The Princess Bride had it right all along. There really are R.O.U.S.s (see #36 below).

Jeff Houck, a reporter for the Tampa Tribune suggested an award for best quote of the year be given to Richard Fisher (director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division) for a response he made when being interviewed by NPR (October 2009) about the heliosphere (the ribbon of hydrogen that surrounds our solar system): “We thought we knew everything about everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns.”

Houck rephrased this as: “We don’t know what we don’t know until we know that we don’t know it.”

Houck went on to cull 50 items of discovery from 2009 and list them for us to be amazed by what we’ve learned this year and to remind us that there is a lot we still don’t know. I’m copying the list here, since I don’t know how long it will be accessible on the AT&T news site (where I located it, via Mark Traphagen’s HT). [UPDATE: Jeff provided the link to the original article in the comments, click here to read it. It’s worth the trip because he includes links to the sources of his choices. Also, the Tampa Tribune requested that I not include the entire list, so I have now edited out a significant number of items. Check the original article for the entire list.]

This list also makes me wonder about the folks who chose to study these things. And, here’s to the PhD students and Post-docs who are doing so much of the research and went without sleep (surviving on coffee and leftover colloquium food) for days and months and years to bring this knowledge to us!

I particularly like #10.

1. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
2. Grumpy people think more clearly because negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking.
3. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
4. Analysis of Greenland ice samples shows Europe froze solid in less than 12 months 12,800 years ago, partly due to a slowdown of the Gulf Stream. Once triggered, the cold persisted for 1,300 years.
5. One mutated gene is the reason humans have language, and chimpanzees, our closest relative, do not.
6. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
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9. Babies pick up their parents’ accents from the womb, and infants are born crying in their native dialect. Researchers found that French newborns cry in a rising French accent, and German babies cry with a characteristic falling inflection.
10. Surfing the Internet may help delay dementia because it creates stimulation that exercises portions of the brain.
11. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images.
13. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
14. Hormones that signal whether whales are pregnant, lactating or in the mood to mate have been extracted from whales’ lung mucus, captured by dangling nylon stockings from a pole over their blowholes as they surface to breathe. (This method could allow scientists to study whales without having to slaughter them.)
15. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
16. The blue morpho butterfly, which lives in Central and South America, has tiny ears on its wings and can distinguish between high- and low-pitch sounds. The butterfly may use its ears to listen for nearby predatory birds.
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23. A massive, nearly invisible ring of ice and dust particles surrounds Saturn. The ring’s entire volume can hold 1 billion Earths.
24. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
25. Seven new glow-in-the-dark mushroom species have been discovered, increasing the number of known luminescent fungi species from 64 to 71. The fungi, discovered in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico, glow constantly, emitting a bright, yellowish-green light.
26. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
27. ——————-
28. Communities of 850 species of previously undiscovered insects, small crustaceans, spiders, worms and other creatures were found living in underground water, caves and micro-caverns across Australia.
29. The human body emits a glow that is 1,000 times less than what our eyes can detect.
30. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
31. Cockroaches hold their breath for five to seven minutes at a time through a respiratory system that delivers oxygen directly to cells from air-filled tubes. One reason they hold their breath may be to prevent their bodies from getting too much oxygen, which could be toxic to them.
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34. Nearly all animals emit the same stench when they die, and have done so for more than 400 million years.
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36. A new species of giant rat was discovered in a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea. At 32.2 inches from nose to tail and 3.3 pounds, it’s thought to be one of the largest rats ever found.
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40. The speed of U.S Internet broadband lags far behind other industrial nations, including Japan, Finland, South Korea, France and Canada.
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43. A group of deep sea worms dubbed “green bombers” are capable of casting off appendages that glow a brilliant green once detached from their bodies. The tactic is believed to be used by the worms to confuse attackers.
44. A flesh-eating pitcher plant that grows more than 4 feet long can swallow and devour rats that are lured into its slipperlike mouth to drown or die of exhaustion before being slowly dissolved by digestive enzymes.
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46. More than 350 new animal species were discovered in the eastern Himalayas, including the world’s smallest deer and a flying frog.
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50. Watermelon is more efficient at rehydrating our bodies than drinking water. It contains 92 percent water and essential rehydration salts.