Brain Snacks #145: Fields of Numbers, Lost City and Sun-Eaten Threads
Ronald Fisher Turned Farmlands into the Birthplace of Modern Statistics, The Underwater Chimneys that Whisper Earth’s Secrets and How Arraiolos Tapestries Were an Accident of Light
Welcome to this week's edition of Brain Snacks. I share three short, exciting stories every Sunday to inspire your week.
Tired after a nice weekend with some friends visting and a short trip to the wine country. It seems also that after an unexpected really warm October, the weather started shifting and rain has started. I actually didn’t mind having a sleepy Sunday afternoon watching the rain, I actually was missing that. I know that feeling will not last but let’s enjoy while it does.
I hope you enjoy this week’s snacks.
Brain Snack #1: Fields of Numbers
Modern statistics is used everywhere, from understanding how well medical treatments work to keep you hooked in your favorite social media app. But its beginning started in a industry you might not expect, the so call primary industry of agriculture. It was there, that Ronald A. Fisher, the so called father of statistics, developed a new branch of mathematics.
In the 1920s, deep in the English countryside, Ronald Fisher was working at Rothamsted Research Institute, one of the oldest agriculture research institutes of the World. Rothamsted had decades of field data but little clarity. Weather changed, soils varied, and results contradicted one another. Fisher, a Cambridge-trained mathematician, saw an opportunity. By applying probability to agriculture, he formalized the idea of “experimental design.” Randomly assigning plots, replicating treatments, and controlling variables allowed him to separate signal from noise.
From his experimentes came his 1925 book Statistical Methods for Research Workers, which became the Rosetta Stone for scientists eager to make sense of complex data. He introduced the concept of the null hypothesis, a way to test whether observed differences were likely due to chance. He also invented analysis of variance (ANOVA), which broke down the sources of variation across experimental groups.
This new methods allowed scientists to understand whether differences between groups were truly meaningful or just random noise, such as whether a new fertilizer actually increased crop yields, or if the improvement was simply due to natural variation in the fields. Today, Fisher’s fingerprints expanded to everywhere such as clinical trials that save lives, experiments that improve learning, and data analyses that help us grow more food and use fewer resources.
Go deeper: Historical Spotlight: Ronald A. Fisher - Statistics.com
Brain Snack #2: Lost City
In 2000, as humanity crossed into a new millennium, it also discovered something underwater that might explain how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago. More than 700 meters deep in the Atlantic Ocean, scientists found a mountain ridge with towers rising as high as 60 meters, a place that would come to be known as the Lost City.
What made scientists so excited is that the Lost City showed life could exist without sunlight or volcanoes, only chemistry. Deep below the surface, seawater seeps into Earth’s crust, reacts with the surrounding rock, and rises again as warm, mineral-rich fluid. This natural process produces gases like hydrogen and methane, the very ingredients early life could have used for energy.
In other words, the Lost City revealed that our planet itself can act as a vast chemistry lab, transforming simple molecules into more complex ones: perhaps the first steps toward life. Similar vents may once have dotted the ancient seas where life first flickered into existence. And since then, researchers have spotted similar geological signatures on icy moons like Enceladus and Europa, hinting that the story might not be uniquely ours.
Today, Lost City still thrives in the dark, teeming with microbial colonies that feast on its mineral breath. It’s a time capsule, a living echo of Earth’s youth, quietly rewriting our assumptions about life’s origins. The deeper we dive into its labyrinth of limestone towers, the more it seems that the spark of life was not a miracle, but a chemical inevitability waiting for the right place to breathe.
Go deeper: 'Lost City' Deep Beneath The Ocean Is Unlike Anything We've Seen Before on Earth - ScienceAlert.com
Brain Snack #3: Sun-Eaten Threads
Arraiolos is a small village in the heart of Portugal, made famous by the embroidered carpets that bear its name. These Arraiolos tapestries are famous for their muted, sun-dusted tones, but few know that those colors were never meant to be muted at all. Their story is a beautiful accident, where nature and culture conspired to create something timeless what graces the halls of palaces, convents, and castles across Portugal.
The most accepted theory traces their origins to Moorish artisans who, fleeing persecution in the 15th and 16th centuries, found refuge in the Alentejo. There, they blended Islamic geometric design with European embroidery, creating rugs stitched rather than woven, echoing Persian and Turkish motifs yet grounded in local wool and dyes. Early Arraiolos pieces glowed with madder reds, weld yellows, indigo blues and brazilwood pinks: a vivid palette drawn straight from nature.
Then came the Alentejo sun. Spread across walls and floors, those naturally dyed fibers surrendered to the light. The plant-based pigments gradually broke down under years of exposure. Scarlet turned to rust, blue to grey, gold to beige. What time and sunlight erased, taste later enshrined: the once-bright carpets became softly faded heirlooms.
When later generations set out to revive the craft, they copied what they saw, unaware that the “Arraiolos look” they adored was the handiwork of the sun. Even now, modern artisans embroider by hand using tones that echo those ancient, weathered rugs. What began as bright devotion became gentle nostalgia: a reminder that sometimes, art happens not by design, but by accident of light.