Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have learned about the dynamics of the cosmos and tiny microbes, the nature of the human brain and artificial intelligence. We’ve also covered some of the most pressing issues facing the planet: the climate crisis, infectious-disease outbreaks, a new wave of transformative weight-loss drugs. Along the way, our reporting has revealed some fascinating, sobering, and unusual facts. We wanted to share some of the most intriguing tidbits we’ve stumbled across, and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Mars has seasons, and in the winter, it snows. Bats are arguably the healthiest mammals on Earth. Mammal milk changes depending on the time of day, a baby’s age and sex, the mom’s diet, and more. The genetic mutation behind “Asian glow” might help protect people against certain pathogens—including tuberculosis. The overwhelming majority of sweaters available on the American mass market are made at least partly of plastic. In 2003, a NASA Investigation Board blamed the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in part on PowerPoint. As much as 36 percent of the world’s annual carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are sequestered, at least temporarily, in fungi. Mice and rats can’t vomit. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army considered distributing daily rations of yerba mate to soldiers. You have two noses, and you can control them separately via your armpits. It’s possible to lactate without ever having been pregnant. But if you are pregnant, your feet might grow roughly half a shoe size and lengthen by about 0.4 inches. Gender-neutral baby names are more popular in conservative states than in liberal ones. By 2051, North America may run out of three-digit area codes. Today’s average NBA athlete is 4 to 7 percent better than the average player from more than 10 years ago. Hawaii’s feral chickens are out of control. When you look at a tattoo, you’re seeing ink shining in the “belly” of an immune cell that has gobbled up the ink and failed to digest it. The technology behind the first rice cookers, sold in 1955, is still widely used today—because it’s perfect. Meanwhile, the corrugated pizza box used by basically every pizzeria has not changed since its invention in 1966, and it does a bad job of maintaining a take-out pizza. A database of nearly 200,000 pirated books is powering many generative-AI models. Americans are suffering from cockroach amnesia. The hippopotamuses released from Pablo Escobar’s personal zoo in Colombia are engineering the local ecosystem. Compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years can still hold a full load of groceries. Allergy season really is getting worse. Last month, for two consecutive days, the Earth reached global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels for the first time. There are Lord of the Rings–style hobbit-house Airbnbs, an Airbnb in the shape of a spaceship, and an Airbnb inside a freestanding harbor crane. Cat owners in Cyprus are giving leftover COVID drugs to their pets, but not for COVID. The same molecule that makes cat urine smell like cat urine is, in lower concentrations, commonly used in air fresheners and household cleaners. The Sphere, in Las Vegas, can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can reportedly see from space. Within eight seconds of flushing, a toilet bowl can shoot a plume of aerosols nearly five feet into the air—and straight into your face. Until the 1800s, merchants, lawyers, and aristocrats each wrote in their own distinctive script. The English words flow, mother, fire, and ash come from Ice Age peoples. By hacking a Tesla’s rear heated seats, German researchers inadvertently accessed private user data. Many eye creams are functionally identical to facial moisturizers but are far more expensive. A Dutch man and his family have a perplexing brain condition called “color agnosia”: They can see colors, but they cannot name them. Hurricane Otis confounded extreme-weather warning systems by gaining more than 100 miles per hour of wind speed in 24 hours. Foxes have committed mass murder against flamingos at least three times during the past 30 years. Despite nearly half a century of trying, we don’t have any medication that effectively treats anorexia. There are no established clinical guidelines for diagnosing and treating adult ADHD. Elephant seals sleep only two hours a day, for many months at a time, via a series of super-short naps, taken as they dive deep beneath the ocean’s surface. UPS handles so many packages every year that its workers put their hands on roughly 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. One of Saturn’s moons likely has a habitable ocean. AI avatars led a church service in Germany this summer. There’s a lifeguard shortage in America. It’s been going on for a century. A pill may be easier to swallow if you turn your head as it goes down. During the original run of Seinfeld, the show’s costumers had a hard time sourcing the clothing for Kramer’s wardrobe because his quirky style had become so popular with the general public that they were buying up all of the vintage clothing that made up his look. AI models can analyze the brain scans of somebody listening to a story and then reproduce the gist of every sentence. A new idea to curb emissions takes inspiration from the Cold War: a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation treaty. During a 2018 war game in which the president had been cut off from his nuclear forces, many participants—including former heads of state, foreign ministers, and senior NATO officers—recommended leaving the decision of whether to enter a nuclear exchange to an AI. Decades of research suggest that hypnosis might be an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, at least in the short term. Rest is not necessarily the best treatment for a concussion. People have been living on the Galápagos Islands since the early 1800s. Bird chicks aren’t innately able to recognize their mother’s calls—they learn to do so while in their eggs and can be manipulated to respond to another species’ voice. People are likely spending billions of dollars tipping creators on TikTok Live. Before Tesla and Meta, Palo Alto’s biggest tech giant was a farm that bred racehorses. Reports of pediatric melatonin overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade. iPhone cameras can perform trillions of operations to optimize a single photo. Modern flip phones stink because they’re just made of recycled scraps from the smartphone-manufacturing process. If you think all phones are passé, you can buy a pair of screen eyes from Apple for $3,499. Some people loop playlists in their sleep to help them game the Spotify algorithm and get more impressive Spotify Wrapped results. An index ranking the transparency of flagship AI models from 10 major companies gave every single one a resounding F.

