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Official page of Today I Learned Science by Dr. Harini Bhat (PharmD).
'A Prescription for the Curious Mind.'
2023 Telly Award Winner | Anthem Awards | WCSFP Emerging Producer | 2024 Webby Honoree
Currently Host for PBS Origins

19/06/2026

Insurance literally runs the world. Full video now on my YT page

18/06/2026

How do you make your brain a great place to spend time? You put it under tension, consistently and on purpose. Asking for the answer immediately is the trap.


I don’t use Claude to skip the hard part. I use it to find the hard part and dive deep into it. Whether that’s the assumption I hadn’t questioned or the framing that was quietly wrong. It doesn’t replace my team or the multiple subject matter experts I interview. It makes sure I show up to them having already done the real work.

If you use any AI tool, I challenge you to use it to think with you, not for you.

Our Strait of Hormuz YouTube video is out right now! More in my header!


18/06/2026

This is one THE wildest connections ever.

For nearly 6 months now, the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important waterways on Earth was basically shut down.
Not because of bombs. Not because it was blocked. Because of a piece of paper. Something every person watching has: insurance.

Here’s the part that blew my mind: this is exactly how insurance was invented in the first place 4,000 years ago just a few hundred miles away from the Strait of Hormuz!

Ancient Babylonian merchants watched their ships disappear over the horizon for months, not knowing if they’d come back. So they built a system called bottomry, which basically involved borrowing money for a sea voyage, then paying it back with interest if the ship survived or the debt got cancelled entirely if it didn’t. It’s all written in the Code of Hammurabi from 1750 BCE.
That is, structurally, the same mechanism deciding whether tankers move through that exact stretch of water right now.

I go deep on this in our latest YouTube episode. The full history of how insurance built (and is now testing) the modern world.

17/06/2026

Thick thighs do indeed save lives. There’s a BMJ study to prove it.

Note that the twins study was in females!

This summer we celebrate alllll the thunder thighs saving lives

1. Heitmann B L, Frederiksen P. Thigh circumference and risk of heart disease and premature death: prospective cohort study BMJ 2009; 339 :b3292 doi:10.1136/bmj.b3292
2. Steves CJ, Mehta MM, Jackson SH, Spector TD. Kicking Back Cognitive Ageing: Leg Power Predicts Cognitive Ageing after Ten Years in Older Female Twins. Gerontology. 2016;62(2):138-49. doi: 10.1159/000441029. Epub 2015 Nov 10. PMID: 26551663; PMCID: PMC4789972.

16/06/2026

There’s an update on the Maldives cave diving incident!

First of all there’s been some incorrect info circling in videos on the internet about the dive instructor. Here’s what the Finnish recovery divers, the ones who actually went in, believe happened. And it’s far more interesting than some of misinformed versions that are currently going around. More info in the video.

The leading hypothesis for what caused the death of the five divers in a Maldivian cave last month was a sandbank sitting at the tunnel exit. From one direction it looks completely passable, but from the other, it looks like solid rock. The exit essentially became hidden in plain sight.

What questions do you still have about this case? Drop them below and I’ll cover them in the next update!

11/06/2026

90% of drugs fail in clinical trials.

Not because we lack money. Because we barely understand biolog.

Here’s what’s actually changing that and why it matters more than almost anything happening in science right now.

Google’s “Where the Internet Lives” series has a full episode on this, the Recursion team, the science, and what it actually looks like to build a map of biology. Head to my bio for more!

09/06/2026

Seal milk officially beats human milk as the most complex milk produced on planet Earth.

Milk’s most important components aren’t fat or protein. They’re oligosaccharides, these complex sugars that build immune systems from the ground up. Scientists just found 332 different kinds in seal milk. The most ever recorded in any species.
Human milk has around 100 on average, 250 at most.
We assumed we had the most sophisticated milk on earth because we only ever really studied ourselves. Classic.

08/06/2026

Science just proved that the phrase “I feel it in my bones” is a real thing.

Apparently, your skeleton is involved in your fight-or-flight response. The moment your brain senses danger it signals your bones and within minutes your skeleton releases a hormone called osteocalcin that rapidly primes your muscles to fight or run.

The strangest part is that osteocalcin comes entirely from bone cells but has almost no effect on bone density itself.

Read more: Moser SC, van der Eerden BCJ. Osteocalcin-A Versatile Bone-Derived Hormone. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2019 Jan 10;9:794. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2018.00794. PMID: 30687236; PMCID: PMC6335246.

05/06/2026

Scientists just made sourdough from a 5,300 year old mummy. And apparently it was very good.

Otzi the Iceman was found frozen in the Alps in 1991, had his microbiome studied by researchers who found something completely unexpected inside and on his body. Yeast. Multiple strains of it too.

But the actually useful finding is that three of those strains survived by eating phenol, the chemical used to preserve Otzi’s body. Phenol is highly toxic. Current cleanup methods after spills are expensive and complicated. So an ancient glacier yeast that can break down phenol as food could change that.

Sarhan, M.S., Samadelli, M., Zink, A. et al. The Iceman’s microbiome: unveiling millennia of microbial diversity and continuity. Microbiome 14, 135 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-026-02417-6

04/06/2026

I LOVE this piece of history. The oldest known q***r couple in recorded history were also two of the most powerful men in ancient Egypt.
Their tomb, which was discovered in 1964 at Saqqara, shows them embracing face to face, holding hands, and sharing breath in a gesture of romantic intimacy almost exclusively reserved for husbands and wives in Egyptian art.

In one key afterlife scene, Niankhkhnum’s wife has been deliberately erased from the wall. So that his companion for eternity would be Khnumhotep.

Someone 4,400 years ago broke every artistic convention of their era to make sure these two men would be together forever. This matters because Egyptian tomb art was not simply decorate, it was believed to literally manifest in the afterlife. Whatever went on those walls was meant to last forever.
And it did. Happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈🙏🏽

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