January 09, 2016 at 12:16AM

Today I Learned: 1) The elements Uranium, Neptunium, and Plutonium are named after Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, respectively (in order of discovery). In retrospect, this should have been pretty obvious. 2) The space race was really expensive! I'm used to thinking of NASA as a super-cheap thing fed off the dregs of the US budget (currently NASA uses about 3% of discretionary spending, or half a percent of total spending, of the US federal government). During the 60s, though, NASA's budget spiked as high as 5% of national spending! That's the equivalent of $200 billion in today's dollars, which, for scale, is about a third of the military's budget (which itself is roughly the size of our yearly defecit). That's... like... big enough to make a dent. I'm a little flabergasted that we actually cared about space exploration enough to put that much cash into it. These first two facts and much more I got from WaitButWhy's series on Elon Musk. I highly recommend it -- if you're already a fan of Elon Musk, this will make you appreciate him even more; if you're not a fan of Elon Musk, this may come off as preachy w.r.t Musk himself, but there's a ton of cool information that comes along with it. Link here: http://ift.tt/1cbEGBL 3) There is a species of (almost) herbivorous spider. It's a jumping spider called Bagheera kiplingi, and as far as I can tell it has no common name. It lives primarily off nutrient-rich nubs found at the base of leaves of Mimosaceae trees called Beltian bodies, which normally incentivize symbiotic ants to colonize the tree and guard it from other predators. The ants protect the tree against, among other things, B. kiplingi. The spider also drinks nectar, and will steal ant larva and cannibalize other B. kiplingi if given the opportunity (hence, it not quite being herbivorous).