Lemon-lime isn’t a flavor so much as a sensibility that defines soft drinks. The Italian government provides gluten-free-food vouchers for people with celiac disease. Some people taking Ozempic to lose weight are also effortlessly quitting smoking, drinking, and online shopping. Scantron tests, a defining feature of American education, are dying. Fifteen percent of daily Google searches have never been searched before, according to the company. American cars hit more than 1 million large animals and as many as 340 million birds every year. Animals at watering holes in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park were twice as likely to flee when they heard a human voice as when they heard lions. Hundreds of craters on the moon never receive direct sunlight. The total surface area of the Antarctic’s sea ice in July was more than four standard deviations smaller than the average for that time of year, shattering records. Oxygen might actually be bad for multicellular evolution. Last year, the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles was on time for just 19 percent of trips, making it the tardiest train in the country. About a third of pregnancies in women 40 and older are unplanned. MSG stays on the tongue long after food is swallowed, resulting in a lingering savory sensation. Podiatrists have seen a spike in plantar-fasciitis cases since the coronavirus pandemic began, partly because so many people who work from home shuffle around barefoot on hard floors. OpenAI’s chief scientist commissioned a wooden effigy intended to represent an AI that does not meet a human’s objectives. He set it on fire at a leadership meeting this year, according to two people familiar with the event. A luxury trip to Antarctica can cost upwards of $65,000. Many football fans punch, shoot, run over, or otherwise destroy their TV when things don’t go well for their team. Checked-bag fees may feel like they’ve been a scourge since the birth of aviation, but they were only introduced in 2008.

Dolphins have their own version of baby talk. Gravity-wise, the Earth doesn’t resemble a blue marble so much as a potato.

In the climate-change era, everyone who has oil wants to be the last one to sell it. Oil-producing countries still plan to increase production in the near term, and very few economic incentives exist to press them in any other direction. As long as someone else still has oil, they’ll sell it to your customer in your stead. Oil-industry insiders have said this point-blank throughout this year’s United Nations climate talks in Dubai, which are scheduled to end tomorrow.

The economic disincentives to phasing out fossil fuels have been the “elephant in the room,” according to Susana Muhamad, the environment minister of Colombia’s first-ever leftist government, who has emerged as a vocal leader in the meeting’s plenary rooms. Some of the countries most dependent on income from oil and gas are also among the ones most indebted to foreign banks, and so they keep drilling to stay current with payments. Countries such as Ecuador are exploiting their reserves—even in protected rainforest ecosystems—to service their painfully high debt. (Ecuadorians voted this August to block drilling in at least one part of the rainforest, for now.)

As one of South America’s biggest oil producers, Colombia is—or should be—another case like Ecuador. The country has a lot of international debt, so according to traditional economics, it had better keep pumping that oil. Instead of falling into that “economic trap,” Muhamad told me, over an espresso in an Emirati restaurant inside the sprawling COP campus, the country decided to veer radically off course. It announced in Dubai that it would sign on to a novel attempt to fix this seemingly intractable logic, one that has been gaining momentum outside negotiating rooms: a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation agreement.

