Brain Snacks #143: Walking Giants, Missed Hole and Planck’s Society

How Easter Island's Moai Statues Moved, How an Old machine in Antarctica Caught Ozone Layer Hole and How Germany Rebuilt its Scientific Soul

Welcome to this week's edition of Brain Snacks. I share three short, exciting stories every Sunday to inspire your week.

I am more and more convinced that the way to live a fulfilling life is to never lose the kid on us. And this mean we should never lose our desire to play. We are forced (by society, parents) to “grow up”, to become more serious and to become adults, and while there is a truth to that, a lot of times we are just doing it in the wrong way, tying responsibility with strict rules, or “ways it should be”.

Here is an experiment, think about the last 10 adults that you met, and how many of them you would find interesting and someone you would hang out. And now think about the last 10 kids. I bet the ratio of interesting is much higher in the kids.

Kids are still in a innocent, pure form that make them always interesting. They will bring you a different point of view and will give you raw what is in your heads. And they are eager to learn, to try new things and to play. Every adult should have regular time with kids, we can learn a lot from them.

I hope you enjoy this week’s snacks.

Brain Snack #1: Walking Giants

The island of Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, is world-famous for its colossal stone statues, the moai, each weighing more than ten tons and scattered across its windswept slopes. For centuries, the question lingered: how could a small, isolated Polynesian community, cut off from the world since the 13th century, have carved and transported such giants without metal, wheels, or beasts of burden?

Clues begin at the quarry of Rano Raraku, where most moai were born from volcanic tuff. Their bases are subtly curved, and their centers of mass tilt slightly forward—an odd design if you plan to lay a statue flat, but ingenious if you mean to keep it upright and let it “walk.” The island’s ancient roads add to the puzzle: they curve gently and follow ridgelines, where archaeologists have found fallen statues lying face-down, as if they had tripped mid-stride.

The secret, it turns out, lies not in brute force but in rhythm. Researchers Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo proposed that the moai were “walked” upright using ropes and coordination rather than sleds or rollers. The method is elegantly simple: three teams (left, right, and a braking crew behind) worked in sync, pulling in short, measured tugs. The statue would rock and pivot a few centimeters to one side, then the other, slowly striding forward in a hypnotic heel-to-toe dance. Modern experiments proved it possible: with just a couple dozen people, a multi-ton replica could glide across the ground at surprising speed, rewriting centuries of speculation.

Great feats don’t always require great waste, sometimes the trick is to design with physics and for people. The moai “walked” because carvers shaped balance into stone and leaders turned logistics into ritual. In an age chasing mega-projects, Rapa Nui whispers a leaner script: lighten the load with smart geometry, choreograph effort, and let culture do part of the lifting. The giants moved because everyone moved together.

Go deeper: The Secrets of Easter Island - Smithsonian Magazine

Brain Snack #2: Missed Hole

In an age when computers were already replacing many human checks, a handful of scientists in Antarctica were still pointing an old optical instrument toward the Sun. Their readings suggested that the ozone was vanishing, contradicting the more modern satellite systems that were not showing anything unusual. Luckily the team refused to dismiss their data, and their persistence would soon shock the entire World.

For decades, the British Antarctic Survey had measured ozone at Halley Bay as part of routine monitoring. By the early 1980s, most of the world had switched to satellites like NASA’s TOMS, which processed vast amounts of data automatically. but the satellite’s software came with a feature where it rejected any readings below a certain threshold, assuming they were instrument errors, which made it oversight the ozone hole.

Joe Farman and his colleagues Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin, still using their trusty Dobsons on the ice, saw what the computers had thrown away: a dramatic thinning of the ozone layer every southern spring. When Farman published his findings in Nature in 1985, the reaction was immediate and global. The “ozone hole” over Antarctica was real, a massive seasonal wound in Earth’s protective shield, forcing the world to confront the scale of invisible atmospheric damage.

Within two years, nations united to act. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 began phasing out CFCs, marking one of the most successful environmental agreements in history. Decades later, satellite and ground instruments together confirm that the ozone layer is healing. This story reminds us that maintaining redundancy in our measurements and keeping older methods alive can help us uncover critical problems we might otherwise never see.

Go deeper: The story behind the discovery of the ozone hole - UK Research and Innovation

Brain Snack #3: Planck’s Society

In the early 20th century, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was the most reputed scientific institution in the World. It nurtured Einstein’s relativity, Haber’s chemistry, and Meitner’s nuclear insights, making Germany the beating heart of modern science. Yet that same brilliance was about to be shadowed by moral failure. Under Nazi rule, many of its institutes became entangled in state ideology and war research, and by the end of the war its very existence was in question question.

The Kaiser Wilhelm model:, elite, well-funded but politically enmeshed, had made scientific freedom vulnerable. So when physicist Otto Hahn, joined by Max von Laue and other survivors of the era, began rebuilding in 1948, they rewrote the rules. The new Max Planck Society distributed funding across federal and state lines, protected researchers from government interference, and focused on pure, curiosity-driven inquiry. Its very structure was an antidote to the temptations that had undone its predecessor.

That model proved astonishingly fertile. From the structure of DNA to quantum optics, from the frontiers of neurobiology to gravitational waves, Max Planck Institutes became laboratories of discovery. Over 30 Nobel laureates have emerged from their halls, through the freedom to ask obscure, beautiful questions that sometimes rewired entire fields.

The story of the Max Planck Society is a reminder that science thrives only when it is free, not of accountability, but free of ideology and short-term control. In rebuilding its institutions, postwar Germany rediscovered a deeper truth: that the pursuit of knowledge must answer to curiosity, not to power.

Go deeper: History of the Max Planck Society - Max-Planck-Gesellschaft