The Peculiar Dispatch #012

One of mRNA vaccines' biggest practical problems isn't necessarily making them. It's keeping them cold.

Some formulations require carefully controlled low-temperature storage, making distribution much harder in regions without reliable cold-chain infrastructure. Researchers at MIT have now used AI to help redesign the formulation surrounding mRNA-carrying lipid nanoparticles.

The result?

Much greater resistance to heat. Researchers also demonstrated the approach using microneedle patches, which generated immune responses comparable to injected versions in their experiments. Even more interestingly, they say the approach isn't necessarily limited to vaccines.

The same principle could potentially help stabilise future mRNA medicines and other drug-delivery technologies.

The Biggest Rocket Humanity Has Ever Built Just Reached Orbit

This is a genuine engineering milestone.

SpaceX's Starship has successfully reached orbit on Flight 14 — the first time the enormous vehicle has achieved orbit during its test programme. And "enormous" isn't an exaggeration.

Starship and its Super Heavy booster together stand roughly 123 metres tall, making the complete vehicle taller than the Saturn V that took humans to the Moon. But the important part isn't simply size.

Starship is being developed as a fully reusable heavy-lift transportation system, with future ambitions involving the Moon, enormous satellite payloads and eventually Mars.

There are still substantial engineering hurdles before that vision becomes routine. But getting the world's largest rocket into orbit is a pretty major box to tick.

Your Dog's Brain May Be Breaking Your Speech Into Words

You know when you're talking normally and your dog suddenly reacts to a word like “walk”, “dinner” or “outside”?

It might not simply be recognising a familiar sound.

New research published in Science suggests dogs' brains can actually break continuous human speech into word-like chunks using a strategy remarkably similar to humans. Researchers placed non-invasive EEG sensors on 20 dogs and 20 humans and played them streams of made-up words with no pauses telling them where one word ended and another began.

Some streams contained repeating patterns in the consonants. Others used vowels. And some were essentially random. Something remarkable happened.

The dogs' brains began tracking the consonant patterns.

Their neural activity synchronised with the rhythm of the hidden "words", suggesting their brains were identifying structure within the continuous stream of speech.

Humans do something similar.

When we're trying to distinguish words from continuous speech, consonants often provide particularly useful clues to word identity. Scientists call this preference a consonant bias. Until now, this particular bias hadn't been demonstrated in another species, not even non-human primates.

Even more interestingly, some dogs in the experiment hadn't spent their earliest months surrounded by human speech, yet still showed the effect. That suggests years of simply living around humans and listening to us talk may be enough to reshape aspects of how their brains process speech.

This doesn't mean your dog understands every conversation you're having. But next time you're discussing taking them for a walk while they're supposedly asleep across the room... maybe spell it out.

1,800 People Just Moved a 360-Tonne Castle By Hand

Forget cranes. In northern Japan, officials needed to move an entire 360-tonne historic castle tower. Their solution?

Get 1,800 people, some enormous ropes, and start pulling.

The remarkable operation took place at Hirosaki Castle, where teams of 80 volunteers hauled on 30-metre ropes while chanting in rhythm. The castle wasn't dismantled; instead, the whole three-storey keep was raised and positioned on rails so it could slowly slide across the ground.

It's part of an ancient Japanese building-moving technique known as hikiya, which allows entire structures to be relocated intact rather than taken apart. And there was a serious reason behind all this.

Hirosaki Castle's stone walls had become unstable, so in 2015 the entire keep was shifted roughly 78 metres away to allow repairs underneath it. Workers subsequently dismantled and painstakingly replaced 2,185 stones, completing the wall work in 2024.

Now they're putting the castle back. During the public pulling event, volunteers moved the enormous structure several metres by human power. Machinery is handling the remainder of its journey back to its historic position.

The present three-storey keep dates to 1810, after an earlier tower was destroyed following a lightning strike in the 17th century. It's one of only a small number of surviving historic castle keeps in Japan.

So, more than two centuries after it was built, thousands of ordinary people have literally grabbed a rope and helped drag a Japanese castle across the ground.

A) Bowhead whale
B) Galápagos tortoise
C) Greenland shark
D) Blue whale

C — Greenland shark.

Greenland sharks are extraordinary.

Scientists have estimated that some individuals can live for several centuries, with one famous study estimating the oldest specimen at around 392 years, albeit with substantial uncertainty.

That means a Greenland shark alive today could theoretically have been swimming around the Arctic Ocean...

before Isaac Newton published his laws of motion.

A) 13,000
B) 130,000
C) 1.3 million
D) 13 million

C — Around 1.3 million Earths.

The Sun looks relatively small in our sky because it's about 150 million kilometres away.

In reality, it's enormous.

Its diameter is roughly 109 times Earth's, and its volume is approximately 1.3 million times greater.

And yet the Sun isn't particularly huge as stars go.

There are stars out there that make our Sun look tiny.

A) Praying mantis
B) Honeybee
C) Dragonfly
D) Jumping spider

B — Honeybee.

A honeybee has the two large compound eyes you can easily see.

But sitting on top of its head are another three tiny simple eyes, called ocelli.

The compound eyes are excellent for detecting things such as movement and patterns, while the smaller eyes primarily detect changes in light intensity and help with orientation.

So the little bee buzzing around your garden...

is looking at the world through five eyes.

Have a good week!

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