May 24, 2016 at 04:29PM

Today I Learned: 1) According to a kind-of-sketchy-looking site called scienceheroes.com, there are four humans credited with saving the lives of more than a billion people -- Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch for the invention and commercialization of the Haber process, respectively (~2.7 billion people); Karl Landsteiner for discovering blood groups (A, B, O, +/0) (~1 billion people); and Richard Lewisohn for discovering a way to keep blood from coagulating outside the body with sodium citrate, thereby making blood banks possible (also ~1 billion people). scienceheroes.com also has an extended list. They credit 20 scientists with saving over 100 million lives. Of those scientists, 13 of them saved lives through vaccinations of one form or another. 2) Baby carrots are just normal carrots that have been sculpted into little cylinders. They were invented by a frustrated farmer in the 1980s, and now make up about 70% of all carrot sales. 3) There's a long-standing philosophical problem called Molyneux's problem involving blind people, as philosophical problems so often do. A blind person can instantly identify, say, a sphere or a cube by touch alone. If a blind person were to gain the ability to see, would they be able to identify a sphere or a cube by *sight*, using their knowledge of the object's shape? Unfortunately, this is a rather hard problem to solve empirically... ...which is why it wasn't solved until 2010. An MIT professor by the name of Pawan Sinha put together a project to restore the sight of five adolescent-to-teenagers blinded by terrible congenital cataracts, which previously limited their sight to essentially "it's dark out" vs "it's light out". The kids had their vision restored, then were tested on Molyneux's problem after less than two days of recovery. They could easily *distinguish* a cube and a sphere, but could not *identify* which was which with better than chance accuracy. They didn't do much re-testing after that, but what re-testing they did do (at up to 5 months with three of the five) showed that they learned to distinguish spheres and cubes quite accurately (80-90%, admittedly still worse than the average sighted person).