33: Immortality, Before Trees, and Emojis 💩

Episode notes

Is immortality possible in humans or other animals?  What was on Earth before trees?  And what can we learn from emoji? 🤔

Things we talk about:

The First Emoticons

Kurita’s Emojis

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We also learn about:

Halloween in January, stories of immortality, the epic of gilgamesh, MR BEAST GRANTS IMMORTALITY IF YOU STAY UP FOR 6 DAYS, the first story of facing AND accepting mortality, teen alexander the immortal, shooting down 9 suns, making your own immortality serum, spoiler alert we don’t find immortality in this topic, the first blood transfusion, oh nevermind not really, testicle rejuvination solves all problems, how do we die? programmed death and antagonistic pliotropy, accumulating insurmountable damage, the Hayflick Limit, shoe telomeres, four nobel laureates behind atlos labs (aaaand also jeff bezos), we’ve never recorded a naked mole rat dying from old age, transdifferentiation in the immortal jellyfish, surprise immortality! the slow and old greenland shark, having to go through puberty and pay taxes is not worth immortality, “I sort of like that the animals are winning, and we haven’t quite got there yet”, you’d make a great tree, Caroline makes us define a tree, trees are “a human concept based on visual criteria”, NOTHING EXISTS, trees put oxygen in the atmosph- wait no that was algae, Caroline wants our bewilderment and fear in the questions, the Cambrian explosion, fossils of a tree fight, sharks are older than trees, what are these spires of life, cockroach t-rex, it really is the second Halloween episode, lovecraftian Earth, letters are pictures, emojis are language, our most used emojis, emoticons, codepoints, the first emoji, standarized emoji, no more flag emojis, people assume the internet keeps records of itself.

Sources:

Royal Forestry Society Tree Definition
Encyclopedia Britannica Tree Definition
Natrual History Museum First Trees
World’s First Tree Reconstructed
Giant cladoxylopsid trees resolve the enigma of the Earth’s earliest forest stumps at Gilboa, Stein et al, 2007 (Paper)
Timeline: The evolution of life
Smithsonian Magazine: The Top 10 Greatest Survivors of Evolution
Live Science: Prehistoric Mystery Organism a Humongous Fungus
Rotted wood–alga–fungus: the history and life of Prototaxites Dawson, Hueber 2001 (Paper)
Smithsonian Magazine: Giant Mushrooms

—

Nineveh
The Eternal Life of Gilgamesh
The Search for Immortality
History of the First Blood Transfusion
Serge Voronoff
The Long and Gruesome Hstory of People Trying to Live Forever
Theories of Ageing
What Is Antagonistic Pleiotropy?
Evolution and the Biology of Aging
DNA damage—how and why we age?
Hayflick limit
Telomeres
2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Naked Mole Rats
Greenland Sharks
Immortal Jellyfish

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Unicode Emoji Stats
Lauren Schwartzberg’s The Oral History of the Poop Emoji
Swiftkey Regional Emoji Data
Emojipedia Stats
Early Emoticons
Unicode’s Emoji Principles
Unicode’s Stance on New Flag Emojis
Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set