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#1243: a nocebo is the evil counterpart to the placebo: if you expect something (particularly a drug) to have negative (side-)effects then they happen. people in control groups in trials often drop out (for example 5% for depression meds and 9% for parkinsons) even though they don't have any active chemicals, because they experience the byproducts that they've been warned of. it's as useful as a placebo for that reason. even tho it sounds like a cute "nuh-uh-cebo" it comes from Latin "nocēbō", meaning "i harm" (as opposed to placēbō "i please"). according to a 2022 study, 72% of adverse reactions to the first COVID vaccine were nocebo, and 52% to the second were too.

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#1242: an ant mill, also known as a death spiral, is when ants start going round in a circle. ants follow each other through pheromone paths, which are stackable to optimise routefinding. if they accidentally form a cycle, it becomes a positive feedback loop and ants keep joining it and it gets increasingly bigger. they walk until they die of exhaustion, and a pile of carcasses builds up in the middle. the first one to be properly described in 1921 was 370m in circumference and took two and a half hours to complete one revolution. it's also been observed in fish and some caterpillars.

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#1241: Rocky Marciano, the only heavyweight boxer to end his career undefeated, had his punch measured at a military facility in 1955. he supposedly clocked in at "925 feet-pounds" of energy, which is about a .22 shotgun cartridge in freedom units. I found one tabloid saying how this is equivalent to being fired at 13 times but what do I know. it's surely a lot lower pressure and force than that....? other athletes have been recorded higher, sometimes by taking the force and turning it into an energy figure, which seems very assumptive... there's one saying a hit from Mike Tyson is equivalent to being hit with an anvil dropped from 1.5m, which almost sounds about right. I guess the fact today is that you can't trust boxers to do physics.

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#1240: the etymology of the Franks (and by extension France, Franconia, etc) is a matter of fierce debate. the term was in Latin by the third century and other Germanic roots point to the origin being an endonym. the biggest theory is that they were named for using a spear called a *frankon (the Saxons were named after a sword called the seax (sax/sahs) so it fits..?). one of the probably more mythological answers is simply that they take their name from King Francio. alternatively, it comes from fra(n)kaz, an endemic word for "fierce" - the Franks were also called feroci in Latin.

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#1239: the tree shrew is (probably) the only mammal that can tolerate spice. a protein called transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V member 1 (TRPV1), aka the capsaicin receptor, is highly sensitive to capsaicinoids, a group of neurotoxins that make things spicy. but the tree shrews' gene encoding for it has a single mutation making it many times less responsive. the Piper boehmeriaefolium plant, which produces Cap2, chemically similar to your local chilli, lives in a lot of the same places as the shrew so it gets a reliable food source with very little competition. the shrews were shown to be more indulgent in the red hot peppers, garlic and ginger too, although they still strongly prefer the Piper leaves, suggesting they specifically evolved for it.

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#1238: no-one knows whether the Minister for Foreign Trade of the DRC during 2007 actually existed. chances are he didn't. someone called Andre Kasongo Ilunga supposedly held the position but is generally believed not to exist, since nobody saw him in person at any point during his surprisingly long tenure. the prevailing theory* is that the leader of the UNAFEC party, who made up a smaller fraction of the first democratically elected government in a while, put a made-up person with the name "equivalent of John Smith" down as one of the two options for the post to make the alternative, Kisimba Ngoy, look like a better choice. but the PM didn't get on with him so appointed this complete rando instead. Kasongo apparently ""wrote"" a letter of resignation but it wasn't accepted until he handed it in in person, so he held his position.

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#1237: llamas and alpacas were imported into the USA in the 70s and formed a "speculative bubble": the biggest reason for having one was to breed more, so they ended up ballooning in price and number, reaching over $200,000 and almost 150,000 individuals. then, of course, they crashed as supply caught up to demand and people realised that there was actually no real use for them, exacerbated by the recession. ironically, llamas and alpacas actually come from America: the camelid family first evolved on the Great Plains. one group moved south, becoming the genus Lamini Lama (and then getting domesticated) while another moved north, through Russia, to become Camelini Camelus, including Dromedaries and Bactrians. there was a species endemic to Alaska, C. Camelops, but that went extinct after the ice age.

