Did You Know Your Brain Eats Itself? And Other Astonishing Moments from January 4

Did you know?

Your brain is constantly eating itself. This process is called phagocytosis, where cells envelop and consume smaller cells or molecules to remove them from the system. Don’t worry! Phagocytosis isn’t harmful, but actually helps preserve your grey matter.

On this day in history, January 4

1698 Most of the Palace of Whitehall in London, the main residence of the English monarchs, is destroyed by fire.

1809 Louis Braille is born in France. Blinded as a boy, he later invents a reading system for the blind using punch marks in paper.

1847 Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the US government.

1853 After having been kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South, Solomon Northup regains his freedom. His memoir, Twelve Years A Slave, later becomes an international best seller, and movie.

1887 Thomas Stevens is the first man to cycle around the world.1906 South Africa beat England by one wicket in their first Test win.

1948 The South African flag is hoisted on Prince Edward Island the much-larger Marion Island, which contains South Africa’s only active volcano. The annexed islands lie about 1 900km south-east of Cape Town.

1951 Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul during the Korean War.

1958 A New Zealand team, led by Edmund Hillary, reaches the South Pole. It is the first to reach the pole overland using motor vehicles and the first since Roald Amundsen in 1911 and the ill-fated Robert Falcon Scott in 1912.

1970 More than 15 000 people are killed in Tonghai County, China, by an earthquake.

1975 Ice is found to be 4 776m thick – 4.7km –. in a part of Antarctica known as Wilkes Land.

1981 British police arrest Peter Sutcliffe, the much-publicised ‘Yorkshire Ripper’.

1989 Over the Mediterranean, US F-14s shoot down two Libyan jet fighters, which the Americans believe are going to engage them, as had happened eight years earlier.

1990 A passenger train collides with an empty freight train, killing 307 people.

2010 Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world at 829.8m, officially opens.

2018 A train hits a truck near Kroonstad. Twenty people die.

2022 Toyota becomes the second biggest automaker, second only to Volkswagen.

2023 39 people killed in car bomb attack in Hiraan province, Somalia, with al-Qaeda linked group al-Shabab claiming responsibility.