Well just in case this ends up being a solution to some mystery I’ve not come across, here’s a genuine (albeit seemingly pointless) finding from a research project I did a while back:
When saltwater is poured into the soil around the roots of a tomato plant, the plant’s internal electrochemical response oscillates with a 0.1hz frequency.
I’m not sure what mystery that will solve but now nobody can accuse me of not reporting/recording it!
Thats so much cooler than my last work, which can be summed up as “when someone said you can make [substance] via [cheap process] instead of [expensive process] they were fucking lying”.
Unspoken second title: “and all you reviewers fucking suck!”
It would have been a cool paper, if my original goal was anything remotely similar. I mostly wrote it out of spite.
So this is related to hydration in the plants. I read this paper about tomato plants being stressed and emitting ultrasonic chirps
So glad I can’t hear my poor potplants.
They said “Whaaat?”
Ooh, interesting. That’s a different angle from what we were working on but a similar idea of being able to understand what stresses plants are under.
Here’s an article talking about the project I contributed to: https://www.engineering.com/story/xzezv
We know by now that plants talk with each other. You could measure the effect of this on the plant and surrounding plants. Check if the effect is beneficial, like better water retention, growth or taste etc. If any of this is true, install a speaker on your tomatoes field and play some 0.1hz jazz
…one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Go back even further - there were some very clever people people around in ancient times. Example: the Antikythera device. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Who knows what they might have come up with? So much knowledge was lost to fire and flood and warfare over the centuries.
Stone henge. Pyramids. Etc.
Didn’t the Romans accomplish something similar when they built the temple of Jupiter?
Those dudes were truly onto something.
Very likely. This is one of the problems with our global social system.
Keeping such a large proportion of people in poverty and lacking access to education basically guarantees that we’re missing out on more than half our Einsteins.
Antivaxxers, flat earthers and religious people all think they are einstein too.
Lemon helping with scurvy was reported and recorded but then forgotten. I think losing knowledge is more likely than unreported knowledge, especially regarding lifes great mysteries.
I believe that was the origin of ‘limey’ becoming a nickname for when English were in submarines for large periods of time.
Especially so for anything discovered more than a couple hundred years ago when most people couldn’t write, let alone have their findings instantly available to the world via the internet
Or now, when it can be buried in misinformation or the sheer messy size of the Internet.
100% Has happened many times. Often those things are later re-discovered. But who knows?
How many reporters around the world have had a car spontaneously explode, or suffered sudden-onset jumpeez near a window?
How many scientists and researchers have had significant breakthroughs or discoveries about hazards of waste or energy efficiency, only for their work to suddenly be labeled falsified and personal reputations dragged through the mud?
Trying to tell the world about life’s greatest mystery is like trying to get them to eat salad without dressing. There’s really no point or benefit to you.
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I have made a truly marvellous discovery, which this post is too short to contain.
I think it’s closer to accurate that life doesn’t have a whole lot of “great mysteries”, not counting frontiers beyond which we simply can’t detect.
Instead there’s just so much to learn, that it’s impractical for any individual to learn even a modest fraction of it. But, there’s usually some philosopher, or niche branch of medicine, or sect of monks somewhere or behavioral biologist or whatever that has figured out the answer to that particular question, and just nobody really bothers to ask them very often. And they only might know that one, just because they specialized in it. They won’t know any of the others, just like everyone else.
Like, what is love could be a common one. But would you really say nobody knows, or just nobody starts knowing, but it is possible to figure it out, and rarely, some people do?
*Baby don’t hurt me,
Don’t hurt me, no more*
Oh definitely! And not only cause humankind tend to forget something. We are a really western, at best on top asian and arabic region focused society. So we wouldn’t know if a guy in South America figured out the earth is round or saw gravitation like Newtown.
Edit: and if you wanna read about how much Christianity destroyed knowledge everywhere they went. I would say chances are 99,9999% someone got erased from history
Not only this, but women have been suppressed for most of history and not allowed to participate or taken seriously. This means even in those societies where we were paying attention, we were listening to at best only the 50% of (generally white) men in that fraction of the world.
Different field than the post, but Mozart’s sister comes to mind. She was also a prodigy, was toured around with Wolfgang and got top billings as a kid. But as soon as she was “marriagable age” she was not permitted anymore to pursue any career in music. She had to marry, have kids, and was a piano teacher the rest of her life. What incredible musical compositions could we have had from her, if the patriarchy had allowed?
It’s probably the Vogon’s fault. The mice are sure to be displeased.
But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