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#1236: i don't know why weasels have such a bad rep. a "weasel" is a deceptive and insincere person; to "weasel" is to manipulate shiftily; to "weasel out" is to avoid responsibility. one theory is that Ovid, an ancient Roman poet, wrote of Galanthis, Hercules' mother's maid, who lied to save his birth, and was turned into a weasel. some attribute it to Shakespeare's Henry V, where there are similes to weasels sucking birds' eggs, but they don't really do that a lot in real life. in Greece, weasels are an omen of bad fortune, and in folklore are thought to conceive in the ears and deliver through the mouth. in Mecklenburg, there was an annual two-week period specifically dedicated to killing weasels. in the Edo period, they were seen as yōkai, supernatural monsters that cause strange phenomena and shapeshift. what did they do to humans to deserve this all!

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#1235: pitch inflation was the increase of concert pitch in the world of music. Praetorius in 17th century Germany said singers had started straining their voices and viols broke more frequently. the best explanation i could find is mainly down to bowed instrument players, who tried to out-compete each other and more tighly-strung instruments produce comparatively more brilliant sounds. it doesn't entirely make sense but i guess it's always the firsts' fault in one way or another. the contemporary measure to this was defining standard pitches (often just locally), Chorton and Kammerton (choir and chamber tones respectively), which kept it at bay for a few hundred years. then, with French Romanticism and developments in technology, the pitch began inflating again, going from A390 (the A above middle C is that number of hertz) in 1795 all the way up to A449 in just sixty years. eventually, in 1859, a law was passed standardising it at A435.

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#1234: the little flap of tissue on the inner corner of your eye is vestigial: it derives from the third (or fourth) eyelid. i'm not talking about the little round thing right in the nook - that's called the lacrimal caruncle, secretes mucus, and is made up of basically the same stuff. this thing, the plica semilunaris of conjunctiva (literally, crescent-shaped fold of conjunctiva), is only really visible if you move your eyeball quite far round. it's made of conjunctiva, the thin slimey material on your eyeball and the inside of your eyelid. the muscles that control it are also biologically redundant. it would've originally formed a "nictitating" membrane, found nowadays on most birds, reptiles and anurans, but only attested to one primate. also, cats apparently, which i had no idea.

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#1233: abbreviations are one of the biggest sources of new words in English. things you probably say all the time come from much longer words, like taxi/cab (both from taximeter cabriolet) and van (from caravan). the one that surprised me was "sport" from "disport" (from French des (away) + port (carry)). Oxford's style manual Hart's Rules say that abbreviations and lowercase initialisms have to have periods, but contractions and uppercase initialisms can't. for example, "doctor"->"dr" is a contraction, but "professor"->"prof." is an abbreviation and needs a stop. you would say "FBI" and "OK" but "e.g." and "o.k.". most other guides on the matter disagree...

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#1232: bee hives have seasonal genders! over winter, all the drones in a honeybee colony die off, meaning the entire hive is female for a half the year. the drones' entire purpose in life is to find virgin queens from other hives and mate with them, but only the minority get there first. if they succeed, they die almost instantly because they leave body parts inside the partner... even without that, drones only last about eight weeks, so they rarely make it past autumn. if they do last that long, they get kicked out of the hive by the workers, because why waste valuable food on someone if they're gonna pop the clogs after a few months.

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#1231: the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect, or the YORP effect for short, is an effect on things like asteroids, which are smallish and uneven. as a layperson, it's basically the light equivalent of a wind turbine, i think: as photons hit a surface, they impart an impulse (ie they transfer momentum), and because the surface of the astronomical body slants in some places more than others, the reactionary force (as well as infrared radiation) isn't parallel to the incident force, causing a net torque. the person who named it claimed to do so after the four scientists who enabled the effect to be discovered, but really i think they just went "yorp" and retroactively found four people in the right field with the right initials.