Modeled in concept after the nuclear-nonproliferation deal signed in 1968, the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty is not official COP business, but is at the center of a growing side conversation. Like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the fossil-fuel treaty aims first to take stock of each country’s resources; the organization Carbon Tracker Initiative has already begun compiling a registry of fossil-fuel production and reserves. Then agreements could be made to mutually halt expansion. So far, 12 countries have signed on to support the deal; Colombia is the second oil-and-gas-producing country to join. (Timor-Leste, an island nation in Southeast Asia with a struggling oil economy, was the first.) Ultimately, the treaty’s signees intend to have it recognized by international law and be legally binding.

Tzeporah Berman, a longtime Canadian environmental activist and the chair of the group pushing for the fossil-fuel treaty, has had “an out-of-body experience” watching the treaty take on a life of its own, she told me when I caught up with her at the conference. “Last year, we walked into COP with one country,” she said. The tiny island nation of Vanuatu called for the fossil-fuel treaty on the floor of the 2022 UN General Assembly. Now, in addition to those 12 countries, 95 cities and subnational governments have signed a call for nonproliferation, along with 3,000 academics and scientists and 101 Nobel laureates. Mark Ruffalo is a fan. Those other entities can’t be party to the treaty when it ultimately forms (only countries can do that), but Berman sees their collective support as a force to move public opinion—much as the nuclear-nonproliferation movement started by turning the moral tide on nuclear weapons. If everyone who thinks that fossil-fuel expansion is morally unacceptable backs a single treaty, that could have major political ripple effects, she thinks.

Berman spent a number of years as a provincial-government appointee working with the Alberta oil-sands industry on climate policy. Though their goals are at odds, she is still friendly with a number of oil-sands executives, and in Dubai, she happens to be staying in the same hotel, so she greets them in the lobby in the morning. Canada put 28 oil-and-gas-industry employees on its official roster for the climate talks. “The industry has made $2.8 billion in profits every day for 50 years,” she said. “They’re trying to hold on to that.” After working with them, she clearly understood one thing: “Anything that out-and-out constrained the production of their products, they would not support.” They have maintained this position in Dubai, where Exxon Mobil’s CEO and others have expressed their preference for agreements that focus on limiting carbon emissions generally—not on limiting fossil fuel production specifically.

Berman saw a similar reticence from countries when she started coming to COPs in 2007, she told me. “I was told by governments, including my own, that oil production was not a climate issue.” When a blockbuster climate deal finally emerged from a COP in 2015, she said she “searched the Paris Agreement for oil, gas, and coal,” but the words weren't there. Every country had committed to tackling climate change, yet none of them officially planned to cut fossil-fuel production. And since then, production has gone up.

So Berman began talking with academics, looking for a political strategy that had worked in the past to break this type of standoff. The nuclear-nonproliferation movement stood out. It was a case much like climate change: The threat at hand had the potential for mutual assured destruction, a danger that many agreed was unacceptable, yet no country wanted to go first in eliminating its part of that danger.  

With a fossil-fuel-nonproliferation treaty, countries could share information on their oil and gas reserves and agree to a mutual drawdown schedule that reflects their individual situations. “It’s also an instrument to look for better and more fair conditions for countries like Colombia,” Muhamad, the environment minister, said. The country has roughly seven years’ worth of oil reserves left, and is expected to run out of gas in this decade. Changing course, she said, would save the country from being locked into a downward spiral of aggressive oil drilling and then a financial crisis when it ran out. Plus, to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals, Colombia can’t possibly unearth all its oil. With so many cities and subnational governments also signed on to support the nonproliferation agreement, economic dialogues might be possible among more entities. Muhamad pointed to California, which has supported the nonproliferation treaty. “But who buys 50 percent of their oil from Ecuador in the Amazon? The state of California. So what is California going to do about it? This is the discussion that we have to have.”

