Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity and wonder, and also some really odd-looking things hanging in the sky.
And on that note: if you recently saw that alarmingly strange purple ribbon of glowing plasma stretching overhead in recent days, please do not be alarmed! It’s just Steve.
“The inspiration behind the glow's name is thought to be a scene from the animated movie "Over the Hedge".
In it, a group of animals awake from hibernation to find what to them is another awe-inspiring phenomenon - a big garden hedge.
"What is this thing?" one creature says.
"I'd be a lot less afraid of it if I just knew what it was called," another says, before a squirrel recommends calling it Steve.
"I'm a lot less scared of Steve," another animal replies.
Scientists later adapted the name into an acronym - ‘Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement’.”
This reminds me of a prophetic scene in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
Maria Hill:
What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for, Agent Ward?Grant Ward:
Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.Maria:
And what does that mean to you?Ward:
It means someone really wanted our initials to spell out "shield."
Truly, science is filled with lovable dorks. And I guess there’s just something about the name “Steve” - huge apologies/congrats to all you Steves out there.
(For an example of a rather more terrifying Steve, read this raw and beautiful piece from a decade ago by my friend Geraldine. I’m glad to say she’s okay and is now busily upsetting people with transparent pumpkin pies and other haunting obscenities.)
Secondly, as I write this it’s a bitterly cold day here in Scotland and the sky is bulging with what I hope is snow (because nobody looks forward to experiencing Not-Quite-Snow), so for the second time in this newsletter’s history, I think what’s called for is a leaf sheep:
It’s a type of sea-slug, it’s exactly as cute as it looks, and that magnificent green coat on its back is the most interesting things about it: those spines are stuffed with green chloroplasts from the algae it likes to eat, a process called kleptoplasty.
Chloroplasts are the parts of algae that convert energy from the Sun into chemical energy for growth - meaning the leaf sheep is one of the very few sea creatures that indirectly performs the miracle of photosynthesis, just like plants do. Hell of a trick.
So that’s absolutely everything in the world fixed for the next 10 seconds. You’re very welcome. (Many thanks to Dr Suzanne Moss, who first made me aware of them back in 2021.)
Okay! To today’s business - and the first part of the new season-within-a-season for paid subscribers, on the life-improving science of memory.
As I wrote previously:
“I want to find some ways to store things away in my brain in a form I’m much more confident of being able to retrieve later.
I want to know a few tricks for remembering what I want to remember, to curate my memories instead of taking enormous cognitive gulps of what’s around me at the time, like a photograph compared with a detailed sketch. (When I was an archaeologist, we learned to photograph and draw everything, because the latter is more of an argument about what you’re looking at, filtered through your interpretative skill.)
And of course, I want to find stuff that makes my inner child go WOW! all this new science is so cool. I’m tediously predictable like that. You know this, of course.”
But it turns out that most of my assumptions about how memories work were way off the mark - and the science is far stranger that I was expecting (the findings of some of the most recent research are delightfully trippy in places)…
And this story starts with one of the most forgetful people in the world staring at a clock.