Curiosities - Silicon Canals

In 1928, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to a stack of staphylococcus plates, noticed a blue-green mould had cleared a halo through the bacteria, and gave the leaking compound a name that would change medicine: penicillin

When Alexander Fleming returned to his St. Mary's Hospital lab in September 1928, a contaminated petri dish would change medicine forever. The story of how a blue-green mould, a rotting Peoria cantaloupe and an artist's eye for the odd produced the drug that has saved half a billion lives.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 26, 2026

Curiosities

Michel Eugène Chevreul boiled down skeletal muscle broth in 1832 and isolated a compound he named after the Greek word for flesh — and that name still defines what gyms now sell by the tub

In 1832, French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul boiled down skeletal muscle and isolated a compound he named from the Greek word for flesh. Nearly two centuries later, creatine has become one of the most studied and widely sold supplements on Earth.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 26, 2026

Mind

For decades an Italian-American town in Pennsylvania had far less heart disease than the near-identical town next door despite smoking, drinking and eating much the same, and the only thing that explained the gap was how closely its people lived

The town is Roseto, in eastern Pennsylvania, settled at the end of the nineteenth century by immigrants from a single village in southern Italy.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 25, 2026

Curiosities

A mosasaur called Tylosaurus grew to more than 13 metres in the Late Cretaceous seas, roughly twice the length of a great white shark, with a second set of teeth on the roof of its mouth that drove prey one-way down its throat

Tylosaurus stretched past 13 metres in the Late Cretaceous seas, longer than two great white sharks nose to tail, with backward-pointing palatal teeth that turned its throat into a one-way ratchet. A newly named species from Texas, Tylosaurus rex, pushes the genus to its upper limit.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 25, 2026

Curiosities

Axolotls can regrow entire limbs, parts of their heart, sections of their spinal cord, and even portions of their brain, and they do it without forming scar tissue, which is why labs from Vienna to Boston keep colonies of them alive specifically to figure out what humans lost

Axolotls regrow limbs, heart tissue, spinal cord and brain without forming scars. From Vienna's Hand2 discovery to a 2026 PNAS paper on the SP8 gene, here's why labs worldwide keep the Mexican salamander alive.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 24, 2026

Curiosities

In 1901, sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the Greek island of Antikythera surfaced with a corroded bronze lump that sat in an Athens museum for decades before anyone realised it was a 2,000-year-old geared computer that could predict eclipses and track the Olympic Games

The Antikythera mechanism spent 2,000 years on the seabed and another 50 in a museum drawer before X-rays revealed it was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses, modelled the Moon's elliptical orbit, and tracked the schedule of the ancient Olympic Games.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 23, 2026

Curiosities

Oregon hides a fungus called Armillaria ostoyae that covers 2,385 acres underground, weighs an estimated 35,000 tons, and has been quietly killing trees from below for thousands of years

In Oregon's Malheur National Forest, a single honey fungus covers 2,385 acres, weighs around 35,000 tons, and has been killing conifers from below for thousands of years — making it the largest known individual organism on Earth.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 23, 2026

Curiosities

A single cumulus cloud the size of a small village weighs roughly 500,000 kilograms, about the weight of 100 elephants, yet stays aloft because its water is dispersed as tiny droplets through air denser than the cloud itself

A fair-weather cumulus cloud the size of a small village holds about 500,000 kilograms of water — the mass of 100 elephants — yet floats because the droplets are scattered across a volume larger than a stadium and the warm air beneath is denser than the cloud spread through it.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 22, 2026

Curiosities

A donated human head sold for around $300, a torso with the head attached for $3,300, and a full body up to $5,000 — taken apart, one person is worth far more than they ever were whole

Inside America's legal but largely unregulated body-broker industry, where a donated human head sells for around $300 and a single donor disassembled can generate more than $10,000 across a dozen buyers.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 22, 2026

Curiosities

America’s body brokers turned donated bodies into a multimillion-dollar trade

A 2017 Reuters investigation traced 50,000 donated American bodies through 34 brokers in just four years, with more than 180,000 individual parts shipped to buyers ranging from surgical schools to Army blast-test labs — almost none of it described on the consent forms families signed.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 19, 2026

Politics

It is a federal crime in America to sell a kidney to save a dying patient, yet a whole donated body cut into parts and shipped for research sits in a legal gap Congress never thought to close

The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act made it a federal felony to pay a donor family for a transplantable kidney. The same law left a parallel industry — whole bodies donated to non-transplant brokers and resold in pieces for thousands of dollars — entirely untouched.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 19, 2026

Curiosities

A Colorado funeral home returned fake ashes to grieving families while selling their loved ones by the body part

Megan Hess ran a funeral home and a body-parts brokerage out of the same Colorado building. Federal prosecutors found she sold more than 500 donated and non-donated bodies while returning concrete dust and strangers' remains to grieving families.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 19, 2026