Ecuador has not yet signed the treaty, but Colombia, Ecuador, and similar countries are, as Muhamad put it, “not Saudi Arabia,” with its seemingly endless reserves. Colombia and Ecuador will run out of oil. Which means they have less to lose, long-term, from agreeing to leave it in the ground. “We don’t have resources for hundreds of years. We are the ones right now who could do this transition,” she said. But their short-term financial needs are too pressing to leave the oil there for nothing in return. Plus, when her country does try to move in this direction, it is punished in the markets, she said. After Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that the government would cease issuing new permits for oil exploration, the value of its peso dropped immediately. The financial system needs to change, Muhamad said, or countries like hers won’t be able to take meaningful climate action. “And a treaty could be the place where we could negotiate now, not in 15 years, when nobody wants our oil.”

Of course, that logic won’t work for mega-producers such as the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, or even for smaller countries such as Azerbaijan, which gets two-thirds of its wealth from oil and gas, and which was just announced this week as the host of next year’s COP. But, Berman argues, treaties change the culture, even in the absence of the biggest players. The nuclear-nonproliferation deal had limits—the five major nuclear powers, including the U.S. and Russia, still have their arsenals—but it did change the trend of unrestrained weapons production. More recently, a UN treaty banned nuclear weapons outright. No nuclear power signed on, but such treaties can succeed nonetheless: The Guardian notes that the U.S. never signed a UN land-mine treaty, yet aligned its land-mine policy to match. The dangers of using oil are more diffuse than the dangers of nuclear weapons, and the incentives to use it are constant. Decoupling those things will take a monumental effort—something treaties are designed to do.

Ministers at COP28 have spent nearly the past two weeks sitting in large, carpeted rooms negotiating a text that, up until today, contained a call to phase out fossil fuels altogether. John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, had said during the conference that he thinks the world needs “largely a phaseout of fossil fuels in our energy system,” a distinct difference from the less forceful “phase down” language the U.S. previously supported. China said it would commit to some language on fossil fuels, which was better than no language.

For a few days, it felt like a radical new approach to oil and gas might be possible. But Saudi Arabia and the head of OPEC had been attempting to block the phaseout proposal, and today COP President Sultan Al Jaber released a new draft of negotiated text that eliminated the possibility, instead leaning on the much softer language of “reducing” fossil fuels. The European Union has said it will not accept this version of the text, leaving open the door to restoring some stronger language. Yet even the discussion of a phaseout at COP represented a change in the rhetoric of some powerful countries: Once, Berman told me, talking about oil production at all was a nonstarter. Diplomacy might have limits, but it can bring ideas once treated as impossible dreams into the mainstream. A treaty to stop expanding the frontier of fossil-fuel production could go the same way, or further. “At the beginning, it seems to be something on the periphery,” Muhamed said. “But maybe from the periphery, it goes to the center.”

Colombia and Brazil have destroyed 19 illegal gold mining sites and equipment in the Amazon rainforest.

The Belgian empire invaded the Congo rainforest during the late 19th century and swiftly established itself as the cruelest imperial force in Africa. The Congo is the world’s second-largest rainforest behind the Amazon, and King Leopold II treated it like a personal loot box. To strip away and sell its resources, he enslaved the Indigenous population, destroying much of the region’s preexisting culture and politics from the family unit on upward. The penalty for failing to meet his rubber quotas was amputation. Millions died during his extractive reign, and ever since, the rainforest has rarely known peace.

To a certain cast of mind, the rainforests that straddle Earth’s equatorial zone constitute the apex of all creation. Every day, 12 hours of sunlight strikes their canopies and beams down through cracks to ferns on the forest floor. This daily dose of sun also burns off mist from equatorial oceans and rivers, raising a belt of clouds from the planet’s midsection. The droplets that fall from it put the rain in rainforest. Together, these twin supplies of solar energy and water fuel the year-round growth of a green multistory shelter, from which some of the world’s most diverse animal, fungal, and microbial ecologies have emerged. Few other physical systems, perhaps in the entire universe, convert inanimate materials so readily, and so profusely, into life.

Tropical rainforests are not merely marvels of nature. Like human beings, they profoundly affect the Earth system; they also stabilize it in the face of geologically novel events. During the past 200 years, they have done so by breathing in the carbon exhaust of industrial modernity, reconstituting its molecules into branching networks of roots, thick stems, fresh leaves, flowers, and seeds. Tropical  rainforests are among nature’s most important carbon-capture systems, absorbing far more than any human technology. They are nonetheless under threat all over the world. Some are better off than others. So far, the Congo’s 500 million acres of forest have remained largely intact. But maybe not for a reason that anyone can celebrate.