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#1230: the USS Mississinewa was an American oil tanker that was sunk by Japanese torpedoes in Micronesia in 1944. it wasn't discovered until 2001, and just a few months later, a typhoon struck the atoll it was sitting in, rupturing the cargo, even from 100m below the surface. it leaked fuel into the lagoon for two months until they finally managed to plug it, only for it to happen in December of the same year. Micronesia is incredibly biodiverse: there are about 300 species of coral, 1000 of fish and 1200 of molluscs. its reefs are also the some of the most "productive" in the world, meaning that they absorb carbon more (about 20x more quickly than average open sea).

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#1229: the reason Krusty the Clown from the Simpsons looks like Homer is because the character was initially designed to be Homer in disguise. it's actually quite deep because Bart worships TV icon but looks down on his father. or something. Matt Groening chickened out and dropped the storyline though. it says in the official style-guides (see fotd#1169) that incidental personas shouldn't have a) the same colour hair as their skin (like the three Simpsons children) or b) a Homer beardline. to quote it, "don't out-Simpson the Simpsons". that's why everyone with these two features is either a Simpson or trying to be one.

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#1228: asbestos was a kind of wonder in the middle ages: Charlemagne set his banquets on asbestos tablecloths because it was bright white, and then he'd throw it into the fire in front of the guests and pull it out completely unblemished. other rich folks had similar party tricks: for example, General Lian-ki of the Han dynasty in the second century would repeatedly decline wine until, in a rage, it'd be spilt onto his asbestos jacket, staining it. he'd have it burnt in feigned anger, then retrieve it, completely spotless. nobles were cremated in asbestos so their ashes wouldn't mix with those from the fire. eternal candles in the ancient Roman temple of Vesta had wicks of asbestos, and burnt for at least 330 years. scammers claimed that chunks of asbestos came from the true cross, or other articles belonging to Jesus that seemed to have been endowed with everlasting durability. or something.

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#1227: there are very few mosquitoes in Disneyland Florida, even though it's built on top of a swamp, and every measure is taken: every body of water has a fountain or something so it's constantly moving. every building and floor is designed to stop rain pooling anywhere. rather than just killing them, Walt wanted to stop them being there in the first place, and still water is the perfect breeding ground for mozzies. instead of using chemical pesticides, a very faint garlic liquid is sprayed across the whole park. they have mosquito fish and Sentinel chickens, which eat the mosquitoes, but they also use the latter as canaries: they can catch viruses but they don't fall ill to mozzie diseases, so if there's a bug going around, pun intended, then they know. in 2018, over 2000 blood samples of the poultry were taken.

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#1226: collective nouns were a bit of a trend in the middle ages: it would be a symbol of your high status and well-learned-ness to go out hunting and comment on the "ostentation of peacocks" you missed, or the "malapertness of peddlers" upon whom you scowl with a well-furnished gaze. one source of these conventions was the 15th century Book of St Albans, and many of the collective nouns mentioned there stuck around, eventually making a resurgence on 2010s middle-class pseudo-arts-and-craft-style greetings cards. lots of them seem logical (a parliament of pedants); some make sense given the socio-economic situation of the time (a toil of peasants); others relate to folk tales (an unkindness of ravens: referencing the myth that they're cruel to their own young). most, however, are just silly (a groan of puns - how autological).

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#1225: the five-ringed flag was first used at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, but they managed to lose it at the end. in 1997, the committee held a banquet and invited Hal Prieste, the oldest living medallist at the time. a reporter mentioned to him at one point that they never found the original flag, and he went "i can help you with that. it's in my suitcase". he had been dared to steal it by a fellow swimmer and it sat at the bottom of his bag for decades, until he ceremoniously gave it back at the 2000 Sydney games, at the age of 103.

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#1224: HMS Diamond Rock, a very small rocky island off Martinique, was a "stone frigate" in the British fleet for over a year. it had a strategic position, being tall and in the St Lucia Channel, but the Navy weren't allowed to hold land, so they had to call it a ship. a sloop-of-war, no less. it fended off the French, stopping them from landing in some of their ports on the main(ish)land. it also had vitamin C-rich callaloo to prevent scurvy, and broad-leaved grass to weave hats and fabrics from.