off chemical reactions that can change inorganic material into organic molecules.

As the practice becomes more widespread, and we view it less as cosmetic surgery and more like a grooming habit, more people are reaching a critical mass of botulinum toxin that’s causing the muscle-freezing effects to wear off more quickly. About 1.5 percent of patients can develop a full immunity to the treatment.

In 2022, Swedish tech dork Sebastian Siemiatkowski took Sam Altman’s boot out of his mouth long enough to offer up his company, Klarna, to be OpenAI’s “favorite guinea pig.” Within a year, over a dozen A.I. algorithms had been implemented at his company, aimed at cutting jobs for real people. As Klarna is about to IPO, they’ve proudly cut their workforce from 5,000 to 3,500, aiming to get that number down to 2,000.

An unprecedented study of the pigment-producing cells of six 100 million-year-old mammals found that they all had the exact same coloring: a dark brown, dirt-like color. That probably helped us hide from our bigger, prettier foes.

Chicago turns its river green every year for St. Patrick’s Day, and it’s natural to wonder if that disorients the fish. But a study found that, while fish absolutely freaked out when sewers overflowed into the river in 2023, five tagged fish didn’t appear to change their behavior at all when the water was dyed green.

Maria Branyas Morera was the oldest person in the world when she died at 117. An autopsy found that her cells’ biological age was about 17 years younger than her chronological age, and she had the gut biome of an infant (which, somehow, is a good thing).