[Read: The Amazon cannot be recovered once it’s gone]

For more than 50 years now, satellites have whirled around the Earth many times a day, monitoring the health and extent of tropical rainforests. Almost all of the largest forests—in the Amazon basin, mainland Southeast Asia, and the islands in and around Indonesia—have lost very significant portions of their tree cover. In the Amazon alone, enormous stretches have been burned down and replaced with industrial-scale fields of corn and soy since 1985. Their yields feed the tens of billions of chickens, pigs, and cows in factory farms, which perversely mirror the rainforest in the density of their biomass production. The Congo has been a notable exception to this extreme deforesting trend—but that’s partly because the rainforest has played host to one of the bloodiest sustained conflicts since the Second World War.

In 1960, the colonial Belgians were ousted from power in the Congo, and in the decades since, the rainforest has been subject to nearly every variety of political instability. That the region’s national borders were drawn by and for imperial powers has made tensions worse, as has continued meddling by quasi-colonial outsiders. During the Cold War, a coup backed by the United States assassinated Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of independent Congo. A brutal dictator, then named Joseph Mobutu, eventually seized power. Even by local standards, Mobutu’s regime was extraordinarily corrupt. He embezzled his way to an enormous personal fortune, depleting the state’s strength.

When the Hutu perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide sought refuge in the eastern rainforest during the late 1990s, the region ignited into the First Congo War. It lasted only six months but set the stage for the Second Congo War, which spanned roughly four years and eventually killed more than 3 million people. A peace agreement finally arrived in 2002, but today militias continue to fight in the Congo’s eastern reaches. As a consequence, multinational companies have been slower to set up large slash-and-burn operations than they have in, say, Brazil, Max Holmes, CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told me. Without as many corporate-scale operations on the ground, foliage has been preserved, and the planet has stayed cooler.

Any decent human being has to hope that a more stable peace will soon come to the Congo, even though it will likely mean more intense deforestation. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the world’s poorest nations, and its leaders will want to ramp up the economy. The quickest and dirtiest way to do that will be to exploit the rainforest. Elsewhere in the world, forests have been devastated after conflicts came to a close.. For example, after the 2016 accords between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels, many of the guerillas’ former jungle strongholds were burned to make way for farms, ranches, and other businesses.

[Read: Trees are overrated]

Something similar could happen in the Congo, the home of the forest elephant and gorilla. Studies have found a positive association between conflict in the Congo and traditional, small-scale deforestation, which is mostly caused by local people clearing forest for subsistence farms, and by the extraction of charcoal, timber, and minerals by militia groups. But peace can bring larger-scale deforestation, explained Elizabeth Goldman, a researcher at Global Forest Watch. During the past 15 years, the rate has doubled in the DRC. The Congolese government has passed forest-conservation legislation, but brazenly flouts its own laws. New networks of red-soiled roads are spreading out through the jungle. Deforestation in the region still isn’t as bad as it has been in the Amazon or some parts of Indonesia, Goldman told me, but that could change if peace at last comes to the region.

Among those who are trying to save the Congo, there isn’t yet a consensus about what to do next. Community forest management has shown some promise, but only on a small scale. Many policy makers have championed a carbon-credit system, whereby foreign companies pay locals to keep rainforests intact, to offset their own emissions. But one of the Congo’s largest private carbon-credit operations was exposed for not keeping its promises to locals, and the practice itself has recently come under intense global scrutiny. Among other things, confirming that credits are working as intended is difficult. Nor is it always clear that the forests they protect would have otherwise been removed. Brazil has just proposed a massive new global fund that would pay countries to keep chain saws and torches away from rainforests. But there is no guarantee that it will be adopted.

For those who pay attention to climate change, the grim ironies are hard to miss. The United States, the world’s most powerful country, professes to care about the planet’s warming atmosphere, but has also just become its largest exporter of natural gas. Abu Dhabi, a petrostate, is hosting the preeminent global climate meeting, and talks are being led by Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Clearly, for the foreseeable future, humanity is going to keep burning the forests that were buried under the Earth’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago and also the living ones that now cool its atmosphere. We have already dramatically shrunk the largest of them, except for one, and it may only be an outlier because of a terrible, terrible war.