* When those same scaffolder enzymes fail in plants, dark spots bloom across the leaves following even modest light exposure.

* The transformations in Angela Carter’s modern fairy tales are similarly striking.

* We need sleep to live: there is a genetic condition called ‘Familial Fatal Insomnia’ in which a progressive intractable insomnia, in step with a deteriorating dementia, leads to death. It is thankfully extremely rare.

* Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA’s structure, believed that this was the purpose of REM sleep.

* A paradox being that the noises heard in the right ear are processed in the cortex beneath the left, and vice versa.

* In 1972, after winning Mr Universe, Schwarzenegger was invited to Park’s home in Johannesburg. Park criticised the definition of his calves, and instructed Schwarzenegger on how to improve them.

* Men who have one testicle removed often experience a flare of testosterone production from the remaining one. It swells in size, and breast tissue beneath their nipples may swell as the newly released testosterone is converted to oestrogen.

* Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great were generally depicted with horned helmets. In the Qur’an, Alexander is referred to simply as the ‘Two-Horned One’, Dhul-Qarnayn.

* In about 15 to 30 per cent of us the foramen ovale stays patent into adulthood (a ‘PFO’). William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, thought PFOs might permit their owners to breathe underwater. He was wrong: PFOs make diving more dangerous. They permit gas bubbles that form in the blood on surfacing to cross from the right circulation to the left, where they may cause strokes in the brain.

* Chinese alchemists traditionally mixed and heated different minerals, not herbs, to create youth treatments, and it’s as if Ovid was aware of Chinese preference.

* Kafka’s In The Penal Colony describes a machine that tattoos each prisoner’s body with the law that has been broken.

* There is a push now to extend the regulation of tattoo artists to the pigments that it is legally permissible to use, in order to make them more easily removable. Bright modern pigments are the most difficult to remove with lasers.

* The downy hair growth is due to hormone imbalance. This ‘lanugo’ or ‘wool-like’ hair has led some scholars to speculate that the medieval nuns canonised as ‘bearded saints’ suffered from anorexia.

* In 1939 a Peruvian girl called Lina Medina became the youngest recorded mother, giving birth by caesarean section to a baby boy at the age of five years and eight months. Lina reportedly began menstruating at around a year old. Edmundo Escomel, ‘La plus jeune mère du monde’, La Presse Médicale vol. 47, no. 43, 1939, p. 875.

* William Hare, of ‘Burke and Hare’, who were paid for their murder victims by the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox.

* Pituitary’ means ‘snot’; early anatomists thought that the gland channelled mucus.

† ‘Ecce Homo’ are Pontius Pilate’s words on releasing Jesus of Nazareth to the mob: ‘Behold The Man’.

* There are exceptions: George W. Bush managed to beat John Kerry, and Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford.

* Though as discussed in ‘Puberty’, her pelvis would still have some years to grow.

* Overbeck says that he sang the ‘wonderfully beautiful gondola song’ reproduced in Ecce Homo: ‘And my soul, a stringed instrument,/Sang, touched by invisible hands,/ To itself a secret gondola song,/ Trembling with all the colours of bliss.’ See also Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, Christopher Middleton, trans., p. 354.

* The Italian poet Carlo Emilio Gadda pronounced pronouns ‘the lice of thought’ for the lazy thinking they introduce.

* The same year Lili Elbe, a trans woman born in Denmark who changed her name from Einar Wegener, died from surgical complications of a procedure to implant a womb in her pelvis.

* I wrote about my year on the station in Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (London: Chatto, 2012).

* There are identifiable genes which code for these traits, and ‘clock genes’ can predict whether you are by habit early or late to bed.

† There are even people who are ‘cortically blind’, in the sense that they have no conscious perception of light, but this ‘third eye’ continues to keep the body clock running strictly to time.

* This is called ‘salt-inducible kinase 1’ or Sik1.

* Miss J. E. A. Brown, Miss Edith Thompson, Miss E. R. Steane and Mrs W. Noel Woods.

* Since we met, Andrew has sourced a supply of plain black gloves.

* Later sources speak of nine Muses, with fabulous names, including ‘lovely-voice’, ‘make-famous’, ‘heavenly-one’, ‘give-delight’, ‘beloved’, ‘song-celebration’, ‘many-hymns’, ‘dance-delighting’ and ‘flourishing’.

* There’s a suggestion that Borges himself possessed a prodigious eidetic memory. Many years after he had become blind, he was able to remember the book, page and which part of the page, he had first seen a particular quotation.

* Forensic pathologists have to be entomologists too: the species of insects found on the body can predict the time of death to a remarkable degree. Edinburgh’s pathology department are developing new charts that take into account Scotland’s colder climate, and different patterns of insects.

* Thomas Browne quotes Pliny’s insistence that drowned women float prone, and drowned men belly up, veluti pudori defunctorum parcente natura – ‘nature modestly ordaining this position to conceal the shame of the dead’. He was wrong.

* Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall I. ‘Some, being of the opinion of Thales, that water was the original of all things, thought it most equal to submit unto the principle of putrefaction, and conclude in a moist relentment.’

* A Scottish role roughly comparable to that of a coroner.