Skeleton Trivia for Wednesday, 2025-09-24
Today’s trivia is monstrous ... ly delightful!
Hiya Skeleton Crew,
Since I took Labor Day off at the beginnin of the month, I’m gonna wrap things up at the end of the month a li’l different to how I usually do:
- Friday’s email will be a REGULAR trivia day—matter of fact, it’ll be the last one of September!
- Then next week I’ll be takin the week off.
- EXCEPT ...
- I’ll send out the special paywalled trivias NEXT Friday.
The point here is that I’m gonna still be sending out the same total number of SUPER SPECIAL EXTRA TRIVIAS to paid subscribers, just that the timeline’ll be a li’l funky: I usually try & do four (4) per month, but this time it’ll be three (3) in September & FIVE (5) in October.
THRILLING, I know!!!
Answers to Last Time
- Pima cotton’s the U.S.A. counterpart to Egyptian cotton, & it’s named for the Pima (Akimel Oʼodham) people of what’s now southern Arizona.
- Cotton, cacao, cola, okra, durian, & hibiscus all belong to the family Malvaceae, a.k.a. the mallows. The marsh-growing Althaea officinalis I mentioned yesterday is better known to you & I as the marshmallow, which I was hoping’d be a li’l extra hint for ya.
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
One band of the Pima, the Keli Akimel O'odham, have lived along the banks of what tributary of the Colorado River since forever ago?
Trivia 2
The river from Q1 has an interesting connection to modern medicine! Namely, it’s the namesake for a critter that a NIH scientist fella named Jean-Pierre Raufman got interested in in the ’80s, owing to how it (the critter) only needs to eat a coupla times a season. Mr. Raufman took a peek at this critter’s venom &—lo & behold!—he found it had some molecules in it that did some biological hocus pocus on the pancreases of test animals to make ’em all weird & inflamed (the pancreases, not the animals) (although maybe the animals, too? I dunno).
(Can ya guess that I don’t really understand all the details here?)
Point is, studyin this critter’s venom led directly to the development of a whole new class of drugs that activate what receptor that ya can find on beta cells in the pancreas, & also brain neurons? (Just an abbreviation here’s fine for yer answer.)
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeee