Adventurer Karl Bushby completed a multi-day swim of the English Channel, stepping foot on UK soil after a 28-year journey. Bushby, 57, left Chile, South America, on 1 November 1998, following two self-imposed rules – not to use transport to advance and not to return home until the journey is complete. On Tuesday, he announced that he had swum from France to the UK – the final, major hurdle of his journey back to his childhood home in Hull. Bushby said he swam for 20 hours over three days, making landfall at Shakespeare beach, just south of Dover, at 15:30 BST on Monday. To date, Bushby has covered more than 30,000 miles (48,000km), including 29 countries. He walked the length of South America, crossed the treacherous Darien Gap and continued north to Alaska. From there he crossed the Bering Strait on foot, swimming where necessary. Bushby then traversed Siberia and the rest of Asia before swimming across the Caspian Sea, which took 31 days to complete. (via the BBC) ## Researchers built a model of a fruit fly's nervous system and it can parallel park a car What can a fruit fly do? Buzz around ripe bananas, sure. But maybe, a whole lot more. Like parallel park. Or play Minecraft. Creative internet users have in recent days taken a complete map of a fruit fly’s 166,000 neurons, published by Google, and made simulated flies do some things that are pretty impressive, given that these insects have a brain the size of a poppy seed. One has been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Another dances to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” in response to four tones. Others have envisioned fruit flies playing poker and blackjack and slicing a doner kebab. Mr. Unthank, who lives in Italy, also programmed a fly to use a car’s blinkers when turning because he was frustrated that so few human drivers seem to use them. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia completed the new map of the adult male fruit fly’s brain in partnership with Google. In 2024, a consortium led by researchers at Princeton published a map of an adult female fruit fly brain. (via the NYT) ## At the Olympics in 1908 one of the sports was competitive pistol duelling At the 1908 Summer Olympic Games in London, it was possible for losing participants to be pronounced dead—theoretically, anyway. For a fleeting period of time in the early 20th century, a form of pistol dueling grew in popularity by promising all the excitement of a fatal rivalry with none of the actual bloodshed. Duelists, armed with specially-made pistols and painful (but not deadly) wax bullets, faced off against one another in a mannered test of sidearm skill that encompassed not one but two Olympic Games. In 1901, a doctor and dueling aficionado named Paul Devillers developed an intriguing way to practice one’s dueling skills without committing homicide. He crafted a bullet made from tallow and baryta sulfate and then convinced pistol-making firm Piot-LePage to manufacture a gun that could fire the wax projectile. With a reduced charge without gunpowder and a special steel adapter in the chamber, the bullet could speed through the air and strike an opponent, who would typically be outfitted in a fencing-style chest protector and mesh mask. (via Mental Floss) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## He was an evangelical preacher at 4 years old but went on to expose the con By the time he was 4, Marjoe Gortner was an ordained minister, coached by his parents into a tiny simulacrum of a Pentecostal preacher, belting out hellfire and brimstone. He was born into the business, the fourth generation of a family of ministering men. But it was his mother, Margaret, known as Sister Marge, who taught him the trade, writing the scripts for his sermons and drilling him in daylong sessions. He rarely stumbled. When he did, Marge’s teaching method involved pressing a pillow over his face or holding his head under a running faucet. He was a hit on the evangelical circuit. Clad in a little white suit and cowboy boots, his hair a nimbus of blond curls that his mother had bleached and permed, he gestured and lunged, delivering his lines in a piping voice from a pint-size pulpit. Mr. Gortner, who exposed the flimflammery of his former profession in the 1972 Oscar-winning documentary “Marjoe” and went on to become a hard-working mid-list actor, died on Oct. 2 in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 82. (via the NYT) ## To some he was just a monk who liked to garden but he discovered how genes work Gregor Mendel was born in 1822 in a remote village in Moravia. As a young adult he began his studies at a small village convent long before the advent of public education in rural areas. His parents were meager farmers and they did not have any previous education to help Mendel. To be accepted into an elite academic institution without credentials or finances, Mendel had to begin his studies as a monk and eventually become a member of the Augustine Order. By entering the strict religious sect, he managed to cover the substantial expenses of his advanced studies. Mendel stopped his education all together several times due to depression and personal crises. Despite these trials and tribulations, he began lecturing in Brno at the age of 31. It was here that he undertook a series of experiments involving sweet peas that changed the scientific world forever. But Mendel’s findings did not receive much attention during his lifetime and his contemporaries did not recognize his genius. (via NRGene) ## At this aquarium the otters help clean up their toys and get paid in ice cubes _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

In December, 1940, Rita Levi-Montalcini rode a train from the station near her home in Turin, Italy, for 80 miles to Milan to buy a microscope. On her return to the Turin train station, two police officers stopped her and demanded to see inside the cake-sized box that she was carrying. The officers found her new microscope instead. Just a week after her trip, British bombers hit Milan. Levi-Montalcini was a 31-year-old scientist who had been working at the University of Turin. Despite her father’s disapproval, she had trained in medicine, inspired by seeing a nanny succumb to cancer. In 1938, the Italian dictator Mussolini banned Jews from positions in universities. Levi-Montalcini was not raised in the Jewish religion, but her Jewish ancestry would have been evident from her surname. Mussolini’s ban had pushed Levi-Montalcini to leave Italy for Belgium in 1939, where she did research using fertilized chicken eggs as a source of material for her research topic: the developing nervous systems of vertebrate embryos. (via Nautilus) ## The odd reason why ballpoint pens are banned at sites that make aircraft parts Signs like the one above can be seen at a number of job sites and factories where they make aircraft parts and other things out of titanium. Ballpoint pens are banned in certain high-precision titanium and aerospace manufacturing plants because the tiny tungsten carbide ball in the pen tip can fall out and severely contaminate the titanium melt, creating a hard, brittle inclusion that causes structural failure in critical aerospace components. Titanium has been used in a lot of high speed rotating equipment in jet engines. These tungsten inclusions become a crack initiation site and under high rotational speeds and high temperatures, the crack can spread and lead go catastrophic failures. There were several catastrophic engine failures in history that were traced back to inclusions. It's so severe that if a titanium manufacturer making aerospace grade titanium finds any "High Density Inclusions," they must inform all of their customers that they found this and recall and associated heats and material. (via Reddit) ## He made a fortune on notes issued to finance the Revolutionary War and made himself a lord Timothy Dexter was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1747, and he did not start out with much. He was working as an indentured farm servant by age eight, later apprenticed as a leather dresser, and eventually landed in the port town of Newburyport. There he married a widow named Elizabeth Frothingham and saved up a few thousand dollars and put it into Continental currency, the paper money of the Revolution. Then the new federal government made good on that debt, and Dexter overnight became a man of substance. Money bought Dexter a lot of things, but it didn't buy him the respect of Newburyport's old families, so he went looking for attention instead. He gave himself the title "Lord" and then he bought a mansion and filled the grounds with more than 40 painted wooden statues of great men, including him. He wrote a book, _A Pickle for the Knowing Ones_ , with creative spelling and no punctuation at all. (via Now I Know) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Among the treasures being revealed by melting ice is a 2,500-year-old ski The Alps are losing ice faster than almost anywhere on the planet. And, as the glaciers and ice patches disappear, they are releasing secrets that had been locked away for millenniums.Secrets like an enigmatic, 2,500-year-old ski that melted not long ago out of a strip of dying Swiss ice. On a bright recent morning, Romain Andenmatten, a 42-year-old archaeologist, peered down at his discovery. Exploring the paltry remains of the ice at a mountain pass called Col de Barberine, he spotted a three-foot-long slat of grayish wood, nestled between rocks at the ice’s edge. Three years ago at this same pass, elevation 7,500 feet, Dr. Andenmatten found a similar plank, also with a tapered end. Carbon dating revealed it to be from roughly the fifth century B.C., when, on a certain day in the Iron Age, its owner might have been crossing the Alps. Now Dr. Andenmatten wondered whether he’d found the second in the pair. (via the NYT) ## How Tabasco sauce accidentally became the world's favourite hot sauce There are scant details about the man who started it all. But everyone can agree that the complicated story begins with Edmund McIlhenny in the mid-1800s. A Maryland native who found his way to Louisiana, McIlhenny did not even mention his invention in his own obituary, and did not believe it to be an important part of his legacy. The official story is that Edmund wanted his sauce to bring the spicy, flavorful foods that he ate in Louisiana to the entire Reconstruction South. His son would bring the company to even greater heights; He is credited both with major innovations in the production process and with introducing the characteristic green top that still crowns every one of the one-million-plus bottles of Tabasco that are produced on Avery Island every day. They transformed peppers, vinegar, and salt into a global icon, that much we know for sure. But there’s a whole lot more in there that feels incredibly murky, with competing accounts offered by McIlhenny family members, historians, and hot sauce fans. (via Ravenous) ## This rabbit is having the best time jumping in the fallen leaves _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_ ##

Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later. From it being too hot or too wet to leaves on the track or cows on the line, there's a fine tradition of what the British public consider to be flimsy excuses for delays on the trains. Yet an 1871 edition of the journal Nature describes a very different event that caused a train departing Exeter, in Devon on the south-west coast of the U.K., to be delayed by 16 minutes: a solar storm that flooded the railway signals' electrical telegraph network with current. The event has been cited as the first example of a solar storm disrupting technology, but when a team led by Wild went back through historical records to investigate they found that things didn't add up. (via Space.com) ## New York City's new robo-toilets kick you out after 10 minutes whether you're finished or not As of June 2025, New York City had just 975 operating public restrooms across its five boroughs, or one per every 8,697 residents. To start making it easier to go while on the go, the city is installing 17 new modular bathrooms—aka robotoilets—equipped with amenities like running water, temperature control, and baby-changing stations. The bathrooms, made and operated by Throne Labs, are already being erected around NYC, with the first two open as of this week and two more coming on Thursday. But as Mamdani put it, these bathrooms are “not a place to scroll on your phone.” Users are meant to do their business, then get a move on within 10 minutes—or face the consequences. How do the new bathrooms keep patrons from lingering? There’s a simple fail-safe: After 10 minutes in the bathroom, the doors will automatically open. (via Fast Company) ## Her work as a programmer at Los Alamos helped lead to chaos theory but she got little credit Mary Tsingou arrived at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in 1952, seven years after the testing facility in New Mexico helped propel the world into an age of nuclear proliferation. She was a recent college graduate with a mathematics degree and joined the cohort — almost all women — of “human computers.” She was soon given the opportunity to work as an early programmer of MANIAC I, the lab’s first fully electronic computer. Her coding work — translating equations into the MANIAC-approved language of holes punched on tape — led to the creation in 1955 of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) problem, named after the men who worked on the numerical experiment.When the report was published, Ms. Tsingou was not listed as an author. Instead, her name was placed in a footnote. The groundbreaking computational physics experiment observed surprising physical behaviors that propelled the development of nonlinear science, one of whose branches is chaos theory. (via the NYT) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Why a pound of random coins is almost always worth about twenty US dollars Here’s a fun bar bet you can try yourself. You’ll need a relatively big pile of U.S. dimes, quarters, and half dollars — no pennies, nickels, or dollar coins, or this won’t work — and a regular kitchen scale. (I’m not sure if you’ll be able to find that in your local bar, so either come prepared or lend me some literary license.) Place a few handfuls of coins on the scale, adding or removing until the lot weighs as close as you can get to one pound as possible. Then make your bet: Tell your friend (or whomever is on the other side of the bet) that you can predict the total value of those coins within, say, ten cents. And then “predict” that their value is exactly twenty dollars. You should win virtually every time — because a pound of any amount of those three coins should come out to that amount, regardless of the individual numbers of any one denomination coin. Why? It’s a mix of history and just plain dumb luck. (via Now I Know) ## In 1996 a family took to the road in a motor home for a year and detailed the trip on a website We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. What we built over the following nine months — 25,000 miles through 40 states — would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. We filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall. Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome. (via Longreads) ## Watch these African elephants dig salt from a cavern in a volcano _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm. Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. fter he called the funeral home, Otto told me, he waited beside his mother all night and into the next afternoon before he heard a knock at the door. He was surprised to see that, rather than doctors, the two men in the hallway were police officers. They wore bulletproof vests and carried guns. He invited them inside, where they scanned the rooms. He directed them to his mother’s bedroom and followed close behind, but the officers stopped him and asked him to take a seat. A tall, stylish woman approached and introduced herself as a coroner from the Munich Institute of Forensic Medicine. (via The Guardian) ## In Wales you might be visited by someone with a horse's skull and asked to rhyme You'll never forget the moment you first see a Mari Lwyd. She has lights or baubles for eyes. Her mane is made of colourful streamers, or holly and ivy. A white cloak falls from her skull, which is attached to a pole, which is held by a person inside it: they control the character's mischievous nature, often snapping their bony jaw at you. The origins of Mari’s name are, like the horse herself, are deeply mysterious. One Welsh translation of it, Grey Mare, connects it to the heritage of pale horses in Celtic and British mythology, many of whom can cross over to the underworld. Mari is taken around a village traditionally, often between Christmas Day and Twelfth Night, She is dressed with festive lights and decorations, and is usually accompanied by an ostler. This brings the tradition closer together with Mummers' Plays, a tradition of performances by the working classes in the 18th century. When the groups get to a house, they indulge in a ritual called pwnco: an exchange of rude rhymes with the person who lives there. (via Wales.com) ## In some people anesthesia causes brain damage and scientists don't understand why When Freddy Marquez was 12, he was hit by a motorcycle while biking and smashed his face into the pavement. He healed fast, but as adolescence reshaped his boyish features, the scar started to tug on his upper lip, leaving his mouth ajar. “Mom,” he said, “I’m going to high school. I don’t want to look like this.” So in September 2024, his parents found a surgeon in central Florida, where they live, to do a scar revision.On the morning of his surgery, Freddy went into the operating room around 9. His mom, Joana Jardin, settled into a waiting-room chair, expecting to drive him home in a few hours. Noon came, then 1 o’clock, then 2, then 3. “Where is my son?” Joana began to ask. “Where is my son?” The staff couldn’t tell her anything, except that she had to wait. She watched as other parents picked up their kids from surgery and left. At 4 o’clock, she realized she was the only one in the waiting room. Eventually, Freddy managed to slump into a wheelchair, his eyes still closed. He was sent home. (via The Atlantic) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Ancient Romans thought that drinking the blood of gladiators would cure epilepsy The broken doll movement and unexpected mental interruptions of epileptic seizures have probably always been unsettling. Some cultures have explained their onset as the consequence of religious sin, others as divine intervention or a sign of sacredness. To the ancient Romans, epilepsy was a contagious disease caused by evil spirits or demonic possession, and there was only one way to cure it — with the blood of a gladiator. Ancient Rome wasn’t the first place epilepsy was treated with human blood. There’s evidence of its use in ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere. But the Romans were the first to look to the blood of a warrior for a cure. Drinking the “hot blood from the throat of a gladiator” is first recommended in the _Book on Medicine_ in 40 C.E. and, over the next 500 years, Roman doctors experimented with exactly how to administer the cure: three spoonfuls a day for 30 days, sucking directly from a bleeding wound, filling a cup with the dripping blood of the slaughtered. (via Popular Science) ## A candidate whose name is Hitler Mussolini has been elected mayor in Peru A businessman called Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has been elected the mayor of a remote district in the Peruvian Andes, according to local election data. The 45-year-old, who shares two of his names with the notorious European dictators, won the race for mayor of Queropalca, in Peru’s central Huánuco region, and will take office on 1 January. The candidate from the leftwing Ahora Nación party won 229 out of a total of 663 votes in elections on 4 October, according to the national office of electoral processes. Flores, who works in freight transportation, had belonged to Popular Force, the party of Peru’s rightwing president, Keiko Fujimori, until 2025, according to electoral authorities. Despite the name being associated with Germany’s Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, several candidates with the name have won elections in Peru. In 2021, the doctor Hitler Saavedra Casternoque was elected to parliament for the centrist party Somos Peru. In 2018, Hitler Alba Sánchez was voted in as mayor of the Andean district of Yungar, saying during his campaign that he was “the good Hitler”. (via The Guardian) ## You may think there are only a few types of electrical outlet in the US but there are over 35 _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

I joined the army on the day of the Russian invasion. I’d studied computer science and only recently landed a great internship at a game company. But I saw the news and knew my options were to sit and wait for them to come and kill me or go running into the fight. On the front line, we spend 90 per cent of our time underground in bunkers because of the threat of enemy drones. Every time you go outside, you risk being spotted and killed. The conditions are like camping, but it obviously has a very different vibe. I’ve done a lot of different jobs as a drone pilot, but at the end of the day, the mission was always to protect our ground troops. I spent time as a reconnaissance drone pilot, then flying bomber drones and now I’m doing anti-drone missions in a regiment called Aquila. I’m proud to say that I’m a top performer not just in my regiment but in the wider army. I think it’s because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I’ve taken out 932 enemy drones. I focus on finding smaller FPV drones that are doing reconnaissance or hunting our troops with explosives, and take them out before they can do any damage. (via New Scientist) ## If you see a sign on a boat saying passengers can't bring bananas on board this is why Plenty of captains don't stop at the fruit itself. One chucked a client's can of Banana Boat sunscreen into the Gulf of Mexico first thing in the morning; another picked the banana-shaped pieces out of a bag of Runts before leaving the dock. Ask any of them why, and you'll usually get a history lesson about the Caribbean trade of the 1700s. Ships hauling bananas had to sail fast before their cargo spoiled, so nobody could troll for fish off the back. Or the bunches hid venomous spiders and snakes. Or, the most scientific-sounding theory of all, ripening bananas give off ethylene gas, which makes everything else in the hold rot. Sailors banned them to protect their food, and the ban eventually drifted over to fishing boats. Jim Rizzuto has been writing about fishing in Kona, Hawaii, for decades, and he went looking for the oldest written version of the ethylene explanation. The earliest one he could find was from 1972. He wrote it. As he explains, he "invented the connection between the gas and the fishing kapu as an April Fool's joke, never thinking anyone would ever take it seriously because it was so far-fetched." (via Now I Know) ## A World War II frigate that sank in the Thames has 1,400 tons of explosives in it More than 80 years after the _SS Richard Montgomery_ sank in the Thames Estuary with roughly 1,400 tons of explosives still aboard, marine contractors have begun one of the most delicate interventions yet on the notorious World War II wreck. Florida-based Resolve Marine has started work to remove the Liberty ship’s three remaining steel masts, which still rise above the water near Sheerness, Kent. Engineers and divers will cut and lift the structures under closely controlled conditions intended to avoid disturbing the deteriorating wreck. The work marks a significant step in the UK government’s long-running effort to reduce risks associated with the wreck without attempting to remove its remaining munitions. The _Richard Montgomery_ ran aground on a sandbank in August 1944 while carrying thousands of tons of ammunition. Salvage crews removed roughly half of the cargo before the hull flooded and broke apart, forcing the operation to be abandoned. About 1,400 tons of explosives remain inside the forward holds today, according to the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency. (via GCaptain) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## She hand-wrote much of the software behind six NASA moon missions and the space station Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died on Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90. Ms. Hamilton was a young mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, putting her husband through law school by working in a computer lab. When she learned that M.I.T. was designing in-flight computers for the moon mission, she eagerly joined the team.She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights. Ms. Hamilton, who would bring her young daughter to work on weekends and evenings, is credited with popularizing the term “software engineering” to describe the complexity of the work her team did. Ms. Hamilton worked on the six lunar landing missions from 1969 to 1972. Her programming also contributed to Skylab, America’s first space station, which was launched in 1973, and to the early design of the space shuttle. (via the NYT) ## France used to have an underwater cable-car with six mini submarines The Téléscaphe (a portmanteau of "_téléphérique_ " (cable car) and "_bathyscaphe_ ") was an underwater cable way, situated near Les Goudes in Marseille, France. In the early 1960s, ski lift engineer Denis Creissels and alpine skier James Couttet set out to design a system that would make visits to the seabed accessible to the general public. With support from the City of Marseille and the École nationale des ponts et chaussées, construction began in 1966, and the attraction opened in June 1967. The system consisted of four bell-shaped, six-seater submarines, each weighing around 3 tons and pulled by a cable. It could carry approximately 60 passengers per hour. A trip cost 12 francs, and safety was overseen by frogmen who monitored the operation. The submarines were fitted with lights, and could be operated at night. After each trip passengers received a certificate (a "_baptême de plongée_ " or “diving baptism”) commemorating their first dive. The Téléscaphe proved popular but only operated for one season, closing in 1967 due to lack of money and support, as well as high operational costs. (via Wikipedia) ## Stairway to Heaven performed using traditional Japanese musical instruments _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

For six years, the Parallel Parking Championship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has (for some of us) been motorsport’s crown jewel, a thrilling contest pitting man and machine against time and a 20 foot parking space. The event was first organized by a young couple named Dan and Jenna, just to settle a long-standing family debate about who was the best parallel parker. It has since grown into a raucous street party, a participatory art form, a gift to motorists, and a communal act of joy. Each driver begins from their preferred position and the timer starts when the referee sees the reverse lights of the car. The driver parks, then shouts “Done” out the window, stopping the clock. Hitting the curb or either adjacent car results in disqualification. Your final score is your time, multiplied by your distance to the curb. Ignore the units for now, and think about the implications. If one can get twice as close by taking twice as much time, that’s a decent tradeoff. There’s a small bonus for bigger vehicles, but it seemed insufficient; most good scores came from smaller cars. Our 16’ rental car was, comparatively, a boat. (via Why Is This Interesting) ## In this New York cemetery every headstone or monument had to be made of metal Glimpsed from the L train as it rumbles up to the open air at the Wilson Avenue station in Bushwick, Most Holy Trinity Cemetery isn’t immediately different from the other numerous burial grounds that cluster around the Brookyn-Queens border. Yet step inside its entrance and a rolling landscape of rust stretches before your eyes. All except the most recent graves are wood or metal, an early regulation set in place by the German Catholic Most Holy Trinity Church to enforce a posthumous equality. As the church’s website explains, “from the earliest days, stone monuments were not allowed because no distinctions were permitted to be made between the rich and the poor.” The New York City cemetery dates back to 1851, replacing an earlier church cemetery that adjoined Most Holy Trinity Church in Williamsburg. While the Bushwick neighborhood has shifted around it, its 23 acres still contain this history, worn as it may be. (via Atlas Obscura) ## Some archaeologists are convinced a woman ruled as queen of Egypt 5,000 years ago More than 5,000 years ago, a royal woman called Meretneith, lived in ancient Egypt. She was possibly the daughter of Djer, the third king of the First Dynasty, a period when the first kings ruled over a unified Egypt. Details over Meretneith’s exact royal status have remained murky. We know she ruled the country because her tomb complex was filled with riches fit for a male ruler of Egypt. At the very least, she was an interim ruler or co-regent. But did she ever rule Egypt in her own right? Egyptologists have long disputed whether Meretneith was an independent ruler of Egypt. Resolving that dispute would require finding a text that identifies her as a ruler. Our new research, published in the journal Prague Egyptological Studies, might do just that. Using a new digital technique, we examined hieroglyphs in the photo of a long-lost artefact, and the signs clearly point to Meretneith being one of the early rulers. (via Nautilus) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## An H.G. Wells story inspired a physicist to discover the nuclear chain reaction _The World Set Free_ is a novel written in 1913 by H. G. Wells. The book is based on a prediction of a more destructive and uncontrollable sort of weapon than the world has yet seen. Scientists of the time were well aware that the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the _rate_ of energy release is negligible, the _total amount_ released is huge. Wells used this as the basis for his story. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian, grew up reading and enjoying the works of Wells and became a nuclear physicist. In 1929 he met Wells, who urged him to discover new sources of energy which could bring humankind to the stars and in 1932 he read and was disturbed by _The World Set Free_. Szilard saw a newspaper article in which Rutherford dismissed the idea that particle acceleration could ever generate energy. Szilard was irritated by Rutherford's arrogant rejection of the future of a yet undeveloped field, and a few days later the idea of nuclear chain reaction came to him. (via Wikipedia) ## Leonardo da Vinci was the first to discover that blood played a role in erections In Antiquity, Galen considered penile erection as the result the accumulation of air. His ideas so dominated medieval medicine that nearly everyone then alive was a Galenist. The beginning of the Renaissance shows meaningful examples of experimental scientific work on the penis. Leonardo Da Vinci correctly concluded that erections were caused by blood, and in the 18th century, Von Haller from Switzerland was the first who explained that erections were under the control of the nervous system. In the 19th century, a mindset that emphasized on experimentation determined a new direction, namely experimental physiology. Animal studies clarified that stimulation of the nervi erigentes‐induced small muscle relaxation in the corpora cavernosa. Nearly all were published in the German language and that may be one of the reasons that the existence of the concept of smooth muscle relaxation remained controversial until the first World Congress on Impotence in 1984 in Paris. (via National Library of Medicine) ## Norwegian ad shows how Death and the Enshittificator team up to make things terrible _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Thomas Goldstein did not look at his cards. He shoved his chips forward — all of them — and told the table, “Let’s find out together.” This was the Bellagio poker room in July 2008, then the closest thing the gambling world had to a capital. Goldstein looked like easy prey. He was slight, pale, bald and bookish. He had the round face of a character actor Hollywood would typecast as an accountant. He was also mild-mannered and unfailingly polite. But Goldstein was doing more than holding his own. He was taking the table apart, and in a way almost no one had seen before. Almost every hand, he raised before any of the shared cards were dealt, to $400 or $500. Most of the time, for one stretch an estimated 19 hands out of 20, he bet without looking at his cards. Then he would bet as much as $35,000 on the river. By the time the game finally broke, at a quarter to seven, the July sun was coming up over the desert and the Bellagio’s night shift was going home. Goldstein had been playing for more than eighteen hours. He left a winner; years later he would say the night had made him some $400,000. (via The Foundry) ## The Voynich manuscript has stumped scholars for centuries but they may be reading it wrong It has been called the world’s most mysterious manuscript: a medieval set of pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text. Claimed at various times to be a book in a lost language, a musical score, an instruction manual or just an elaborate hoax, the so-called Voynich manuscript’s true meaning has defied cryptographers and codebreakers for centuries. Now, new research offers an explanation for why a scholarly consensus over this enduring puzzle has been so hard to come by: not only because its truth is so profoundly mysterious – but because everyone has been reading its pages in the wrong order. In an article published in peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, Colin Layfield and Lisa Fagin Davis argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as “singulions” but were mis-bound in a more typical “nested” arrangement at some point in the mid to late 15th century. (via The Guardian) ## He looked at lanes of traffic and cars driving by and it looked like music so he made it that way Have you ever played _Guitar Hero_ or Dance _Dance Revolution_? They’re fun video games that use a never-ending scroll with multiple “lanes” that, when struck at the right time, play different notes—whether you hit those with your fingers on a toy guitar or your feet on a floor pad depends on the game. What you’re looking at here is the same concept, but with a major highway as the scroll and real-life cars as the instruments. Does that make any sense? The creative mind behind “The 101 Plays Itself” is music producer Jay Judah, and his website uses public-access Caltrans traffic cameras on U.S. Highway 101 in Los Angeles, or, as locals call it, “the 101,” to create music. Here’s how it works: when cars drive through a predetermined line that Judah’s software superimposed on the video feed, they play a note. Since this portion of the 101 boasts five lanes, the system can play up to five different notes simultaneously. (via The Drive) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## People are using AI to convince themselves that drinking their own urine is a health cure For years, Facebook has played host to a truly stupefying number of groups for the tens of thousands of people interested in urine therapy — a pseudo-scientific practice involving the use of human micturate to “treat” ailments, ranging from acne to viral infections and even terminal cancer. The members of these groups have done a fine job of cultivating a dangerous ecosystem of quack remedies and misinformation on their own. But with the advent of AI, many are starting to branch out, using the tools to brainstorm new applications and reassure themselves that pee is indeed the cure-all they already believe it to be. In a Facebook group called “Urine Therapy, your sacred plasma medicine,” which has over 45,000 members, some discovered that popular AI chatbots initially push back on wild notions of tinkle as medicine. Acolytes of the urine drinking lifestyle have found it remarkably easy to break through chatbot safeguards — engineering AI to say whatever it is they wanted to hear to begin with. (via Futurism) ## A painting bought for $30 at an estate sale brings record $1.3 million bid at auction It is the stuff of dreams for a treasure-hunting flea market buyer. On Thursday (1 October) at Freeman’s auction house in New York, a painting by the once-obscure figurative painter Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-77), which was bought at an estate sale in Michigan last summer for a mere $30, blew past its high estimate of $200,000 and ultimately sold for $1.3m. The premium inclusive-price, paid for the 8in-by-11in painting titled _Alderman Merriam’s Shells_(1951), marked a new world auction record price for the artist. It represents a 33% jump from her previous auction record of $1m, achieved at Sotheby’s by _Message for Mercy_ (1950), also sold in New York, last November, according to data website Arthur Analytics. The auction high for the artist has shot up in recent years. As of early 2025 the secondary-market record for her work was still under $1m, at $864,000. “Keep going to those estate sales,” said auctioneer David Weiss, a Freeman’s senior vice president, at the start of the bidding. (via The Art Newspaper) ## A revolutionary leader gets upset when the news channel adds subtitles _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

He finds the chamomile and tips a couple extra drops onto a white snowball, making the top of it turn blue. Then the door opens, and he walks through it. For the next 15 minutes, Talmadge, 39, will whip a towel through thick, sticky air to push waves of heat and scent toward 200 naked strangers, including a six-person jury. Aufguss is a sauna ritual; a performance is called a set, and the most elite of them combine choreography, scent, storytelling, steam, and stamina. A competitor—known as a sauna master—enters the sauna to music and places a scented snowball on the hot rocks, then disperses its aroma with their towel. For every one of three or four song changes, another snowball goes on the stove. Contestants are forbidden from drinking water, and judges dock points if they appear fatigued. Within the span of his set, Talmage’s heart rate will hit about 195 beats per minute, according to the Whoop he wears on his left wrist. This is the Aufguss Show World Masters. Forty solo sauna masters from 19 nations have come to Satama, a lakeside resort, after qualifying in their national championships. (via GQ) ## The six-year quest to find the mystery woman in an 18th-century painting Adam Harris Levine stood before the 18th-century painting, completely stumped. The 30-year-old curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario had been scrutinizing a portrait of a young Black woman bedecked in jewels and wearing a shimmering blue gown with pearls around her neck and wrists. _Portrait of a Lady Holding an Orange Blossom_ — the woman holds a sprig of white flowers in her right hand — hung in the gallery near masterpieces by Rubens and Rembrandt. Yet when Levine first stared at her in 2020, he had no idea who had painted her or who the woman even was. Levine set out to solve the mystery. It led his team to sift colonial-era archives and convince families to share fragile letters revealing ugly histories. Early on, they crowdsourced tips through a podcast, garnering help from amateur genealogists listening in. Today, the Art Gallery of Ontario believes that it knows who its mystery girl is and who painted her — the art-historical equivalent of finding a needle in myriad haystacks. (via the WSJ) Before the subway we all know was built there was an 1870 demonstration line known as the Beach Pneumatic Transit. Alfred Ely Beach, inventor and editor of Scientific American, had designed a pneumatic (air-driven) system which he demonstrated at the American Institute Fair in 1867. He applied for a permit from the Tammany Hall city government, and after being denied, decided to build the line in secrecy, in an attempt to show that subterranean transit was practical. Operated as a demonstration from 1870 to 1873, the short tunnel had only the one station and train car. While frequently mentioned as an important early development in NYC transit history, it was merely a curiosity. It is unclear that such a system could have been practical on a large scale. Smaller tube systems are used in buildings for mail delivery, but a rail-car sized system has never been developed. The perfection of electric multiple-unit traction and electric locomotives came about so quickly after this experiment that it wasn't deemed worthwhile to even try an expanded pneumatic system. (via NYC Subway) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Three Elvises, and one pink Cadillac crash: Inside the chaotic world of Elvis impersonators Elvis drives a temperamental pink Cadillac with no seat belts and unreliable brakes. He’s sweating — a lot — and foundation has spread from his face to the lapels of his white jumpsuit. He is running late for an appearance in a Mexican Independence Day parade. This may be my fault. That afternoon, Elvis, né Jesse Grice, had obligingly received us at home, wearing only mesh shorts, so that we could witness his transformation into the King. I apologized for being late. “It’s OK,” he said. “I keep Elvis hours.” Inside his apartment, gilt mirrors shone from almost every surface, so the many pieces of Elvis paraphernalia refracted and seemed to multiply. Above the sofa was a huge shirtless portrait of either Grice or Elvis — at points, the distinction blurs. That evening, Grice was scheduled to chauffeur Las Vegas Councilwoman Olivia Diaz through the parade. So he did a speedy version of his normal routine: heavy foundation (Dermablend, the stuff they use to cover tattoos), hair spray, and waterproof mascara. “I learned from the best,” he explained, “drag queens.” (via the Boston Globe) ## Physicists have discovered that gravity can actually collapse the fabric of space-time Put a box around any region of space (space-time, really, but I’m going to drop time throughout this essay for ease of visualization, as physicists often do). The holographic principle asserts that no matter what’s going on inside — from gas molecules pinging around to black holes colliding — you can decipher the entire contents of the box just by repeatedly measuring points on the surface. Scientists have known for more than a century that gravity is different from the other forces. Imagine a box filled with electric charges, representing one of the other fundamental forces, electromagnetism. Because positive charges neutralize negative charges, different arrangements can look the same. If you observe no field, it could mean there’s no charge inside — or it could mean that the effects of the positive charges are perfectly blocking the effects of the negative charges. From the surface, you can’t tell the difference. (via Quanta) ## Watch the 2026 Hay Bale Toss champion _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Hidden in remote mountain temples across Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures, you’ll find Japan’s mysterious _Sokushinbutsu_ — self-mummified monks who underwent an extreme ritual to achieve enlightenment. Sokushinbutsu is the ancient practice of self-mummification followed by Shugen-do Buddhist monks in Japan’s mountainous regions. This extreme ritual involved a strict diet, intense physical training, and ultimately, sealing oneself in a tomb while still alive. Monks pursued Sokushinbutsu for enlightenment, to ease suffering, and as an act of spiritual devotion. They viewed it not as suicide, but as a sacred path to transcendence. The path to Sokushinbutsu began with a strict three years diet of nuts, seeds, and fruit, combined with intense physical activity to eliminate body fat. This was followed by another three years of consuming only bark and roots, further dehydrating the body. (via Voyapon) ## He left $13 million to a tiny village he had never visited because they shared the same name A man has given over €10 million to a village in Normandy although it is not known that he had ever visited or had any connection to it. Roger Thiberville did not have any heirs so he decided to bequeath part of his fortune to his accountant and the rest to Thiberville, a village of just 1,800 residents in the Eure. Guy Paris, the maire of the town, was first notified of the donation back in August when he received a call from a notaire, however the exact sum was only confirmed in the last few days. Not much is known about Roger Thiberville. He was a weather engineer who lived in a small flat in Paris and led a discreet life. He came from a family of winemakers and inherited from both his parents and his sister, who also died without an heir. He died on August 23 this year aged 91. The bulk of the donation came from four Paris flats that he owned. He is not known to have ever set foot in Thiberville. (via The Connexion) ## After she complained about a stuffy nose doctors removed a 48-year-old bullet A Chinese woman had a bullet lodged in her head for 48 years without her knowledge. She has finally got it removed by doctors, News.com.au reported. The 62-year-old woman, identified in local media only by her surname Zhao, had a bullet 2.5cm long and 0.5cm in diameter extracted from her head. She had gone to the doctors complaining about a chronic stuffy nose, headaches and swollen lymph nodes that had bothered her for 10 years. The question of how she went 48 years without knowing about the bullet resulted in conflicting media reports. According to Want China Times, Zhao said she was hit on her right temple when she was 14 years-old. At the time she thought it was a stone. But the Shanghaiist reported the woman as saying she had been hit by a stray bullet as a girl, but only felt minor pain and decided she would live with it. (via Deccan Chronicle) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Searchers continue to look for Samba the capybara who escaped from a British zoo Samba the capybara is still at large. Along with her older sister, Tango, the intrepid rodent made her escape from Marwell zoo in Winchester in March. Tango all but gave herself up on day two; Samba broke for the marshy wetlands of the River Itchen. Word spread and within days the fugitive was an international social media star. But despite an intense search, the dense Hampshire countryside has afforded her a haven. Six months on, Samba remains elusive. Marwell’s staff still aren’t sure how the capybaras escaped, although they have their suspicions. Tango and Samba were born on Jimmy’s Farm and Wildlife Park in Suffolk in the summer of 2025. They arrived at Marwell zoo on Monday 16 March, to great excitement. They were immediately placed in a quarantined habitat, as is standard procedure for new arrivals. The plan was to keep them there for 30 days. The next day, the vet and zookeepers did their morning checks and everything was fine. But when they returned that afternoon, Samba and Tango had vanished. (via The Guardian) ## It took five years after the invention of weak glue for someone to invent the Post-It Note In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. Instead, he accidentally created a "low-tack", reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive for the aerospace industry. For five years, Silver promoted his "solution without a problem" within 3M both informally and through seminars, but failed to gain adherents. In 1974, a colleague who had attended one of his seminars, Arthur Fry, came up with the idea of using the adhesive to anchor his bookmark in his hymn book. Fry then utilized 3M's sanctioned "permitted bootlegging" policy, which allows employees to spend some of their work time on projects of their own choosing. The original notes' canary yellow color was chosen by chance, from the color of the scrap paper available at the lab next door. Fry provided 3M employees with a prototype of the product, and individuals started exchanging messages, demonstrating the product's communicative effectiveness. (via Wikipedia) ## He blew a tire on his Tesla while driving at 175 miles per hour on the Autobahn _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

As one medieval Italian father puts its: “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” Here is a typical example from the 1220s: "B. to his venerable master A., greeting This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with the greatest diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands; I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun. For you must know that without Ceres and Bacchus Apollo grows cold." (via Medievalists.net) ## At the World Nomad Games athletes compete in sports like horseback archery On a rainy day at the beginning of September, I found myself standing under the giant sky at the foot of the mountains in rural Kyrgyzstan, shouting “add oil! (加油) from the sidelines of a horseback archery track. I was back in Central Asia for the World Nomad Games, an Olympics-style celebration where China reluctantly lets some of its minorities compete. The World Nomad Games were first conceived in Kyrgyzstan in 2014 and are held every two years. After being hosted by Türkiye in 2022 and Kazakhstan in 2024, the Games have finally returned home to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. And these were the largest Games ever, with 200,000+ visitors piling into Kyrchyn Gorge, one of the Games’ six venues, by the third day of the Games to watch 3,000+ athletes from 109 countries (compared to 583 athletes from 19 countries in 2014). (via China Talk) ## Investigating the strange science of how the end of a whip or chain moves John Aitken is the first scientist I know of who studied what I’ve been calling KdK (_Kinetik der Kontinua_) - the physics of moving chains. Aitken lived from 1839 to 1919 and spent most of his life in Falkirk, a town halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Unlike other KdK researchers like Carriere __ and Kucharski, who studied systems in which one end was free to move – so whips, basically – Aitken studied the movement of closed loops of chain, which he set in motion using a series of machines that he built in his home laboratory in Falkirk. When I discovered his 1878 paper “An account of some Experiments on Rigidity produced by Centrifugal Force,” I began constructing similar machines so that I could see for myself the phenomena that were so interesting to Aitken. Out of respect for his achievements I called these machines Aitkenators. My wife dubbed them chain-flingers, which is the name that actually stuck. (via Neal Stephenson) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Archaeologists keep finding the remains of women where men were supposed to be History has a funny way of becoming decidedly less male-dominated the moment we stop assuming it always was. Take ancient Rome, for instance. Despite the legal, economic, political, and social restrictions imposed on Roman women, many did play roles other than wife, mother, and daughter — including priestess, empress, midwife, shop owner, captain, and merchant. In a dedication dating to around 200CE, uncovered by archaeology professor Carrie Atkins, two Roman women described themselves as ‘distinguished matrons, Red Sea ship owners and merchants.’ Just-published research by archaeologist Tamara Lewit adds yet another profession to that list: wine and olive oil producer. By analysing various Roman texts — laws, business records, grave inscriptions— spanning five centuries, Lewit found that the _vilica_ , previously dismissed by historians as little more than a housekeeper, was actually a farm manager overseeing wine and olive oil production, bookkeeping, and other operations. (via The Noösphere) ## In the movie Poltergeist a scene with skeletons used real ones but didn't tell the actors The scene that the skeletons show up in is when JoBeth Williams’ character, Diane Freeling, falls in the pool that is being put in and the skeletons start popping up out of the water around her and she is utterly terrified. The reason that real skeletons were used in the movie is because it was actually cheaper and more cost-effective than creating and using plastic fake ones. JoBeth Williams was not made aware that there were real skeletons were used in the scene until after she finished shooting it. In an interview that aired as part of the TV Land show TV Land: Myths & Legends back in 2008, Williams said: “In my innocence and naiveté, I assumed that these were not real skeletons. I assumed that they were prop skeletons made out of plastic or rubber. I found out — as did the whole crew — that they were using real skeletons, because it’s far too expensive to make fake skeletons out of rubber." in 1982 special effects artist Craig Reardon confirmed the story as part of a lawsuit filed against Spielberg. (via Geek Tyrant) ## The pelican that thought it should be going to elementary school in Japan _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

It was the autumn of 1865 — a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war — when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark woods. Others had him hacked to pieces in New York City. Still more had him living long enough to slaughter Confederates on Southern battlefields. But it had been nearly a decade and a half now since Parker vanished, and no one could ever truly prove what had become of him. The manuscript in James Gilmore’s hands revealed elements of this story never before shared: the outrageous adventures of Parker’s armed Black mutual defense organization; their alliance with various white neighbors; and finally, the daring narratives of Parker’s escapes, first from slavery and later from the enraged mobs and hastily deputized law enforcement officers. (via LitHub) ## During World War I in war-torn Paris some brave women started a library The Germans began firing on Paris again on the fifth of August 1918. Mary Josephine Booth was familiar with the sound of the air raid sirens by then. If they came at night, she would jump out of her bed at the Hotel Petrograd, dress, take what valuables she had, and if the shelling was especially fierce, retreat to the basement. But if the sirens came during the day, then Booth, clad in her olive-green uniform, would remain at her post in an ornate building across the street from the Palais de L’Élysée. “We had to keep working to get the library ready to open,” she would later write. Booth was one of hundreds of librarians who went to war alongside American troops during the First World War. In the summer of 1918, the 42-year-old woman from Illinois served with fellow recruits to the American Library Association’s Library War Service as they prepared to open a library in the war-scarred French capital. (via JSTOR Daily) ## In 1980 peanut crops were infected by a fungus that may have led to the rise in peanut allergies I spent most of 2024 in Davos, isolating gut bacteria in an anaerobic lab set up in the basement of the Swiss Institute for Allergy and Asthma Research. While I was there, one of my colleagues, Duygu, was researching peanut allergy, and she gave a talk where she cited a statistic that absolutely floored me. Before 1980, she said, there were a total of _zero_ known fatalities from peanut allergy. The epidemiology of peanut allergy is interesting to begin with. It's not much of a problem in most of the world. Only in America—where roughly 1% of children are thought to be affected, and maybe a dozen people die annually from it—are schoolchildren forbidden from bringing a PB&J to lunch, for fear of endangering a classmate’s life. Aside from the incidence of allergy, though, there’s one other unique aspect of Americans’ relationship with peanuts. One glaringly obvious thing that sets us apart. Peanut butter. (via Eat Shit And Prosper) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Why did an octopus decide to hitch a ride on a dolphin? Scientists aren't sure It’s a sight you don’t see often: a common octopus apparently hitching a ride on the back of a Risso’s dolphin by clinging onto its fin. The photo was taken off the coast of the U.K. by Bill Coulson from the citizen science initiative Risso’s Dolphin Project. We don’t know what this unusual interaction means, but we do know that warming waters around this part of the coast of England are leading to a bloom in octopuses. While Risso’s dolphins usually feed on squid, they’re quite partial to octopus as well, and so the interaction captured here is unlikely to be a friendly one (don’t expect a Pixar adaptation). Dolphins usually spend their time in deeper waters further from the coast, but experts think the abundance of octopuses—a marine animal that lives much closer to the shore—might be tempting the Risso’s dolphins to new feeding grounds. (via Nautilus) ## He became famous for throwing cream pies at politicians and celebrities Noël Godin, a Belgian entertainer and anarchist who demonstrated his distaste for pomposity by hurling cream pies at executives, politicians and celebrities, a dessert-based form of protest that splattered Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Luc Godard, among many others, died on Aug. 23. He was 80. A self-described “anarcho-confectioner,” Mr. Godin led the International Patisserie Brigade, a gang of custard commandos who referred to their assaults as entartements. They deployed pies with soft crusts to ensure that their caloric projectiles would only injure pride. “We use only the finest patisserie, ordered at the last minute from small local bakers,” Mr. Godin told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 1995. “Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them.”Mr. Godin — “pie-eyed, pudding-faced and potbellied,” in one writer’s description — was a pain in the derrière most of his life, beginning in Catholic school when he complained to the priests about his lackluster sex life. (via the New York Times) ## The opening sequence of the movie District 13 is an incredible parkour exercise _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

In July of 1945, Han van Meegeren picked up his badger-hair brush and began to paint his last forgery. Over a decade, the wiry Dutchman had surreptitiously become Europe’s premier conman — a disgruntled artist-turned-forger who’d sold his works for tens of millions of dollars. He had duped leading critics, wealthy collectors, and even a high-ranking Nazi official into believing his works were real. What’s more, he had chosen to do so by emulating the works of Jan Vermeer, a technically-immaculate master of the Dutch Golden Age. Post-World War II, a “Vermeer” painting sold to Hermann Göring was traced back to van Meegeren — a painting of such high quality that experts agreed no one could have possibly fabricated it. Accused of plundering for the Germans, the artist was sentenced to death. In an odd twist, van Meegeren was given one last chance to prove his innocence: If he could produce a brilliant forgery before the eyes of court-appointed witnesses, he’d be spared. What ensued would make the man one of the most popular figures in the Netherlands. (via Priceonomics) ## Scientists found an ancient sheep virus hiding in a medieval parchment In ancient Rome, shepherds feared the appearance of bumpy pustules on their sheep—a telltale sign of deadly sheeppox. Even today, the disease poses a major threat, capable of wiping out entire flocks. Yet the disease’s origins—and historical impact—have remained mysterious. In a study published today in _Science Advances_ , researchers pin the virus’ emergence to about 5000 years ago, roughly the same time people started to intensively shear sheep for wool. The peek into the pathogen’s past came from an unusual source: dozens of medieval books and legal documents written on parchment, which is made from specially treated animal skins. “It turns out parchment is an extremely good preserver of this type of biological data,” says University of Leicester historian Joanna Story, a co-author of the new study. Researchers rubbed pages of the books with erasers, then extracted DNA from the eraser rubbings. That there was DNA to recover at all came as a surprise. Before becoming pages in a book, cow, goat, and sheep skins were soaked for days in pits filled with lime. (via Science.org) ## Salted caramel seems like it's everywhere now but not that long ago it was unknown Walmart sells 753 items with “salted caramel” in the name. Target has 312, which includes all manner of food plus perfumes, lip balms, energy gels, sea moss dietary supplements, collagen, a quick bread mix sold with a special Bundt pan, and a book called _Salted Caramel Sorcery._ Salted caramel’s roots are well-documented: a chocolatier in Brittany named Henri Le Roux invented it sometime in the late 1970s. The candy’s appeal is obvious: it’s both an updated version of a classic treat and a sensory one-two punch, the combination surprising but delightful. People are hard-wired to enjoy salty and sweet together (see, for example, peanut brittle, kettle corn, _caramel corn_ , and salt water taffy. The jump from Brittany to the rest of the world is much harder to track. There’s no tangible trail to follow throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, no specific data points of who was making or eating salted caramel. (via Snackstack) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## He invented the first vehicle with an internal combustion engine but he isn't well known The de Rivaz engine was a pioneering reciprocating engine designed and developed from 1804 by the Franco-Swiss inventor François Isaac de Rivaz. The engine is said to be the world's first internal combustion engine. It incorporated some features of modern engines such as spark ignition and the use of hydrogen gas as a fuel. Starting with a stationary engine suitable to work a pump in 1804, de Rivaz progressed to a small experimental vehicle built in 1807, which was the first wheeled vehicle to be powered by an internal combustion engine. In subsequent years de Rivaz developed his design, and in 1813 built a larger 6-meter long vehicle, weighing almost a ton. de Rivaz, a Franco-Swiss artillery officer and inventor, designed several successful steam powered carriages, or charrettes as he called them. His army experience with cannons had led him to think about using an explosive charge to drive a piston instead of steam. (via Wikipedia) ## It might sound bizarre but tapping on your shin can help heal your brain Your brain is talking to your skeleton, and more than you probably realize. For example, doctors have long noticed something odd about people with traumatic brain injuries—their bones heal faster. When some brain cells are damaged, they release vesicles filled with proteins that travel to the bone stem cells and stimulate growth. Naturally, researchers began to wonder: If damaged brains can heal bones, can bones heal damaged brains? To find out, researchers from Southern Medical University in China flipped the script on TBI-accelerated bone growth. They artificially caused traumatic brain injuries and strokes in the brains of mice and pigs. They then outfitted the brain-damaged animals with electronic devices that would rhythmically tap on their shin bones a couple times a second for five days. Remarkably, it worked. According to their study, the tapping reduced brain cell loss, promoted neuron growth, and relieved chronic inflammation. (via Nautilus) ## He locked himself inside a glass and metal box and a polar bear took an interest _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison 😭”. The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year beginning in February 2024. His return was met with an overwhelmingly effusive response. Nguyen was deliberately vague about the circumstances of his detainment, but speaking to Pitchfork, he revealed some of the details. In 2020, Nguyen attended a protest in Belarus, where he’d lived most of his life. The former Soviet satellite had recently catapulted Alexander Lukashenko, “Europe’s last dictator,” into a sixth term as president, in an election widely disputed as fraudulent. “I just came out with a flag and walked,” Nguyen says. “It was a regular protest like you guys have in America every day.” Four years later, Nguyen returned to visit his family in Belarus, where he was arrested by state police forces. (via Pitchfork) ## Scientists say acupuncture may work via a newly discovered vascular network The practice of acupuncture made it into the pantheon of accepted medical methodologies in the West through trade, politics, immigration and fascination. But it took thousands of years for scientists to understand the exact physical system that makes it effective. In China, acupuncture predates the common era. Its most foundational text was written around 1st or 2nd century BCE, mapping energy meridians and points along the body the same way that circulatory or skeletal systems are mapped. As European missionaries and traders ventured to China, the West flirted with Traditional Chinese Medicine several times. It caught hold in France, where a unique form of acupuncture developed in the 19th century: The French school of acupuncture created new methodologies like ear acupuncture, and using electric currents with needles. In 2021, scientists discovered a new system inside of our bodies. They’ve labeled it the "interstitium". They say that it plays a role in how acupuncture actually works. (via Why Is This Interesting) ## If you like to travel by train but don't like crowds you can rent your own private sleeper car Amtrak, the national railway company, and a dedicated but dwindling set of enthusiastic owners, have kept private train travel alive by way of something called the Privately-Owned Rail Car Program, which charges owners of private rail cars a fee per mile to hitch them to existing Amtrak trains. Mr. Henry named his first two cars, purchased as a pair in 2004 for $900,000, after his parents: Warren R. and Evelyn Henry. He recently added a 1954 Pullman named Santa Fe — the railroad for which his father worked for 41 years. He declined to share what he paid, but a car immediately ready for Amtrak typically costs around $1 million. Maintenance costs Mr. Henry $60,000 annually on the domed Warren R. Henry car, and $40,000 for each of his two other cars, which are sleepers. Leonard Cherry has chartered Mr. Henry’s trains three times and finds rail travel soothing. “It’s like being rocked to sleep at night,” he said.Mr. Cherry, a 71-year-old Houstonian who sold his material supply and demolition company in 2020, said a weeklong trip typically costs $10,000 per person. (via the NYT) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A steamship company owner revolutionized weather forecasting in the 1800s Very few in scientific circles would have heard of William C. Redfield’s name before the publication of his storm paper in 1831. A New York businessman, he had made his name with his Steam Navigation Company. In 1831 Redfield chanced to meet Denison Olmstead, professor of mathematics and physics at Yale. Soon Olmstead and Redfield were talking about storms and it was then, for the first time, that Redfield unveiled his theory of whirling winds. Redfield had devised this idea a decade before, after the “Great September Gale of 1821.” The gale — as the hurricane was then called — had sparked panic right along the northeastern coast, causing a storm surge that had flooded the New Jersey coastline as well as several streets on Manhattan Island. In the days afterward Redfield had been out walking with his son in rural Connecticut, which had been equally affected. He noticed that near Middletown, in the center of the state, trees had been blown over toward the north-west. But in neighboring Massachusetts the trees had fallen in the opposite direction, pointing toward the southeast. (via Nautilus) ## Harry Potter fans helped divert a power cable because of the grave of a fictional character Harry Potter fans succeeded in diverting a power link between the UK and Ireland after they complained it would disturb a "memorial" to Dobby the House Elf. The £430m Greenlink interconnector links the National Grid to Ireland via 125-mile cable between County Wexford and Freshwater West, a beach in Pembrokeshire where the death of fictional character Dobby was filmed. Project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast the cable was originally going to go straight through the tribute, before fans left his firm hundreds of calls. Ludlam, founder of Etchea Energy, said a BBC News interview about the project had turned into a public relations nightmare after fans got wind of what was to happen. He told the podcast that during the filmed interview he had pointed out where the cable would go underground, saying: "We did the shot, we finished I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later. "And we got hundreds of calls, I mean hundreds of calls." (via the BBC) ## Caracal kittens sound a little like laser beams _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Robert William Barker was an American media personality, game show host, and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS's _The Price Is Right_ , the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. Barker also hosted _Truth or Consequences_ from 1956 to 1975. Born in Darrington, Washington, in modest circumstances, Barker spent most of his youth on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and was a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. The U.S. Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, list Barker as a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, which the tribe publicly confirmed. His mother, Matilda was a schoolteacher; his father, Byron John Barker, was the foreman on the electrical high line through the state of Washington. Barker's father was one-quarter Sicangu, , thus Barker was one-eighth Sicangu. Barker once said, "I've always bragged about being part Indian, because they are a people to be proud of. And the Sioux were the greatest warriors of them all." (via Wikipedia) ## In the nineteenth century before libraries women sold books door-to-door In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. The booksellers visited homes and businesses with sample books, took orders, and then later delivered the books and collected payment. Braun writes that popular volumes included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and the works of Mark Twain were popular choices. Many books published using this “subscription” model sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In an 1868 account of her work selling books across northern Illinois and Indiana, Annie Nelles Dumond described taking up the work out of necessity. She wrote that, seeking to escape a difficult childhood, she married young to a man who turned out to already have a wife and children. A second husband abandoned her. So Dumond sought ways to support herself. When she began selling books, she wore a mourning bonnet. She acknowledged that this was deceptive but wrote that it was “almost necessary to my self-preservation that my past should not be known.” (via JSTOR Daily) ## Mobster Vincent Gigante wandered the streets in his bathrobe pretending to be senile For the latter part of the 20th century, Vincent Gigante, pictured above left, was a household name in his Greenwich Village neighborhood. On any given day, starting when he was in his mid-to-late-30s, Gigante would walk around the community talking to himself under his breath, incoherently, to either no one whatsoever or only to figments that he could see. Sometimes he was wearing old, frayed, and patched pants, paired with a light jacket that had seen many better days. But such formal attire was rare. Gigante was typically seen as above, wearing a bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers, seemingly unaware that it was entirely inappropriate to wear such attire out on the street. The New York Times described his behavior as that of “a disturbed but harmless person" who was obviously out of place. But that’s not why he was famous. He was best known for being a mob boss – the head of the Genovese crime family. (via Now I Know) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## For a brief period in the US it was fashionable to wear a live lizard pinned to your dress During the winter of 1893-94, department stores struggled to keep a curious item in stock: live “chameleons” imported from Florida and marketed as fashionable jewelry for women. Small green lizards attached to pins with collars and delicate chains were sold as living ornaments and souvenirs to tourists. Within a few years, what had started as a local curiosity would become a nationwide phenomenon. Florida was ground zero for the chameleon craze. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the state had emerged as a popular seasonal destination for affluent Northern tourists. Visitors typically purchased keepsakes to serve as tangible reminders of the state’s distinctive wildlife, including various alligator- and orange-themed curios, scenic photographs and postcards, and decorative silver spoons and china. In 1890, Charles E. Mackay began offering a novel souvenir in his St. Augustine book and stationery shop: “a live chameleon fastened to a gold pin by a slender gold chain,” a kind of “animate breast pen” that was “to be worn in the bosom of a lady’s dress.” (via Wild History) ## Research shows the human brain may have originally been two separate organs For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years. The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades researchers have subscribed to the theory that there is a single progenitor cell early in development that gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin. The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins. The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, like Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. (via Eureka Alert) ## This French village hosts an annual pig-squealing championship _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

An Australian man who defrauded a bank by exploiting an ATM loophole said he does not regret his actions after using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle for months. Dan Saunders managed to spend more than AUS$1.6m ($1.1m) in just over four months after he found he could withdraw money from his account without the transactions being registered. Now out of prison, Saunders has told Australian media how he managed to blow the money on "having a good time and just enjoying things really." These extravagant purchases include eating at high-end restaurants, buying drinks all night for people in bars, gambling, and even hiring a private jet so him and his friends could go on vacation. The story of how Saunders managed to afford his newfound millionaire lifestyle began after he attempted to withdraw some cash at a National Bank Australia machine in Wangaratta, Victoria, in 2011. After seeing his account was empty, Saunders transferred cash from his Mastercard to his savings account. He said the screen then said "transaction cancelled," but the machine still gave him the $200. (via Newsweek) ## After the Battle of Waterloo teeth were taken from the battlefield and made into dentures Historians estimate that by the morning following the Battle of Waterloo, the 50,000 bodies that lay dead or dying on the battlefield had been stripped of everything of value including their teeth. Local scavengers, surviving soldiers and professional body scavengers were all known to work on the battlefield. Some body snatchers of London were known to get jobs following the British army. Transported back to England, the teeth were sold to the ivory turners and jewellers and those beginning to make a full-time living from the making of artificial teeth. Sorted and shaped, the teeth were riveted into a hippopotamus or walrus ivory base. Examples on display in the exhibition explore the methods and skill in how these human teeth were attached. The many processes involved ensured the denture took at least six weeks to complete. Not surprisingly they were very expensive to buy. In 1782 Martin Van Butchell of London advertised a full set of ivory dentures with human teeth for £100. (via Nature) ## She was the world's tallest burlesque dancer in the 1950s at six foot eight inches Irene Jewell, a longtime Costa Mesa resident who from the 1950s through 1970s went by the stage name Ricki Covette and was the world’s tallest burlesque dancer, died about two weeks shy of her 91st birthday. Promotional materials billed the 6-foot-8 performer as the “Amazon” woman, a “Glamazon,” the “girl of tomorrow today.” In an interview with the Daily Pilot in December 2014, Jewell noted how the story of her burlesque days was having a resurgence through documentaries, Internet fan sites — even the Smithsonian Institution. Before she died, she gave some of her personal albums to the institution’s National Museum of American History. Jewell was born in Canada in 1925. She grew up wanting to be a singer and dancer, and despite not possessing natural talent for either, she succeeded in the fiercely competitive entertainment industry through hard work, professionalism and training. According to her family, Jewell’s credits include appearances in the 1966 films “The Swinger” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and in the 2010 Leslie Zemeckis documentary, “Behind the Burly Q.” When her entertainment career ended, Jewell worked in real estate. (via the LA Times) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A Maine family's apple tree turned out to be connected to the French revolution One collaborator, Bjarne Larsen, had given Howard access to a trove of apple genotypes from Denmark, the fingerprints of an orchard of historic cultivars maintained at the University of Copenhagen. Larsen had done his Ph.D. in plant breeding there. Because he had researched them for his book, Larsen could link the genetic proofs of apples’ identities to the historic evidence. One tree in the University of Copenhagen’s collection had an especially interesting story. Larsen believed it was a variety named and described in a French pomological text in 1628. A later account said it was so prized in French farming that trees had been hidden in a botanical garden to protect them when the French Revolution ravaged aristocratic estates. It had once been widely cultivated in Germany and Denmark but had fallen out of favor. It was called _Drap d’Or de Bretagne_ —“Brittany’s cloth of gold.” When the MOFGA sample matched it two years later, Howard and Peace understood immediately what the Maine mystery tree meant: a lost piece of apples’ history, grown in only one location in Europe, had suddenly been discovered in North America—the only known one on that continent (via Scientific American) ## He was a world-renowned racecar driver from Macau and also an expert swordsman Macau, 1959. When author Ian Fleming landed in this 11-square-mile, Portuguese-controlled city situated on the western bank of China’s Pearl River Delta, the man responsible for James Bond didn’t find a thriving port so much as a seedy cesspool of gamblers, opium traders, prostitutes, hustlers, arms dealers, and shady characters of every imaginable sort. Fleming had come to Ou Mun to research his travel guide, _Thrilling Cities._ If it was inspiration Fleming sought, he should have visited Teddy Yip instead.Known in his later years as The Grand Old Man of Macau, Yip was a fabulously successful businessman, a legendary swordsman, and a world-renowned racecar driver. He spoke six Chinese dialects in addition to English, German, Dutch, Thai, Malay, and French. A man who “never met a party he didn’t like,” Yip was as comfortable in a hot tub with three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Unser as he was hosting Henry Kissinger on a yacht. Countless individuals have amassed bigger fortunes than Teddy Yip, but few people enjoyed their riches more. (via Victory Journal) ## Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise tests his grizzly-bear protection suit _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls, including one that led to a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the finish. But none were enough to permanently divert him from the 2,193-mile (3,530-kilometer) trail that runs between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines a thru-hike as completing all of the trail's sections in any order within a year, allowing for pauses. Sanders started Sept. 6 in West Virginia, hopscotched around with some brief breaks and finished Monday atop Maine's highest peak, where he paused to pray at the sign marking the summit. Sanders, whose trail name is Grey Beard, first set the Appalachian Trail record in 2017 at age 82. Four years later, his 83-year-old friend M.J. Eberhart, aka Nimblewill Nomad, took the title. But within months, Sanders announced his comeback plan. (via PBS) ## Moby Dick wasn't exciting enough so Hollywood invented an evil half-brother for Captain Ahab _The Sea Beast_ , the first film adaptation of _Moby-Dick_ , begins with a leather-bound edition of the novel opening to page one, but the phrase “Call me Ishmael” is nowhere to be found. That’s because there’s no Ishmael in this movie at all. Instead, theatergoers a hundred years ago were introduced to a new character: Captain Ahab’s evil younger brother, Derek. Yes, Derek. This silent film, released in 1926, offers the story of a dreamy and handsome young harpooner named Ahab Ceeley, cut down in his prime by both fraternal and cetaceous violence. The Hollywood leading man John Barrymore plays Ahab as a valiant lover, wooing the beautiful Esther with his nautical prowess and igniting the envy of his jealous half brother, who hopes to steal Esther’s heart. The dastardly Derek stealthily shoves his sibling into the jaws of a vicious sperm whale, then convinces the now-disabled Ahab that his sweetheart could never accept him in his disfigured condition. Plunged into a steely despair, the captain focuses his hate on the legendary Moby Dick—at least until he discovers the truth. “Your worst enemy ain’t Moby Dick,” a sailor eventually informs him, “it’s your half brother, Derek.” (via The Paris Review) ## Members of this exclusive club get special ties for being shot into the air at 700 miles per hour Ron Bath was flying his RF-4 Phantom military jet at nearly 700 miles an hour over the Nevada desert when it smashed into a bird, destroying one of the engines and part of the wing. Bath managed to land at his base in Reno, but there was still a problem: He couldn’t steer or apply the brakes. As the plane slowed, it rolled off the side of the runway and into a ditch filled with rainwater. The Phantom’s front landing gear collapsed, piercing the floorboard under the cockpit and rupturing the charge on his ejection seat. “Next thing I know is I’m looking down at my airplane and it’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, and I’m just shooting up into the sky,” said Bath. Seven seconds after he shot through the glass canopy, Bath smashed into the ground, breaking his back and neck. What he didn’t know on that day nearly 40 years ago was he had just earned entry into one of the world’s most exclusive clubs. Much like the myth of automatically getting straight A’s if your college roommate dies, there is folklore around military pilots who eject from jets and live to tell. Can you keep your seat? Do you get a tie? (via the WSJ) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## In the 1860s London was gripped by a panic over the rise of "garroting" robberies During the early 1860s, reports of violent robberies known as garrottings filled British newspapers. Victims were said to be attacked from behind, choked into unconsciousness, and robbed before their assailants vanished. As sensational accounts multiplied, fear spread far beyond the actual crime scenes. Respectable citizens grew afraid to walk alone at night, politicians demanded action, and newspapers warned that London was facing a new and terrifying criminal menace. The word "garrotte" originated in Spain, where it referred to a method of execution involving strangulation. In Britain, however, the term acquired a different meaning. A garrotter was a robber who attacked victims from behind, gripping their throat or covering their mouth while accomplices searched their pockets. The panic began after a series of highly publicized robberies in London. Newspapers reported cases in which victims claimed they had been suddenly seized, partially strangled, and relieved of their valuables. Some attacks were undoubtedly genuine, but sensational reporting transformed a local crime problem into a national crisis. (via Amusing Planet) ## This dolphin terrifies fish so they lose their lunch and then it eats it New videos reveal how a male dolphin has perfected a never-before-seen hunting technique for his species: he terrorizes fish until they vomit — and then feeds on their regurgitated food. The observations, aside from being gross, offer some of the most compelling evidence of kleptoparasitism — the act of stealing food from other animals — in a cetacean. While diving off Lady Elliot Island in Australia’s southern Great Barrier Reef between 2021 and 2025, researchers and divers documented 20 occasions when this male individual — a common bottlenose dolphin nicknamed “Bubbles” — hunted for regurgitated food from bigeye trevallies. Bubbles succeeded in his quarry 11 times. The nasty catch goes as follows: The dolphin approaches a school of fish and searches for a target. Once he has identified the unlucky fish, he starts chasing it, isolating it from the group. The chase continues until the fish vomits whatever food it has in its belly, and the dolphin snaps up the regurgitated material. (via Scientific American) ## These tiny creatures can do a backflip out of danger so quickly they literally disappear _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. On five acres, he has a stucco house that’s connected to a barn; white-fenced paddocks shaded by palms; and an outdoor riding ring. Along one end of the ring is a common neighborhood fixture: an eighty-foot-long mirror. Barisone, who’s in his early sixties, with a Will Ferrell chin and a muscular build, can hold a conversation about his own good judgment, and the iniquity of his enemies, while riding a horse and monitoring his own reflection. In Barisone’s Loxahatchee kitchen there is a dark-green safe the size of a vending machine. It used to stand in his office on the New Jersey farm. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he took a handgun from the safe and drove a few hundred yards, to a house on his property where Lauren Kanarek, a thirty-eight-year-old student of his, was boarding with her boyfriend. He shot her twice. (via The New Yorker) ## He was cleaning out his garage and found a box marked SECRET in a hidden crawlspace Jason Hurdle was clearing space in his garage**** for his Halloween decorations when he pulled back an unassuming sheet of plywood from the wall, revealing a crawl space he’d never seen before. Inside was a dusty cardboard box full of weathered files that looked like trash. But as he carried the box out to the flatbed of his truck and reached for a garbage bin, a breeze lifted one of the covers, and a word in red block letters stopped him: “SECRET.” A mechanic for his local school district near Waterloo, New York, Hurdle doesn’t**** encounter government documents with classified markings. Initially, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. But as he read the pages, he started to get an idea.The 80-year-old, onionskin pages were mostly handwritten, first-person accounts by American prisoners of war, or POWs, describing their experiences in German**** captivity during World War II. In July, the National Archives announced the documents had been safely recovered by its Archival Recovery Program. (via the Washington Post) ## James Beaton has advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford and 10 other universities Beaton had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28. Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (education entrepreneurship), Stanford (education technology), Princeton (finance), Cornell (health care policy and economics), Dartmouth (implementation science), King’s College London (war studies) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (global affairs). Still, there was more: Beaton was a founder and the chief executive of Crimson Education, a college admissions counseling service that has been valued at more than $600 million. If he continues collecting degrees, he will surpass Benjamin B. Bolger, who has racked up 16 at age 50. (via the New York Times) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## He spent 25 years building a giant castle of rocks by hand in the Colorado wilderness The castle – containing over over 50,000 tons of rock, concrete, lumber, and steel – was built by one man, Jim Bishop, a high school dropout and ornamental ironworker from Colorado. Beginning in 1969, and for roughly the next 25 years, the story of the castle centered on Jim and his crazy one-man construction project. It began when Jim and his father started building a cottage out of rocks for their family in the Colorado mountains. The frontage on Highway 165 drew onlookers who asked, "What's that? A castle?" Jim thrived on the attention. If a castle was what the public wanted, he would give them a castle. The castle's popularity spurred Jim to make his castle as big and elaborate as possible, and to start describing it as America's largest one-man project. He didn't have much money, so the walls were built with rocks that he took for free from nearby road ditches and creek beds. Jim viewed this as a public service. That opinion was not shared by the Bureau of Land Management. (via Roadside America) ## The hiccup may be an ancient reflex inherited from ancestors that breathed both air and water A tadpole hanging in pond water breathes by gulping. Water in through the mouth, out across the gills, and a flap of tissue in the throat snaps shut so the developing lungs stay dry. Take the water away and parts of that sequence look uncannily like something with a different name, one that has been wrecking dinner parties for as long as there have been dinner parties. Mechanically it is quick and graceless. The diaphragm and the muscles between the ribs contract hard and without permission, hauling air in. About 35 milliseconds later the vocal cords slam shut. Airflow stops mid-rush, and the sound is the result. No agreed useful function follows. No gas is exchanged, no blockage shifted, no threat removed. Writing in the journal Gut, gastroenterologists Peter Kahrilas and Guoxiang Shi noted the oddity of something almost every human experiences repeatedly and almost nobody understands. “Archaic motor patterns” is how a 2003 paper in BioEssays described the whole business. (via Science Blog) ## She saw a hole in the sidewalk and decided to do something to make it a little nicer _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

(_**Note** : I am backcountry camping this week in the remote Canadian wilderness so this is a repeat of an earlier newsletter_) On January 23, 1973, the 5,000 residents of the tiny Icelandic island of Heimaey — located just four miles off Iceland’s southern coast — woke up to the Earth splitting open. In the dead of night, a mile-long volcanic fissure ripped through the ground just a half-mile from the town of Vestmannaeyjar, marking the birth of a new volcano named Eldfell. Fountains of molten basaltic lava shot hundreds of feet into the sky, raining ash and glowing, golf-ball-sized rocks onto rooftops. Within hours, a makeshift fleet of local fishing boats evacuated almost the entire population to the mainland. The people were safe, but their town faced an existential threat. The threat went far beyond a local crisis. Not only were the townspeople of Vestmannaeyjar completely reliant on the harbor, but all of Iceland depended on this tiny island’s fishing industry for a massive chunk of its exports. If the advancing lava choked off that narrow bay, it would deal a devastating blow to the entire nation’s economy. (via Popular Science) ## MIT requires that every graduating student must know how to swim. But why? The legend on MIT’s campus goes that students once had to leap into the Charles River and swim across its dirty water __ without stopping to graduate. That was never true. But the institution does require all students to prove their swimming ability — in the heated indoor pool. Students can either take swim lessons or complete a 100-yard test. Swim tests used to be common at American colleges, but MIT now finds itself increasingly in the minority. It’s one of the few schools that’s clinging to the test, arguing that swimming is an important life skill. Since the requirement suddenly rose in popularity around World War II, many schools have dropped it due to equity or practical concerns. The tradition dates back more than a century. Cornell claims credit as the first college to mandate swimming in 1905. MIT began its practice during World War II. Poor recordkeeping makes it hard to know the true origins of why schools implemented this standard, but many schools cite drowning rates among service members. (via WGBH) ## Builders renovating a house in Belgium found 9 million Euros worth of gold bars and coins Builders renovating a house in Belgium have discovered a stash of gold reportedly worth €9m (£7.6m) sealed into the walls of its cellar. The construction workers stumbled across the hidden trove of gold bars and coins while drilling to lay new sewage pipes in the property in east Flanders earlier this week, local media report. The discovery has sparked interest in who might get to keep the hoard - with both the builders and the local charity that owns the site having a chance of claiming it. After launching an investigation, police warned people against attending the site to search for more treasure, saying the house was "turned upside down" and all the gold had been moved to a secure location. The builders - including an 18-year-old working a summer job - unearthed the stash while working on the building's foundations. Soon after, they alerted police to the discovery and explained that keeping it for themselves was not an option. (via the BBC) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## No one is sure where the dollar sign came from The dollar sign (also known as the peso sign) is a currency symbol consisting of a capital S crossed with one or two vertical strokes. The symbol appears in business correspondence in the 1770s from the West Indies referring to the Spanish American peso, also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in British America. The Spanish coins provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792. It is still uncertain, however, how the dollar sign came to represent the Spanish American peso. There are currently several competing hypotheses: The most widely accepted theory holds that the dollar sign developed out of an abbreviation for the Spanish and Spanish-American ps for pesos. Another hypothesis derives the sign from a depiction of the Pillars of Hercules, a classical symbol for two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, with a ribbon wrapped in the form of an 'S'. Another hypothesis notes that the English word "dollar" for the Spanish piece of eight originally came from _Joachimsthaler_ or _thaler_ , a similar large German silver coin that was widely used in Europe. (via Wikipedia) ## In Torajan culture families keep the dead with them in some cases for years When a person dies, relatives mourn the passing by treating the body as a living entity. They believe that by keeping the deceased in their homes, they are not really dead, but are instead considered “sick”, and should be cared for as such. Depending on social status, the body is cleaned, clothed and fed over the course of weeks, months or even years. The Torajan funeral called ‘Rambu Solo’ is an extremely expensive event and families can spend tens of thousands, keeping the body at home until they can save enough to properly conduct the funeral rites. While this practice may seem strange or disturbing to many cultures, the Torajan have no fear of the dead, and their love for the person outweighs any concerns or feelings of discomfort about seeing death and decomposition. Meals, activities, prayers, and all other aspects of daily home life are spent with the deceased person’s body. Once a funeral date has been decided, the family will purchase a water buffalo to use as a sacrifice. They believe that buffaloes are the ‘vehicle’ in which the dead rides to the afterlife at Puya, the land of the spirits. (via Heritage Daily) ## He couldn't attend his aunt's funeral so he laid food for his sheep in the shape of a heart _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

The organism in question is a protozoan, meaning a single-celled animal, and it’s called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s one of the most successful parasites on the planet. Depending on which country’s serology data you look at, somewhere between eleven per cent of Americans, thirty per cent of the world’s population, and above eighty per cent of the historic French are estimated to be carrying it right now. Most of them have no idea. Most of them never will. In immunocompetent adults, latent Toxoplasma infection produces no measurable symptoms for the rest of the person’s life. But it does something almost nobody knows about, which is that it settles into the brain and stays there, forming small cysts of dormant parasite cells inside the neurons and glia of its human hosts, and quietly doing whatever it’s doing to the tissue around them. What that is, in rodents, has been extensively documented. What it might be, in humans, is one of the more interesting open questions in modern neurobiology. (via Space Daily) ## "Mad honey" made in Nepal will stop your heart if you eat too much of it A few months ago, a friend of mine told me that his father-in-law had been rushed to the hospital after eating some wild honey brought back from the hills of Nepal. Within about 30 minutes, his heart rate had dropped dangerously low and his blood pressure had collapsed. He recovered, but the episode was terrifying for the whole family. As a chemical ecologist from Nepal, I knew immediately what had happened. My friend’s father-in-law had eaten wild honey, known locally as “bhir mauri ko maha,” from the Himalayan cliff bee. These bees forage on rhododendron flowers that carry a natural toxin called grayanotoxin. As bees collect the nectar, the toxin ends up concentrated in the honey. This is what’s now popularized worldwide as “mad honey.” Eat a teaspoonful and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly light-headed. Eat more than a few tablespoons and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels. The Gurung people of Nepal have built up knowledge of safe doses over generations. (via The Conversation) ## For 16 years he lived alone on a tiny Pacific island with just his cats Tom Neale was dumped by boat on a tiny atoll in the Pacific, where he lived alone for 16 years. Neale, a New Zealander, rode out violent storms in a rickety shack, ate a diet heavy on fish and coconuts, and wore nothing but a loincloth. But Neale did not land on the atoll by accident or during a terrible storm. Formerly a shopkeeper, Neale became fixated on the tiny Cook Island atoll of Suwarrow in 1943, when author and traveler Robert Frisbie spoke of it to him after visiting. To prepare for his stay, which he envisioned would last for years, Neale stockpiled supplies. On the nearby island of Rarotonga, he perplexed store owners by buying their entire inventories of flour, sugar, kerosene, and coffee beans. Neale politely refused the advances of several women who asked to accompany him, suspecting it would not be long before he came to resent their company. He did, however, choose two nonhuman companions: a cat named Mrs. Thievery (named for her favorite hobby), and her kitten, Mr. Tom-Tom. (via Slate) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Famous explorer Ernest Shackleton's secret weapons were cocaine and caffeine In 1907 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton led his first of three expeditions to the Antarctic. The aim of the trip was to be the first expedition team to reach the South Pole. Shackleton and his team would eventually be forced to turn back just 97.5 nautical miles short of their target, but the mission was still widely considered a success. Shackleton’s medical kit for the _Nimrod_ expedition was made by Burroughs & Wellcome Co. of London - and contained a variety of quirky treatments. The kit included a glass thermometer, bandages, plasters, safety pins, a tube of Hazeline cream and sewing needles, held together in a leather wallet. There were also sixteen tubes of medicine. Perhaps most intriguing were the Forced March tablets, which were were made from a combination of cocaine and caffeine. The idea was to provide a boost to anyone drastically in need of some energy. If taken once an hour 'when undergoing continued mental strain or physical exertion', it promised to prolong powers of endurance and curb appetites.” (via Much Better Adventures) ## The US government's most important color is Federal Standard 595 Color No. 33446 The color that has come to signify America in today’s combat theaters isn’t the red, the white, or the blue picked by Betsy Ross, but an ignoble sandy hue commonly referred to as desert tan and officially identified as Federal Standard 595 Color No. 33446. The color came of age in December of 1990, when, according to military lore, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, then stationed in Saudi Arabia as commander-in-chief of the US Central Command, got a new pair of shoes: prototype combat boots, size 11.5R, which he unboxed, examined, and hurled at the soldier who delivered them. Photographs of the conflict—ones taken between August 1990 and January 1991—show transport vehicles, trucks, tanks, tents, and soldiers covered in Vietnam-era olive drab and a three-color woodland camouflage that sticks out from the desert like a pickle on hummus. Schwarzkopf wasn’t having it. Shortly after throwing that pair of shoes, he ordered stateside manufacturers to develop all-cotton desert camouflage combat uniforms and paint all vehicles bound for the Persian Gulf desert tan. (via The Morning News) ## A male gorilla refuses to stop trying to get his mate to forgive him _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

(_**Note** : I am backcountry camping this week in the remote Canadian wilderness so this is a repeat of an earlier newsletter_) It’s not uncommon for a 9-year-old child to love dinosaurs, but it is quite rare for someone so young to have opened a museum of their own dedicated to fossils and natural history. Anderson Taylor, now 11, was recently awarded the Guinness World Record for being the youngest male curator of a museum, the first to ever hold the title. He opened the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Cambridge, Illinois, on August 10, 2024, when he was just 9 years and 340 days old. Taylor had been thinking about the museum for years. “Back when I was around 3 years old, I was watching a show on dinosaurs, and I decided that I wanted to go find some fossils,” he tells _Smithsonian_. “So I went outside to my driveway.” In a remarkable turn of events, he happened to find a fossil in his yard, jump-starting his passion for paleontology. **NOTE** : There has been a GoFundMe created to help Anderson buy the place where his museum is located. (via The Smithsonian) ## Study showed 2.6% of people will swerve in order to drive over a turtle In 2012, Nathan Weaver, a senior at Clemson University, decided to tackle a problem. He noticed that the population of box turtles in the area was in decline, and roadkill was a major factor. His goal was to try to create a safer way for the turtles to cross the road. But to do so, he needed to better understand the cause of the squished turtles. So Weaver designed an experiment to study the problem, placing realistic rubber turtles in the middle of a busy lane near campus. Then he stepped back and watched. Over the course of an hour, seven drivers deliberately swerved to crush the fake turtle. Several more appeared to try but missed. Another day of observation yielded similar results — he placed his fake turtles on a residential street, and the second car to pass by crossed the center line just to pulverize the decoy. In the first phase, seven out of 267 cars purposely crushed the fake turtles in the space of an hour” — about 2.6%. And those numbers held up over the course of his other trials. (via Now I Know) ## The bomb ended World War 2 and other myths about nuclear weapons Sixty seven years ago on this day, a bomb fueled by the nuclear fission of uranium leveled Hiroshima in about six seconds. Since then, two foundational beliefs have colored our views of nuclear weapons; one, that they were essential or at least very significant for ending the war, and two, that they have been and will continue to be linchpins of deterrence. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become so ingrained in our minds as symbols of the power of the bomb that we scarcely think about whether they really served the roles that they have been ascribed over the last half century. But troubling and mounting evidence has emerged in the last half century that is now consequential enough to deal a major blow to this thinking. Contrary to popular belief, this is not "revisionist" history; by now the files in American, Soviet, Japanese and British archives have been declassified to an extent that allows us to piece together the cold facts and reveal what exactly was the impact of the atomic bombings of Japan on the Japanese decision to end the war. They tell a story very different from the standard narrative. (via Wave Function) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A Mexican ghost town re-emerges from the banks of the drying Rio Grande The reservoir’s shoreline was nowhere in sight when we arrived in the resurrected city, walking the narrow, cobblestone streets—allegedly hand-laid by children working off their misdeeds, per the archivist. The structures closest to the river had been submerged the longest, but Ceballos Sánchez explained that the building materials, more than the water levels, determined their fate. Cheap, plant-based mortar means more rubble. By contrast, the mineral-based mortar had kept the masonry of a two-story hotel largely intact, with prickly pear growing along the top of the thick, sandstone walls. The flagstones of the town square remained firmly in place. The boys school, completed just a few years before the dam was announced, was almost entirely intact despite its low-lying position by the river, thanks to the concrete and rebar that held up well. The arcades of the open-air market were second in prominence only to the central basilica. (via Texas Monthly) ## Life inside Icelandic turf houses was cozy but also smelly at times Let’s tour an Icelandic turf house. From the side, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a hill; a thick carpet of grass grows up the walls and over the roof. But look closer and you can see a little windowpane peering out from behind the dandelions, and around the side there is a house-front and a door leading into a dark passageway. Inside, a hallway paved with flat stones and packed earth opens on one side to the kitchen, with its stone hearth and huge iron pots; above, strings of fish hang to dry in the smoke. On the other side is the pantry, with butter churns and great tubs of skyr. Up a steep little staircase you’ll find a long lofted room known as the baðstofa, where everyone except the master and mistress of the house crams together to sleep, two to a narrow bed. And by everyone, I mean _everyone_ —not just the children, but also grandparents, servants, and local “paupers”—widows, orphans, or people with disabilities who were placed with the family as household help. (via JSTOR Daily) ## A perfectly-timed skateboard trick in Spain _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

(_**Note** : I am backcountry camping this week in the remote Canadian wilderness so this is a repeat of an earlier newsletter_) Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, died on July 20 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 93. Once called the “prettiest thing underwater,” Ms. Parry was among the first women to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, an achievement that led to a career in Hollywood, including doubling for Sophia Loren in the 1957 film “Boy on a Dolphin” and co-starring with Lloyd Bridges on the television show “Sea Hunt.”Above water, she participated in an LSD study conducted by Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who administered doses of the psychedelic drug to more than 900 subjects in Los Angeles, many of them actors. During her two dozen trips, Ms. Parry painted kaleidoscopic scenes of nature and water.(via NY Times) ## Pilots and flight attendants have a higher risk of cancer because they are bathed in radiation The pilots and flight attendants who help us travel through the sky might be taking on more danger than advertised. Research out today finds that people with these jobs have a noticeably greater risk of dying from certain cancers, likely due to higher exposure levels of cosmic radiation that originate from outer space. Scientists with Harvard Medical School and others compared death certificate data across hundreds of different occupations. Airline pilots and attendants were significantly more likely to die from cancers related to radiation exposure than other professions, they found, even compared to jobs where people have to intentionally spend time near radiation, like nuclear technologists. This research suggests much more should be done to safeguard these employees from the harmful effects of cosmic rays, particularly in the U.S., the authors say. Aircrew employees like pilots and flight attendants are already known to have the highest average exposure to ionizing radiation of any occupation in the U.S (via Gizmodo) ## This string of characters looks like a random password but you shouldn't use it The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has three simple recommendations for passwords: make your passwords long, make them random, and make them unique. So passwords like “password” or “letsgomets” or even “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” are bad ideas. You’ll want something like “x8Am30fuia0” or “ji32k7au4a83,” right? Wrong — at least, in the case of ji32k7au4a83. The phrase “my password” in Mandarin is “我的密碼,” which isn’t something English keyboards can easily type. If you’re in Taiwan, though, you’d not type those characters. You’d probably type out the phonetic equivalent using a different character set, called Bopomofo. On the most common keyboard, the characters would render as “ㄨㄛˇ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄇㄧˋ ㄇㄚˇ”. Boponmofo keyboards map to the standard keyboards we use in English-speaking nations, and “ㄨㄛˇ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄇㄧˋ ㄇㄚˇ” maps to “ji32k7au4a83.” Taiwanese people speaking Mandarin were typing “my password” when registering for online accounts. (via Now I Know) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A former car salesman has been formally recognized as a prince of Belgium Belgium’s Prince Laurent has formally recognized his adult son, born before his marriage to Princess Claire, as a member of the country’s royal family. The prince publicly acknowledged last year he was the father of Clément Vandenkerckhove, 26, a former car salesman, but officially established paternity before a civil registrar in February. Vandenkerckhove was reportedly also present and signed the documents. Last September, Prince Laurent, in a statement published in the Brussels Times, shut down more than two decades of speculation concerning the paternity of Vandenkerckhove. February’s formality made Vandenkerckhove a prince, though he is not expected to take on any royal duties and will not be in line to the throne because he was not born inside a marriage approved by the government. Vandenkerckhove is the child of Prince Laurent, whose last name is Saxe-Coburg, and Iris Vandenkerckhove, a Belgian model, singer and actress who goes by the stage name Wendy Van Wanten. (via Global News) ## They are 150 million years older than dinosaurs and have a tail like a rat and teeth like a rabbit Deep in the ocean is an ancient fish that glides along by flapping their wing-like pectoral fins instead of swishing their rattish tail. They look similar to a shark but with bigger eyes, a more protruding snout and only one visible gill opening. These are chimaeras, also known as ghost sharks, rat fish and rabbit fish. They diverged from sharks and rays around 400 million years ago but around 50 species can still be found in our seas today. Also known as ghost sharks, chimaeras are not true sharks but are very similar to sharks and rays and have a common ancestor – these cartilaginous fish split off from elasmobranchs around 400 million years ago. There are around 50 known species of chimaera but, because they tend to live in very deep waters, scientists still have lots to discover about them. They range anywhere from 60 centimetres to 2 metres in length depending on the species and usually weigh up to around 4kg. (via Discover Wildlife) ## The way he celebrates the victory at the end is worth waiting for _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

The Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a prominent politician in the Tuscany region of Italy in the 16th century, died under mysterious circumstances in 1587 – with the suddenness of his death giving rise to rumors that he'd been poisoned. According to historical documents, Francesco's brother and political rival, Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, was the prime suspect, especially as Francesco's wife, Bianca Cappello, also died within a day of her husband. In a new study published in _iScience_ , researchers from Yale University in the US and the University of Pisa in Italy have confirmed the real killer. The team analyzed genetic material extracted from the skeletal remains of Francesco de Medici to find two species of _Plasmodium_ parasites, single-celled organisms known as protozoans that cause malaria and are spread by mosquitoes. Malaria was widespread in central Italy for centuries, so the clues stack up. (via Science Alert) ## Researchers show that living in an area with mountain lions makes driving safer Hearing the roar of a mountain lion in the distance while you’re just outside your house might sound scary. Yet living in an area inhabited by these large predators might actually make you safer. Every year in the U.S., deer are involved in more than 1.5 million collisions with vehicles, resulting in the death of more than 200 people, tens of thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in damages. The team of scientists behind the new study, published on Wednesday in _Current Biology_ , wanted to see whether pumas could play a role in decreasing those numbers. The researchers analyzed data from 503 camera traps and 59 GPS collars tracking pumas’ presence in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula between 2020 and 2025. They also looked at data on the distribution and behavior of black-tailed deer and elk in the landscape and on collisions between vehicles and the animals. In those five years, the deer and elk were involved in more than 950 collisions with vehicles on the peninsula. (via Scientific American) ## What it's like to surf a wave in Alaska that goes on for six miles On a cold, windy, wet summer evening last month, Pete Beachy giggled as he peered into his binoculars and prepared to do something even he admitted can seem very, very stupid. “There she is,” he muttered. “That’s a wave.”Parked along the Seward Highway in Alaska, Mr. Beachy had spotted the first hint of foam curving around Bird Point, 30 miles southeast of Anchorage, and heading toward an inlet known as Turnagain Arm. The “wave” was a tidal bore, a twice-daily surge of water formed when the incoming high tide from the Pacific Ocean is forced into the narrow arm of Cook Inlet against the outgoing current. The resulting breaker can reach 10 feet in height, with speeds of 10 to 15 miles an hour — and surfers can ride it for miles if they’re tough enough to withstand the cold and skilled enough to stay upright.“One moment it’s still, and you’re looking up at the mountains and eagles and goats, and the next you feel like you have the entire ocean coming up behind you,” Mr. Beachy said. “It’s magical, man.” (via the NYT) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## She was the first woman to drive from coast to coast across the US in 1909 Alice Huyler Ramsey was an American who was the first woman to drive an automobile across the United States from coast to coast, a feat she completed on August 7, 1909. In 1908 her husband bought her a new Maxwell runabout. That summer she drove over 6,000 miles near their Hackensack home. In September 1908 she drove one of the three Maxwells which were entered in that year's American Automobile Association's Montauk Point endurance race, being one of only two women to participate. She won a bronze medal by getting a perfect score in the race. One of the other Maxwell drivers was Carl Kelsey, who did publicity for Maxwell-Briscoe. It was during this event that Kelsey proposed that she attempt a transcontinental journey, with Maxwell-Briscoe's backing. The company would supply a 1909 touring car for the journey and would also provide assistance and parts as needed. The drive was originally meant as a publicity stunt for Maxwell-Briscoe and would also prove to be part of Maxwell's ongoing strategy of specifically marketing to women. (via Wikipedia) ## This German island had a festival where men would smack women with cow horns Germany is known for its charming and sometimes outlandish Christmas traditions - many of which are simply part of the fun of the festive season. This year, however, one popular custom on the East Frisian island of Borkum sparked fury across the nation after it was reported on by ARD's political news show, Panorama, and SRTG_F. The Klaasohm festival, which has been practiced on the island for almost two centuries, was at the centre of the unfolding scandal. This wild street celebration happens on the eve before _Nikolaustag_ on December 6th, involving drinking, dancing and carnival-esque costumes. As part of the festivities, a small group of men dress up as the figure of "Klaasohm" by wearing large helmets covered in fur and feathers. Surrounded by male "helpers", the groups hurtles through the town, hunting down young women to catch and beating them on the bottom with cow horns. The tradition allegedly dates back to whaling times, when men would return after a long period at sea and try to re-assert their dominance in the community. (via The Local) ## A sea lion jumped on board this fishing vessel and climbed into a bunk _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a time of widespread segregation in American sport. In addition to reintegrating the US Open, Rhodes was part of a 1948 lawsuit against the PGA, which had restricted membership to white people. The PGA responded with a settlement and a promise to change, but according to the book, instead it shifted the status of tournaments from open to invitational, allowing the organization to tacitly continue segregation. Before the PGA reversed its stance, some courses welcomed Black players for PGA events, including Phoenix Country Club for the 1952 Phoenix Open, where the Black entrants included Rhodes and a crucial figure in his life: boxing great Joe Louis. It was golf that connected them – when not in the ring, the heavyweight champ liked to go out on the links, with Rhodes as his teacher. During and after his playing career, Rhodes helped spread interest in golf among Black people through his instruction. (via The Guardian) ## Some scientists believe we would be better off burying plastic garbage instead of recycling it Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever. What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin. The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false. It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases. (via Works In Progress) ## Pigeons don't seem to learn from rewards and punishment and scientists aren't sure why Strutting and fluttering around their urban homes, pigeons have adapted to an ever-shifting environment. Their surroundings aren’t the only things that are constantly changing: New research suggests the birds themselves avoid stability in their decision-making, instead choosing to live “at the edge of chaos.” When learning something new, people and animals alike tend to repeat behaviors that are rewarded. This principle, which was first proposed by Edward Thorndike in 1898, is so well established in psychology that it’s become known as the law of effect. To see how rewarded behaviors vary, the researchers gave pigeons a series of five colorful buttons to peck. They could peck any buttons in any order, but as long as they pecked five times, a treat would appear. The scientists expected the pigeons might eventually slip into a routine, but instead they continued pecking in a variety of patterns.The team theorizes that pigeons’ devotion to variability might be an evolutionary advantage that aids coping with new challenges in their environment—and they expect the birds aren’t the only ones resisting uniformity. (via Scientific American) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## An island suddenly appeared in a lake then disappeared and then reappeared 20 miles away thickly forested island appeared mysteriously on a western Canadian lake. Nearly 150 metres (500 feet) long and 75 metres (250 feet) wide, the land mass took local people and experts by surprise. It wasn’t on any maps or navigation charts. One boater approached and took a video of the island, capturing nearly 100 trees undulating in the chop of the lake. And then, within days, it disappeared. On Monday, the island made its second appearance – nearly 20 miles from its location earlier in August – in stunning aquatic displacement that has left residents wondering how an entire island can seem to simply vanish. The mystery has unfolded in the middle of Williston Lake, a long and narrow reservoir created after the W.A.C Bennett dam flooded the region in the early 1970s. At nearly 1,700 sq km (650 sqmiles) it is the largest body of freshwater in the westernmost province. Satellite imagery confirmed the island was in fact real, and floating in the main body of the reservoir, roughly 60 miles west of the dam. (via The Guardian) ## Vietnam became a coffee empire thanks to a partnership with East Germany The GDR always struggled to procure enough coffee for its population because it couldn’t grow its own and had to buy it on the world market. That not only cost money but was also fraught with difficulty. For the first two post-war decades, West Germany attempted to isolate East Germany with the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which amounted to a trade embargo. So that only left socialist countries to source coffee from, but the Soviet Union had decided to stop its coffee exports to the GDR in 1954. So the GDR regime had to buy it wherever it could and whatever the cost, spending around 150 million West German marks a year to do so. Then the coffee crisis of 1977 hit the world. Bad harvests in Brazil, combined with the oil crisis, created a perfect storm of global coffee shortages. Suddenly the GDR’s import costs more than quadrupled, and the situation was unsustainable. Given that the Vietnam War had ended and the last Americans left in 1975, leaving the country devastated but communist, there was an ideal opportunity here to grow real coffee in a “brother state”. Vietnam also desperately needed to rebuild and recover, and the GDR could help with that. A deal was struck in 1980. (via Zeitgeist) ## I guarantee you will never guess what they are arguing so passionately about _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories—which tend to be carefully indexed by date—intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing. Which is why the recently published case study of a 17-year-old girl dubbed TL is commanding attention. Like others with hyperthymesia, TL has an exceptionally intense and vivid memory for the events that have occurred over her short life. She can provide an especially rich amount of perceptual, spatial, and temporal information, and even recall events from multiple points of view. But unlike the others, she is able to organize these memories into a kind of “memory palace,” and can access them whenever she likes. (via Nautilus) ## They rented jet-skis for an hour and wound up fighting for their lives in the open ocean They had become, in an instant, two indiscernible specks stranded in a dark and boundless sea. The jet skis that had carried them past the breakwater had been swept away. The shore of Long Beach, Calif. — where their evening jaunt had begun — was no longer in sight. Now the longtime friends clung to life jackets while choking on fierce waves, their bodies dangling in the Pacific Ocean. It was Aug. 16, and the last rays of sun had faded. It was not clear if help was on the way. Mr. Carbullido was dazed. He had been thrown from his jet ski and landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. He appeared unable to comprehend the urgency of the situation. At 47, Ms. Dubray was a strong swimmer; it was not unusual for her to go into the ocean every day of the week, even to take her kayak out at night. But as she left Mr. Carbullido and set off for the glimmer in the distance, the water churned with an unfamiliar terror. Every few strokes, she shouted her friend’s name so he could hear her voice. She heard no response. (via the NYT) ## They studied the dietary benefits of cockroach milk and the aerodynamics of nose blowing How nutritious is cockroach milk? At last, this burning question is getting the recognition it so sorely deserves: the team answering it has received one of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes. The annual awards, which recognize the most absurd research science can offer, were handed out at a ceremony in Zurich. And yes, the winners in chemistry really did calorie count the milk proteins cockroaches make to nourish their young. (Their results, based on advanced x-ray crystallography, indicate cockroach milk is more than three times as energy-dense as ordinary dairy.) The insect enthusiasts were in good company: other winners included University of Oxford scientists who devised a proper definition of “kissing” in order to argue that human ancestors smooched Neanderthals, a team that taunted venomous snakes to study why they bite and researchers who confirmed what we all know: people who drive expensive cars tend to be jerks. (via Scientific American) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A psychologist found that too much meditation can actually trigger mental illness In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep.Britton, a meditation teacher, was so devoted to the practice that she saw herself as a “double agent,” someone who uses science to promote meditation. Although she had grown up in a nonpracticing Episcopalian home, she’d become deeply invested in Buddhist teachings. She read meditation books in her spare time and at one point considered becoming a Buddhist nun. When she reviewed the results, she was dismayed to find they were the opposite of what she had predicted. The participants in the meditation group slept more fitfully than those who didn’t meditate. Over time, she would find that meditation, promoted as a treatment for anxiety, addiction and other ailments, can sometimes cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. (via The Atlantic) ## Mark Twain wrote a story in 1898 that describes something like the internet "From The 'London Times' in 1904" is an 1898 Mark Twain short story set six years in the future, and it describes something very close to the internet. It opens as a murder mystery. Clayton, a hot-tempered army officer, is accused of killing Szczepanik, the inventor of a machine called the telelectroscope. In the story the device gets wired into the telephone systems of the whole world, and after that, Twain writes, the daily doings of the globe are "made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." Clayton, sentenced to hang, asks for a telelectroscope in his cell and gets one. He spends his nights calling up one city after another. "Give me Yedo," he says, then "Give me Hong-Kong," then "Give me Melbourne," and he watches people going about their work in the parts of the world where the sun is up. As Clayton is being marched to the gallows, the narrator spots the murder victim alive on the telelectroscope screen, standing in a crowd at a coronation in China. (via Boing Boing) ## How to tell the difference between different types of coffee _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman. They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there. It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth. (via The Atavist) ## He survived for five nights in the mountains by eating wildflowers and hiding in a cave A man who survived a grueling five nights in British Columbia's Coast Mountains is sharing more about his experience. Stanislav Volo became the subject of a massive search after he failed to return from a hike on Sunday after riding up the Sea-to-Sky Gondola, just south of Squamish. Search and rescue crews found him Friday evening on the Indian Arm Forest Service Road after he'd descended the mountain injured, but under his own power. In an interview with CBC News on Saturday after being discharged from the hospital, the 43-year-old father of two was in good spirits, despite bruises and a black eye. Volo had intended to hike the Mount Habrich Loop. He said his phone died when he got to the top of the mountain, and he was unable to find his way down. Volo said he spent several nights sheltering in a small cave near a waterfall, where he focused on recovering, trying to stay warm. He said he rationed a few packages of gummy bears before he discovered a sweet-tasting wildflower to eat. (via the CBC) ## After brain surgery this neuroscientist says he no longer felt fear or anxiety In summer 2024, I had an open craniotomy. Doctors cut open my skull and took out the part of my brain with the cancer - an astrocytoma2 about the size of my fist. Collateral damage included my right-side amygdala, the rightmost edge of my hippocampus, and a big chunk of my temporal cortex, including my right-side primary auditory cortex. I mention all of these difficulties because you might expect that, at some point during this process, I would be unhappy or afraid. I do not recall feeling this way. It wasn’t just that I was less depressed than expected under the circumstances. I was actually feeling glorious. I had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder several years earlier, and since then been continually on the maximum dose of the antidepressant mirtazapine. Now I no longer felt like it was necessary. Readers with neuroscience backgrounds have probably already put two and two together: my good mood started after surgeons removed my amygdala, a brain structure which plays a key role in fear. (via Astral Codex Ten) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## China invented moveable type hundreds of years before Gutenberg but didn't catch on In the end, however, Chinese movable type was undone as much by economics as by anything else. As Wang Zhen had found to his cost, a font representing a usable fraction of the 50,000 or so Chinese characters could run to tens of thousands of types. (Others told of vast fonts of 200,000 types or more.) Wooden type had to be cut character by character, and there is no evidence that Chinese printers ever tried to expedite the process by casting type from metal or other malleable substances. Moreover, the mechanics of movable type weighed against it: printers found that it was often faster to cut entire pages in wood, as had been done since time immemorial, than it was to set, print from, and distribute movable type on a page-by-page basis. China’s printers were hamstrung by the writing they sought to reproduce. And so, though he had not invented movable type, if Gutenberg is to be credited with anything it must be that he made it _work_ —that aided by the comparatively economical Latin alphabet he systematically tackled each aspect of a finicky, delicate process until he had perfected it. (via I Love Typography) ## There's a new theory on how a six-tonne rock in Stonehenge was brought to the site Built from stones weighing between 2 and 25 tonnes, the structure of Stonehenge demonstrates a scale of construction hard to imagine before the invention of the wheel. The mystery deepens when you consider that the stones are not from the local bedrock. So why these stones, and how did they get there? Recent work I carried out with geochemist Anthony Clarke from the University of Curtin, Australia, might have an answer to these two questions for the most far travelled stone of Stonehenge – the Altar Stone. The Altar Stone was sourced from 700km away in north east Scotland, from a region of bedrock geology known as the Orcadian Basin. Now, new work by our international team has looked to test the possibility it was transported by glaciers. It is the largest and heaviest of the so-called bluestones (Stonehenge’s travelled rocks), weighing 6 tonnes and measuring 4 metres long. The bluestones were the first stones of Stonehenge predating the larger stones which form the arches by 2,000 years. (via The Conversation) ## She created a website that deconstructs the human body into two thousand 3D pieces _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me — like, well, friends. What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher at the University of Sydney. He believes crows relate to people in ways that meet several conditions for friendship. Criterion one: You must know a friend from a stranger. “In order to strike up a friendship, you have to be the kinds of organisms who can firstly recognize one another as individuals,” he says. Here, the avians have an advantage. While people struggle to tell crows apart, crows are startlingly good at identifying us. In experiments, urban crows held long grudges against people who mistreated them, cawing harshly and forming mobs upon seeing the face of their persecutor—even years later. My sister’s crow companions knew her when she had a different haircut or wore a hat or sunglasses. (via Audobon) ## A food scientist says he would love to taste the rotting fish sauce from an abandoned factory Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary's, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn't permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary's have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove — some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. I spoke with food scientist Bryan Quoc Le earlier this week. Given his background in chemistry and Vietnamese cuisine, he was the ideal expert to unpack this horrifying and possibly delicious situation. (via Defector) ## The real mummy's curse is the health risks of trading in mummified remains The rise of the internet, especially social media, has amplified international trafficking and driven demand for unique cultural heritage, including mummified humans and animals. However, these preserved remains pose health and biosecurity risks due to the toxicity of embalming methods and/or suboptimal storage that can promote microbial growth. This article investigates these risks by analyzing 128 online posts from Meta platforms, e-commerce sites, webstores, and auction houses. We reveal that mummified remains sold online exhibit signs of biodeterioration, yet sellers provide no safety guidance, suggesting limited awareness or deliberate disregard of hazards. Throughout history a range of toxic materials and substances have been employed to preserve tissues, including heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and lead, as well as organic compounds with antimicrobial properties and pigmentation qualities. (via Cambridge.org) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Wrestler Mr. Perfect once saved MLB legend Wade Boggs' life while they were deer hunting Former MLB third baseman Wade Boggs was a long-time friend of the late WWE Hall of Famer Curt Hennig, AKA Mr. Perfect. He recently confirmed a story about how Hennig saved his life while they were deer hunting. A Twitter/X user tagged Wade Boggs in a post asking the MLB legend to confirm the story's authenticity. It stated that Boggs and Curt Hennig went deer hunting in Iowa back in the day. When the MLB legend got tangled in some barbed wire. Boggs was split open from his knee to ankle and was losing a lot of blood, and Curt Hennig reportedly got him out, picked him up, and carried him on his shoulder for about three miles to the pickup truck and got him to the hospital. The story also claimed that Boggs had called Hennig his guardian angel after he saved his life. Responding to the tweet, Wade Boggs confirmed the story was true by simply posting a thumbs-up and folded hands emojis. (via Yahoo) ## Nebraska awards people the title of Navy Admiral despite being miles from any ocean Nebraska Admiral (formally, Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska) is the state of Nebraska's highest civic honor, and an honorary title bestowed upon individuals by approval of the Governor of Nebraska. It is not a military rank, requires no specific duties, and carries with it no pay or any other compensation. Admirals have the option of joining the Nebraska Admirals Association, a non-profit organization that promotes "The Good Life" of Nebraska. The award certificate describes the honor in a deliberately tongue-in-cheek fashion: "And I [the Governor of Nebraska] do strictly charge and require all officers, seamen, tadpoles and goldfish under your command to be obedient to your orders as Admiral—and you are to observe and follow, from time to time, such directions you shall receive, according to the rules and discipline of the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska. The use of the title of admiral, instead of some other high-ranking military title, is a humorous reference to the fact that Nebraska has no navy and is the only triple land-locked state. (via Wikipedia) ## Guest saves an alligator handler who gets pulled into the tank by a gator _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Ask most people who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and you'll get one name: Paul Tibbets. He's the one who named the Enola Gay after his mother, the one who spent decades insisting he never lost a night's sleep over Hiroshima, the one whose life has been written up in a bestselling autobiography and a dozen documentaries. Sitting next to him that morning was a co-pilot named Robert Lewis, a man who was actually supposed to be flying that plane as its commander, and whose reaction to what he'd just witnessed is one of the most quoted lines to come out of the entire mission. Almost nobody knows the rest of his story. Lewis wasn't originally supposed to be the co-pilot of anything. He was the regular aircraft commander of the Superfortress 44-86292, the B-29 that would become the Enola Gay, and had flown it on its first six missions with his own hand-picked crew. (via Utterly Interesting) ## Proof that Australian convict pirates hijacked a ship and sailed to Japan in 1830 An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago. Fresh translations of samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of its feudal isolation. The brig Cyprus was hijacked by convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour in 1829, in a mutiny that took them all the way to China. Its maverick skipper was William Swallow, a onetime British cargo ship apprentice in the Napoleonic wars, who in a piracy trial in London the following year told of a samurai cannonball in Japan knocking a telescope from his hand. (via The Guardian) ## Scientists don’t actually know how long fungi can live and the reasons are kind of weird Fungi are everywhere and anywhere, seemingly at any given time. For scientists, studying fungi has led to key insights in medicine, paleontology, astrobiology, and more. But they still aren’t sure how to do this seemingly simple thing: find out how old they are. Researchers investigated this long-overlooked biological mystery in an opinion paper published today in Trends in Microbiology. The team examined the biological and logistical reasons behind why it’s so difficult to gauge fungal age. To put the issue in context, we “don’t really know if 10 years or 500 years is ‘old’ for a fungus or how much it differs between fungal species and lifestyles,” Kristin Aleklett, the study’s senior author and a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, said in a statement. “There is this large kingdom of organisms living alongside us that we still know so little about.” (via Gizmodo) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A millenarian cult emerged in British Guiana in the 1800s and committed mass suicide Bekeranta was a millenarian indigenous community in British Guiana in the mid-19th century, led by Awakaipu, an Arekuna man. In the mid-1840s, at Awakaipu's direction, members of the community committed a mass murder–suicide at the base of Kukenán-tepui. Awakaipu preached that the members of his community would become white in both appearance and power if they followed his leadership. However, after leading the community for some time, Awakaipu eventually grew paranoid and believed others were plotting against him. He then declared that the way for his followers to become white was for them to kill each other; Awakaipu claimed that following their deaths, the spirits of the dead would rise up to the peak of Mount Roraima and reincarnate with white skin. Roughly 400 people died, including men, women and children. After the dead failed to resurrect, a party of survivors clubbed Awakaipu to death. (via Wikipedia) ## Researchers say homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages It has long been known that birds rely, at least in part, on magnetoreception to orient their movements. The mechanisms underlying this reception appear to be numerous and are still being discovered. Physiological connections have been found in the head, including the beak, eyes, and brain, but Lisowski _et al_. have now identified the presence of superparamagnetic macrophages in the liver (see the Perspective by Spiro and Drakesmith). On cloudy days when they could not see the sun, pigeons whose magnetic macrophages had been depleted were unable to navigate home. Orientation was unimpaired in birds without macrophages when the sun was visible, suggesting that this was their primary cue. We propose that in homing pigeons, superparamagnetic macrophages in the liver are required for finding magnetic direction. (via Science.org) ## Rick Springfield who just turned 77 stuns the crowd by playing shirtless _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

At the Elmcroft of Lebanon, Tennessee, the staff of the memory-care unit knew the code to the keypad that controlled the exit door. Residents weren’t supposed to be able to leave unattended. That’s how the system worked: the keypad stood between those in the facility’s care and the risks outside of it. But on March 2, 2020, the system broke down—because one resident realized the keypad was giving the code away. That afternoon, a husband and wife living in the memory-care unit left the facility. While the man and woman were gone about 30 minutes before a stranger picked them up two blocks away and returned them to the facility, uninjured, the real question came afterward: how did they manage to get through the locked exit in the first place? Local reporters say the man told staff that he had previously worked with Morse code in the military and learned the door’s numeric exit code by listening as staff punched it on the keypad. From those sounds, he figured out the code well enough to use it himself. (via Popular Mechanics) ## How orchids helped inspire the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin In Darwin’s woods I was moved that I was feeling pleasure from something he initiated but never got to see. And in his woods are some plants he would be fascinated by. Here and there in the deep shade under the beeches is a species of orchid called violet helleborine. The orchids time their flowering for when fruits have fallen to the ground and wasps are patrolling for food. Bees avoid the gloom of the understory, but wasps don’t mind it, and are attracted to the helleborines by the promise of an intoxicating nectar (itself made by a symbiosis with fungi). When they drink it, becoming dusted with pollen as they do so, the wasps seem to get drunk. They give up on personal hygiene; they let themselves go. This means they don’t groom themselves with anything like the care they normally would, and pollen remains stuck to them. They stagger to the next flower, like a pub crawl with bonus pollination events. If you examine the orchid flowers, you’ll find a sort of shield stopping the pollen falling from the male parts of the flower onto the female parts, preventing self-pollination. (via LitHub) ## A jar of mustard that was spicier than usual led to an international Dijon mystery The strange thing about that night was no one liked my mustard chicken. I was frustrated, because mustard chicken is usually a hit in our house. The mustard did come from a new jar, but it was the same brand I buy every time, Maille Dijon Originale. For weeks afterward a question gnawed at me: Why is this mustard so spicy? I packed the jar in a cooler and went to see Elspeth Copeland, a professional taste tester in Toronto. Copeland sent me to talk to Demet Güzey, who worked for seven years at Unilever, the global consumer products giant that owns Maille. I described my situation and she was skeptical that Maille would make such a spicy jar by mistake. I wound up talking with Marc Désarménien, the head of one of the last mustard dynasties in France. My favourite fact about the city of Dijon: it is home to La Confrérie de la Moutarde de Dijon, or the Dijon Mustard Brotherhood. They wear medieval-style, yellow waistcoats and capes, and hold conferences and debates to defend and promote mustard. (via The Star) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Australian dolphins have been filmed using conch shells to catch fish Fifteen years ago, a note in the journal _Marine Mammal Science_ commented on an odd behavior of dolphins in Western Australia. These Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins were seen lifting big conch shells from the water by sticking their noses into the openings. The purpose of this “shelling” was revealed when dolphins shook the shell to drain water out of it and eat a fish that had been trapped inside. Since then, multiple bouts of shelling have been observed in dolphins in these waters. Now, a new study in _Marine Mammal Science_ reports shelling in another dolphin population, this time in Eastern Australia. It’s based on footage of two instances of shelling captured by the researchers, along with reports from a dolphin tour company. Handling the conch shell requires specialized skills that must be somehow taught and learned by dolphins. They’ve got to find the shell, get a fish to go inside it (if a fish isn’t in there already), and manipulate the shell to keep the fish inside as they bring it to the surface. (via Nautilus) ## Quaker shopkeepers came up with the idea of price tags because haggling was immoral If you’re shopping for goods in the Western world, you expect to see a price tag on most things, whether it’s a secondhand toaster at a garage sale or a can of beans at the supermarket. But clearly advertised prices are a relatively recent phenomenon, originating in the 1870s. Before then, haggling was the norm, with the major exception being stores run by Quakers, who believed charging different prices for different customers was morally wrong. Philadelphia businessman John Wanamaker is widely credited with pioneering the price tag. He was a deeply religious man and, while he himself was Presbyterian, he agreed with the Quakers that transparent, clear, consistent pricing was a moral imperative. So when he created a clothing store called the Grand Depot in a converted railroad station, he clearly labeled the cost of each item on tags and in product guides. The business later became Wanamaker’s department store. The grand opening was just before the 1876 world’s fair in Philadelphia. (via History Facts) ## Clip of tennis champ catches her opponent in the background smashing her racket to pieces _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

For years, Arthur Kermalvezen, the child of a sperm donor, saw possible fathers everywhere he went. "I imagined it might be my teacher, the people I saw on the bus... and I was very angry because it's impossible to live like this." When, as an adult, he fell in love with Audrey, another sperm donor baby from Paris, the question became even more pressing. Audrey describes the moment they met at a gathering for donor conceived activists in 2010 as "love at first sight" - but was this connection a romantic or genetic attraction? When they were born, there were only two sperm banks in Paris and many men had made multiple donations - so there was a real possibility they could be half-siblings. Before building a life together, Arthur and Audrey needed to know whether they were related. But in France, laws governing genetic testing and donor anonymity made finding the answer extremely difficult. In France, only a research scientist, doctor or judge can order and supervise a genetic test, and people can be fined more than €3,500 ($4,288; £3,191) for possessing a home testing kit. (via the BBC) ## He was America's greatest industrial designer but hardly anyone knows his name Outside of the field of product and transportation design, too few people know who Raymond Loewy was. The best-known industrial designer, founder of the industrial design profession, and member of the pantheon of our greatest designers, it is time for wider recognition of this amazing man. Coming to the United States from France in 1919 at the age of 25 with $40 in his pocket, Loewy brought with him a love of trains, cars, and good design, but he soon also developed a love of America. Called “the frog” and “a refrigerator designer” by leaders of the auto industry, he created some of the most visionary automobiles in American history. He trained and developed dozens of other top designers. Today we see his work every time we see Air Force One, the Shell Oil or Exxon logos, or the Greyhound dog on a bus. Over his 60-year career, he reshaped the world as we know it. (via Profectus) ## This Greek island used to be a military prison but now it hosts a rare seal colony We've journeyed just half an hour from Syros, the administrative heart of the Cycladic islands, southeast of mainland Greece. Sail in any direction and you'll find quintessentially Greek islands like Mykonos or Andros – whitewashed houses scattered on hillsides like sugar cubes tipped from a bowl, ferries arriving on schedule, tavernas open. Gyaros never got that memo. It offers only scree and scrub, appearing empty, lifeless even. But it is not. The reason is rooted in a particularly dark and violent period of Greece's history. An authoritarian regime followed by military training left this island untouched by development, a forgotten relic of a turbulent past. Then, in 2004, an unexpected photograph focussed attention on this apparently desolate place once more, but for very different reasons. Devil Island, it turned out, had become a wildlife haven, offering a sanctuary for a rare seal. (via the BBC) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legal medical-grade opium The Tasmanian opium industry was established in Tasmania in 1966. Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legal narcotic opium, producing more than 50% of the world's supply. Opium produced in Tasmania generally gets produced into opiate medications such as morphine, codeine and oxycodone. _Extractas Bioscience_ (formerly known as _Tasmanian Alkaloids_) is Tasmania's largest corporate grower of opium poppies. The father of Jeremy Rockliff, the current Premier of Tasmania worked for Extractas during his life as a poppy producer. A downy mildew outbreak in the 2014 poppy-growing season led to one Tasmanian company to look into growing poppies in the Northern Territory and Victoria of Australia. Following the outbreak, the Northern Territory Government passed legislation allowing for the supervised production of opium plants for legal wholesale to produce narcotic medications. Demand for Tasmanian poppy products fell sharply in 2015 following changes in prescription policies in the United States. (via Wikipedia) ## Scientists dropped gophers into a volcano forty years ago and they saved an ecosystem It would probably be pretty alarming to learn that, in the early 1980s, scientists decided to drop off a bunch of gophers at the site of a volcanic eruption. But don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact, according to a report from the University of California, this particular gopher-volcano encounter proved to be such a net positive that its effects are still being felt 43 years later. It starts with the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May of 1980. It was the most destructive volcanic event in American history, claiming 57 lives and causing staggering ecological damage. Faced with a devastation that would take the local environment a substantial amount of time to recover from, scientists were open to unorthodox ideas that might speed the process along. Specifically, as laid out in the University of California’s report, the thinking was “by digging up beneficial bacteria and fungi, gophers might be able to help regenerate lost plant and animal life on the mountain.” So, in May 1983, three years after the devastating Mount St. Helens eruption, that’s exactly what scientists did. (via Popular Mechanics) ## Sneaking into New York's abandoned City Hall subway station _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

In July 1933, former Army General Smedley Butler was visited by a pair of gentlemen who had come to urge him to run for the office of National Commander of the American Legion, an influential organization of veterans. Though Butler declined the invitation, one of the men⁠— Gerald MacGuire⁠— made several subsequent visits during which he disclosed additional details. He claimed to represent _The Committee for a Sound Dollar_ , whose primary purpose was to pressure the president to reinstate the gold standard. He implied that his organization had the support of several political leaders, and the financial backing of some of the country’s most affluent individuals and successful corporations. The credibility of MacGuire’s claims was reinforced when he produced evidence of considerable cash resources and made some eerily accurate predictions regarding personnel changes in the White House. He also described the still-secret _American Liberty League_ , a high-profile group whose principal players were wealthy Americans, including the leaders of DuPont, JP Morgan, US Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Colgate, Heinz Foods and Chase National Bank. (via Damn Interesting) ## The Mayo Clinic apologizes because its founder dug up the corpse of an indigenous man For 156 years, the Santee Dakota people have waited for what happened in a casino conference room in Santee, Neb., a few weeks ago. The Mayo Clinic apologized for the desecration of Marpiya Okinajin, known as “Cut Nose,” who was hanged in 1862 in Mankato, Minn., one of 38 Native Americans executed under orders from President Abraham Lincoln in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The Santee tribe was forced from Minnesota. Cut Nose was buried in a shallow grave. But a doctor dug up the body, “carted the corpse to his office, dissected it, melted off the flesh and made a skeleton he studied and allowed his children to play with,” columnist Matthew Hansen writes at the Omaha World Herald. The doctor was William Mayo, founder of the Mayo Clinic, where Cut Nose’s skull remained on display until it was returned in 1998. Mayo had a practice in Le Sueur, Minn. Earlier this year, officials of the Mayo Clinic contacted a descendant who is also a Mayo employee, and asked if it would be OK to establish a scholarship that would allow one Native American student a year to go to medical school free. (via NewsCut) ## A coal fire has been burning underneath a mountain in Australia for 6,000 years Burning Mountain, the common name for Mount Wingen, is a hill near Wingen, New South Wales, Australia, approximately 224 km north of Sydney just off the New England Highway. It takes its name from a smouldering coal seam running underground through the sandstone. Burning Mountain is contained within the Burning Mountain Nature Reserve, which is administered by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. The underground fire is estimated to be at a depth of around 30 m (100 ft). It is estimated that the fire has burned for approximately 6,000 years and is the oldest known coal fire. European explorers and settlers to the area believed the smoke, coming from the ground, was volcanic in origin. It was not until 1829 that geologist Reverend C. P. N. Wilton identified it as a coal seam fire. The fire is generally moving in a southerly direction at a rate of about 1 m (3 ft) per year. The combustion has caused soil discolouration and an uneven ground surface in the area. (via Wikipedia) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## An otter has been seen swimming in the Bronx River for the first time in a century An otter has been spotted in the Bronx River for the first time in more than 100 years, in a further sign that New York’s previously befouled waterways are recovering some of their ecological health. The North American river otter was photographed by a motion-activated camera foraging near some vegetation in the Bronx River, a waterway that flows through New York’s Bronx and empties into the East River. The image, captured in June by the camera of RJ Hawkins, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx zoo, is the first documented sighting of a river otter in the river since the early 1900s, according to the society. River otters are found across North America and were once plentiful in New York’s rivers but vanished due to rampant water pollution, habitat loss and trapping for their fur. The Bronx River, in particular, was treated as an open sewer and a dumping ground for New York’s rapidly expanding industrial base as the city grew into an economic powerhouse in the 19th and 20th centuries. (via The Guardian) ## This 22-year-old engineer 3D prints dentures for low-income Americans At just 22, Connor Gibson is doing something he never dreamed possible: using his engineering skills to 3D print dentures for America’s most vulnerable people — and giving them back their sense of dignity in the process. Gibson is the dental technology manager at Remote Area Medical, also known as RAM, a large nonprofit organization based out of Rockford, Tennessee, that provides free dental, vision and medical care through volunteer-powered mobile clinics across the United States. He first began as a volunteer at the nonprofit while attending a local community college. He was instantly inspired by the organization’s mission to help the nation’s poor and was determined to figure out a way to improve the speed at which dentures could be delivered. The problem? He knew nothing about dentistry or 3D printing. Gibson has since outfitted thousands of Americans with free dentures. He’s seen burly men with tattoos weep when they first look into a mirror to see their new smile. The reaction never gets old. (via CNN) ## Watch this 16-year-old from Thailand absolutely shred the Cranberries song Zombie _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

The organism in question is a protozoan, meaning a single-celled animal, and it’s called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s one of the most successful parasites on the planet. Depending on which country’s serology data you look at, somewhere between eleven per cent of Americans, thirty per cent of the world’s population, and above eighty per cent of the historic French are estimated to be carrying it right now. Most of them have no idea. Most of them never will. In immunocompetent adults, latent Toxoplasma infection produces no measurable symptoms for the rest of the person’s life. But it does something almost nobody knows about, which is that it settles into the brain and stays there, forming small cysts of dormant parasite cells inside the neurons and glia of its human hosts, and quietly doing whatever it’s doing to the tissue around them. What that is, in rodents, has been extensively documented. What it might be, in humans, is one of the more interesting open questions in modern neurobiology. (via Space Daily) ## "Mad honey" made in Nepal will stop your heart if you eat too much of it A few months ago, a friend of mine told me that his father-in-law had been rushed to the hospital after eating some wild honey brought back from the hills of Nepal. Within about 30 minutes, his heart rate had dropped dangerously low and his blood pressure had collapsed. He recovered, but the episode was terrifying for the whole family. As a chemical ecologist from Nepal, I knew immediately what had happened. My friend’s father-in-law had eaten wild honey, known locally as “bhir mauri ko maha,” from the Himalayan cliff bee. These bees forage on rhododendron flowers that carry a natural toxin called grayanotoxin. As bees collect the nectar, the toxin ends up concentrated in the honey. This is what’s now popularized worldwide as “mad honey.” Eat a teaspoonful and you might feel pleasantly warm and slightly light-headed. Eat more than a few tablespoons and your heart rate can drop to life-threatening levels. The Gurung people of Nepal have built up knowledge of safe doses over generations. (via The Conversation) ## For 16 years he lived alone on a tiny Pacific island with just his cats Tom Neale was dumped by boat on a tiny atoll in the Pacific, where he lived alone for 16 years. Neale, a New Zealander, rode out violent storms in a rickety shack, ate a diet heavy on fish and coconuts, and wore nothing but a loincloth. But Neale did not land on the atoll by accident or during a terrible storm. Formerly a shopkeeper, Neale became fixated on the tiny Cook Island atoll of Suwarrow in 1943, when author and traveler Robert Frisbie spoke of it to him after visiting. To prepare for his stay, which he envisioned would last for years, Neale stockpiled supplies. On the nearby island of Rarotonga, he perplexed store owners by buying their entire inventories of flour, sugar, kerosene, and coffee beans. Neale politely refused the advances of several women who asked to accompany him, suspecting it would not be long before he came to resent their company. He did, however, choose two nonhuman companions: a cat named Mrs. Thievery (named for her favorite hobby), and her kitten, Mr. Tom-Tom. (via Slate) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Famous explorer Ernest Shackleton's secret weapons were cocaine and caffeine In 1907 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton led his first of three expeditions to the Antarctic. The aim of the trip was to be the first expedition team to reach the South Pole. Shackleton and his team would eventually be forced to turn back just 97.5 nautical miles short of their target, but the mission was still widely considered a success. Shackleton’s medical kit for the _Nimrod_ expedition was made by Burroughs & Wellcome Co. of London - and contained a variety of quirky treatments. The kit included a glass thermometer, bandages, plasters, safety pins, a tube of Hazeline cream and sewing needles, held together in a leather wallet. There were also sixteen tubes of medicine. Perhaps most intriguing were the Forced March tablets, which were were made from a combination of cocaine and caffeine. The idea was to provide a boost to anyone drastically in need of some energy. If taken once an hour 'when undergoing continued mental strain or physical exertion', it promised to prolong powers of endurance and curb appetites.” (via Much Better Adventures) ## The US government's most important color is Federal Standard 595 Color No. 33446 The color that has come to signify America in today’s combat theaters isn’t the red, the white, or the blue picked by Betsy Ross, but an ignoble sandy hue commonly referred to as desert tan and officially identified as Federal Standard 595 Color No. 33446. The color came of age in December of 1990, when, according to military lore, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, then stationed in Saudi Arabia as commander-in-chief of the US Central Command, got a new pair of shoes: prototype combat boots, size 11.5R, which he unboxed, examined, and hurled at the soldier who delivered them. Photographs of the conflict—ones taken between August 1990 and January 1991—show transport vehicles, trucks, tanks, tents, and soldiers covered in Vietnam-era olive drab and a three-color woodland camouflage that sticks out from the desert like a pickle on hummus. Schwarzkopf wasn’t having it. Shortly after throwing that pair of shoes, he ordered stateside manufacturers to develop all-cotton desert camouflage combat uniforms and paint all vehicles bound for the Persian Gulf desert tan. (via The Morning News) ## A male gorilla refuses to stop trying to get his mate to forgive him _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

“I don’t think it belongs here.” Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The “here” Vinson referred to was a nook just outside the telephone equipment room in the employees-only portion of the second floor of the hotel. The “it” was a curious piece of equipment of unknown origin loitering conspicuously in the cramped side room. It was a metallic gray box about the size of a desk, with a smaller box attached on top near the rear right corner. The front face of the smaller box was an incomprehensible control panel occupied by 28 metal toggle switches in five neat rows, each labeled with a numbered sticker. All of these switches were situated in the down position except for #23, which was toggled up⁠⁠—an oddly ominous asymmetry. Whoever had left the machine had taken the time to place each corner on blocks of wood, and these blocks pressed deep dimples into the red-orange carpet, suggesting that the equipment had significant mass. In spite of its resemblance to some kind of manufactured electromechanical office machine, it had no power cord, and no obvious power switch, just the 28 enigmatic toggles. (via Damn Interesting) ## An Icelandic TV station aired an episode of the Teletubbies but with audio from The Sopranos In 2012, Icelandic television viewers were in for a major surprise when a showing of Teletubbies featured an NSFW subtitle-dubbing from HBO’s _The Sopranos_. _Eh-Oh!_ The shows couldn’t be more opposite. For one, _Teletubbies_ is geared towards children; therefore, Laa-Laa, Po, Dipsy, and Tinky-Winky speak in a language only toddlers could understand. _The Sopranos_ , on the other hand, is a crime drama following members of the mob in New Jersey, often featuring language of a different sort. While it was definitely a major error on the station’s part, funnily enough, the stark contrast really works? The dubbing over the _Teletubbies_ episode was from Season 4, Episode 10 of _The Sopranos_ , “The Strong Silent Type”. Unlike the Teletubbies fighting over the last slice of Tubby Toast, the family is holding an intervention for Christopher. They’ve become increasingly fed up with his drug use. Adriana brings up the fact that he recently killed their dog, Cosette, by sitting on it while he was high. (via Vice) ## Feuding Korean clans have agreed to end a 400-year war over burial plots After nearly 400 years, a few killings and scorned pleas from a king, two powerful clans have settled one of the longest-standing feuds in Korean history, over ancestral burial grounds.The clash between the Yoon family and the Shim family started in 1614 when the two began burying their ancestors in large burial mounds next to each other, with both claiming rights to the land. It will finally be sorted out in March 2008 under a settlement deal reached a few days ago. The Yoon family will give about 8,300 square meters (89,340 sq ft) of land to the Shim family, which will use it as a new burial ground for 19 of its ancient clan members. The settlement deal from the two sides, who increased their power in ancient times by having their daughters marry into the royal family, was aided by a married couple made up of a member of the Shim clan and a member of the Yoon clan, the local daily Hankyoreh reported. Ancestor worship has played a significant role in Korean culture for centuries and families search for sites harmonious with nature in the belief it will lead to benefits for their family for generations. (via Reuters) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Chinese doctors claim they can reverse Alzheimer's symptoms with one simple surgery The video opens with a man in his 80s slumped in a hospital bed, his face hollow as he scrunches his eyes. A jump cut advances the scene three days: the man is alert now, words gathering as he identifies his son. Six months later, he is pictured sitting upright, engaged in conversation. His gaze is animated. At eight months, the man walks briskly down a hospital corridor. The footage records the recovery of a man who, in September 2020, became the first person in the world to undergo a surgery known as deep cervical lymphatic-venous anastomosis. The procedure involves connecting tiny lymphatic vessels in the neck — part of the drainage system that carries waste away from the brain — to nearby veins, creating a route that, in theory, allows fluid and waste proteins to flow more easily into the bloodstream. At the time, it drew little notice. But that changed the following year, when Wei Chen, a microsurgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, began showing the footage at surgical meetings around the world. (via Nature) ## A Volvo engineer invented the seatbelt and the company gave the rights way for free In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin developed the modern three-point belt, and on August 13 of that year, the company sold the first car fitted with one, a PV 544, to a customer in Sweden. The invention is credited with saving more than one million lives, and Volvo later opened the patent to every competitor, rather than charging for it. Patents normally protect an invention: we made this, so you get to pay us. Volvo, with a particular Swedish sense of civic good, saw the bigger picture. Its value got bigger and bigger as it spread, and every competitor that adopted the design made the invention more successful (and the automotive world much safer). Bohlin had previously worked on ejector seats as part of Saab’s aviation division. His job was to get a body out of a speeding plane as fast as possible. When he arrived at Volvo in 1958 as the company’s first dedicated safety engineer, that job inverted: keep the body in the car at all costs. (via Why Is This Interesting) ## After work in Bern some locals choose to float all the way home _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

On January 23, 1973, the 5,000 residents of the tiny Icelandic island of Heimaey — located just four miles off Iceland’s southern coast — woke up to the Earth splitting open. In the dead of night, a mile-long volcanic fissure ripped through the ground just a half-mile from the town of Vestmannaeyjar, marking the birth of a new volcano named Eldfell. Fountains of molten basaltic lava shot hundreds of feet into the sky, raining ash and glowing, golf-ball-sized rocks onto rooftops. Within hours, a makeshift fleet of local fishing boats evacuated almost the entire population to the mainland. The people were safe, but their town faced an existential threat. The threat went far beyond a local crisis. Not only were the townspeople of Vestmannaeyjar completely reliant on the harbor, but all of Iceland depended on this tiny island’s fishing industry for a massive chunk of its exports. If the advancing lava choked off that narrow bay, it would deal a devastating blow to the entire nation’s economy. (via Popular Science) ## MIT requires that every graduating student must know how to swim. But why? The legend on MIT’s campus goes that students once had to leap into the Charles River and swim across its dirty water __ without stopping to graduate. That was never true. But the institution does require all students to prove their swimming ability — in the heated indoor pool. Students can either take swim lessons or complete a 100-yard test. Swim tests used to be common at American colleges, but MIT now finds itself increasingly in the minority. It’s one of the few schools that’s clinging to the test, arguing that swimming is an important life skill. Since the requirement suddenly rose in popularity around World War II, many schools have dropped it due to equity or practical concerns. The tradition dates back more than a century. Cornell claims credit as the first college to mandate swimming in 1905. MIT began its practice during World War II. Poor recordkeeping makes it hard to know the true origins of why schools implemented this standard, but many schools cite drowning rates among service members. (via WGBH) ## Builders renovating a house in Belgium found 9 million Euros worth of gold bars and coins Builders renovating a house in Belgium have discovered a stash of gold reportedly worth €9m (£7.6m) sealed into the walls of its cellar. The construction workers stumbled across the hidden trove of gold bars and coins while drilling to lay new sewage pipes in the property in east Flanders earlier this week, local media report. The discovery has sparked interest in who might get to keep the hoard - with both the builders and the local charity that owns the site having a chance of claiming it. After launching an investigation, police warned people against attending the site to search for more treasure, saying the house was "turned upside down" and all the gold had been moved to a secure location. The builders - including an 18-year-old working a summer job - unearthed the stash while working on the building's foundations. Soon after, they alerted police to the discovery and explained that keeping it for themselves was not an option. (via the BBC) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## No one is sure where the dollar sign came from The dollar sign (also known as the peso sign) is a currency symbol consisting of a capital S crossed with one or two vertical strokes. The symbol appears in business correspondence in the 1770s from the West Indies referring to the Spanish American peso, also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in British America. The Spanish coins provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792. It is still uncertain, however, how the dollar sign came to represent the Spanish American peso. There are currently several competing hypotheses: The most widely accepted theory holds that the dollar sign developed out of an abbreviation for the Spanish and Spanish-American ps for pesos. Another hypothesis derives the sign from a depiction of the Pillars of Hercules, a classical symbol for two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, with a ribbon wrapped in the form of an 'S'. Another hypothesis notes that the English word "dollar" for the Spanish piece of eight originally came from _Joachimsthaler_ or _thaler_ , a similar large German silver coin that was widely used in Europe. (via Wikipedia) ## In Torajan culture families keep the dead with them in some cases for years When a person dies, relatives mourn the passing by treating the body as a living entity. They believe that by keeping the deceased in their homes, they are not really dead, but are instead considered “sick”, and should be cared for as such. Depending on social status, the body is cleaned, clothed and fed over the course of weeks, months or even years. The Torajan funeral called ‘Rambu Solo’ is an extremely expensive event and families can spend tens of thousands, keeping the body at home until they can save enough to properly conduct the funeral rites. While this practice may seem strange or disturbing to many cultures, the Torajan have no fear of the dead, and their love for the person outweighs any concerns or feelings of discomfort about seeing death and decomposition. Meals, activities, prayers, and all other aspects of daily home life are spent with the deceased person’s body. Once a funeral date has been decided, the family will purchase a water buffalo to use as a sacrifice. They believe that buffaloes are the ‘vehicle’ in which the dead rides to the afterlife at Puya, the land of the spirits. (via Heritage Daily) ## He couldn't attend his aunt's funeral so he laid food for his sheep in the shape of a heart _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

I awoke one morning in the summer of 2023 to discover that, while I’d slept, my son Joel had been texting my wife and me a series of unnerving messages about a perilous situation he had found himself in, in rural Connecticut. From what I could tell, as I frantically tried to piece together the night’s events, one of Joel’s friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger she’d met that week on Tinder: “Castle party Saturday! 3:00pm to whenever. Dress code: Formal. Tell your friends.” So Joel and two others went along for the ride. But when they arrived, they found the man’s home so bizarre that Joel sent me the coordinates of his location and a photograph. The photograph was of a vast medieval castle with a drawbridge, gargoyles and many spires, towers and turrets. They crossed the drawbridge and entered the grand banqueting hall to discover … _there was no party_. The room was completely empty, all except for a small number of equally bewildered young people standing around awkwardly. “I’ve invited you here for a different reason,” the owner of the castle said. (via The Guardian) ## In the 1800s doctors tried to inject sick or dying people with cow's milk In 1825, James Blundell performed the first human-to-human blood transfusion in Europe. This procedure was practiced for over 50 years, with poor results at times. One issue was that many of the subjects suffered from incompatibility reactions as the concept of different blood types was not discovered until 1901. As the numbers of adverse reactions increased, human transfusions fell somewhat into disrepute and were rarely performed in the late 1800s. This brought about an era of popularity for milk transfusions. It was thought that the fatty particles in milk were converted to white blood cells by the body and later turned into red blood cells. The first documented intravenous injections of milk to treat humans was performed in 1854, in Canada. The first patient was a 40-year-old man who markedly improved after injection of 12 ounces of warmed cow’s milk, which came from a cow that had been brought to the hospital. However, five other patients who later got the milk transfusions died (via Fibonnaci MD) ## No one knows who built 50 miles of rock walls along the Berkeley hills in California There are remnants of ancient stone walls all over the East Bay, and no one knows how old they are, who built them, or why. Though people have been pondering the enigma of the Berkeley Mystery Walls for well over a hundred years, no conclusions have been reached, and despite wild speculation, no serious scholarly study has ever been undertaken. Stretching for over 50 miles, the East Bay "Mystery Walls" are found up and down the hills of the East Bay from Berkeley to San Jose. The stone walls are up to five feet tall in places, and are constructed from boulders of varying sizes, some weighing up to a ton. The walls run in broken sections, anywhere from a few meters to half a mile in length, and are placed in unlikely and inaccessible places. They seem to serve no known purpose. They are clearly, visibly, very old. The Spanish settlers in the area reported that the walls were already there when they arrived, and when they asked the local Ohlone American Indians, they said the same thing. (via Atlas Obscura) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Japan gets 1,800 people to drag a 360-tonne castle tower using ropes and rollers To chants of “so-re, so-re”, about 1,800 people came together in northern Japan over the weekend to pull a 360-tonne castle keep a little more than two metres closer to its original resting place as part of ongoing renovations. The keep – a fortified tower within a castle – had to be moved to repair a wall that was damaged in a major earthquake. Rotating teams of 80 people heaved on 30-metre ropes as the keep of Hirosaki Castle in Aomori prefecture edged closer to its destination. On Saturday participants towed the building – which has been set on rails – 1.13m, while on Sunday it was shifted another 1.09m. In order to preserve the historic structure, a technique known as _hikiya_ – whereby buildings are put on rollers and moved rather than dismantled – was used. In 2015 the city put out a call for people to come and participate directly. The result was the first citizen-driven _hikiya_ , and the first time the method has been used in any form to move a castle for a century. Work to preserve the castle has been going on since. The wall was completed in December 2024, with all 2,185 stones restacked in their original positions. (via The Guardian) ## Archaeologists say they have found intact human brains that are thousands of years old The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how—and why—do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery. If a human brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published August 7. Many of the intact brains were found in watery, low-oxygen areas, such as shipwrecks, riverbeds, lakeshores and flooded caves. But since water is a key driver of decay, this pattern is puzzling. Seviour and her colleagues wanted to figure out why the brain specifically seemed to be immune to water’s destructive powers. (via The Smithsonian) ## The hilarious walking style of the Eurasian cinereous vulture _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

A 400-year-old grave held the body of a young woman, the rusted blade of a sickle over her throat and a padlock fastened to her foot — the macabre signs of a community terrified the deceased would rise again. Archaeologists unearthed Zosia, as the skeleton was nicknamed, from an unmarked burial site in 2022 near the village of Pień in northern Poland. Now, some of the same scientists have published the first systematic research on Zosia, using ancient DNA and other cutting-edge analyses in an attempt to understand who the woman was, how she died, and why she, and perhaps others buried in the same field around 400 years ago, appeared to have been feared as vampires or demons. Several feature body arrangements or objects that the study described as deviant or atypical. These included a child buried face down, a skeleton positioned as in a crucifixion, graves with stones placed around the skull as if to prevent biting or movement, as well as other graves with sickles and padlocks. (via CNN) ## This Arkansas fiddler made her debut at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 99 Violet Hensley, who grew up in Arkansas learning from her father how to carve and play a fiddle, and whose nearly 60-year performing career reached its peak at age 99, when she debuted at the Grand Ole Opry, died on Aug. 7 at her home in Yellville, Ark., in the Ozarks. She was 109.Her daughter Sandra Flagg, a guitarist, confirmed the death. By the time she turned 99, Ms. Hensley had performed old-time mountain music — not bluegrass, which she deemed too fancy — at the Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson, Mo., for more than 50 years; played on radio stations and at schools; recorded at least two albums, one of them, with family members, called “Old-Time Hoedowns”; and appeared on TV programs like “Captain Kangaroo,” “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee.”She also handcrafted 73 fiddles — she played No. 4, which she made in the 1930s — thus acquiring nicknames like “The Whittlin’ Fiddler” and “Stradivarius of the Ozarks.” (via the NYT) ## The long, tangled, and mostly wrong history of the psychedelic toad In the 1960s, while Schultes was continuing his ethnobotanical research, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in numerous other plants around the world, including a type of grass that could cause grazing sheep to convulse uncontrollably, a phenomenon known as “staggers.” Then, in 1964, the molecule showed up in an animal for the first time, detected in the skins of Sonoran Desert toads, a species that had formerly been of interest only to the occasional herpetologist. This breakthrough was thanks to an Italian chemist named Vittorio Erspamer. Earlier in his career, Erspamer had discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin. In the early 1960s he received 21 Sonoran Desert toad specimens that had been skinned and dried in Arizona. The findings were striking. All toads produce bufotenine, but this was the only species among some of the most chemically diverse animals in the world that contained 5-MeO-DMT. (via Longreads) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Angela Lansbury moved to Ireland because her daughter was involved with Charles Manson Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury was a British and American (later also Irish) actress and singer. In a career spanning 80 years, she won numerous accolades including six Tony Awards, six Golden Globe Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award as well as nominations for three Academy Awards, 18 Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award. In 1949, Lansbury married actor and producer Peter Shaw, and they remained married until he died in 2003. They had two children together and Lansbury became the stepmother of Shaw's son from his first marriage. While Lansbury repeatedly stated that she wanted to put her children before her career, she admitted that she frequently had to leave them in California for long periods when she was working elsewhere. In the 1970s, Lansbury moved the family to Ireland. In contemporary newspaper interviews, Lansbury stated the move was because of her children's use of drugs, her daughter's involvement with Charles Manson, and a desire to remove them from that environment. (via Wikipedia) ## No one knows what happened to the missing Pedro Mountain Mummy John Adolfi, a creationist in Syracuse, New York, searched for many years for Noah’s Ark and a race of giants who supposedly walked the Earth. But until he died last November, the elusive Pedro Mountain Mummy found in Wyoming in 1932 still clearly haunted him. In 2005, Adolfi posted a $10,000 reward for the tiny mummified remains of the 7-inch-tall “Pedro,” as he came to be known in the region. Pedro hasn’t been seen in public since 1950, but in the past 76 years the mummy has been the source of extraordinary speculation about its origin. Adolfi’s goal was to have the mummy tested through DNA samples, magnetic resonance imaging, and improved X-ray technology to establish exactly what it was so he could disprove the theory of evolution. Countless newspaper and magazine articles have been written about Pedro, who is also the subject of a host of videos on YouTube and was featured on an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” in 1994. (via Cowboy State Daily) ## Watching robots run in the Robot Olympics _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, died on July 20 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 93. Once called the “prettiest thing underwater,” Ms. Parry was among the first women to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, an achievement that led to a career in Hollywood, including doubling for Sophia Loren in the 1957 film “Boy on a Dolphin” and co-starring with Lloyd Bridges on the television show “Sea Hunt.”Above water, she participated in an LSD study conducted by Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who administered doses of the psychedelic drug to more than 900 subjects in Los Angeles, many of them actors. During her two dozen trips, Ms. Parry painted kaleidoscopic scenes of nature and water.(via NY Times) ## Pilots and flight attendants have a higher risk of cancer because they are bathed in radiation The pilots and flight attendants who help us travel through the sky might be taking on more danger than advertised. Research out today finds that people with these jobs have a noticeably greater risk of dying from certain cancers, likely due to higher exposure levels of cosmic radiation that originate from outer space. Scientists with Harvard Medical School and others compared death certificate data across hundreds of different occupations. Airline pilots and attendants were significantly more likely to die from cancers related to radiation exposure than other professions, they found, even compared to jobs where people have to intentionally spend time near radiation, like nuclear technologists. This research suggests much more should be done to safeguard these employees from the harmful effects of cosmic rays, particularly in the U.S., the authors say. Aircrew employees like pilots and flight attendants are already known to have the highest average exposure to ionizing radiation of any occupation in the U.S (via Gizmodo) ## This string of characters looks like a random password but you shouldn't use it The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has three simple recommendations for passwords: make your passwords long, make them random, and make them unique. So passwords like “password” or “letsgomets” or even “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” are bad ideas. You’ll want something like “x8Am30fuia0” or “ji32k7au4a83,” right? Wrong — at least, in the case of ji32k7au4a83. The phrase “my password” in Mandarin is “我的密碼,” which isn’t something English keyboards can easily type. If you’re in Taiwan, though, you’d not type those characters. You’d probably type out the phonetic equivalent using a different character set, called Bopomofo. On the most common keyboard, the characters would render as “ㄨㄛˇ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄇㄧˋ ㄇㄚˇ”. Boponmofo keyboards map to the standard keyboards we use in English-speaking nations, and “ㄨㄛˇ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄇㄧˋ ㄇㄚˇ” maps to “ji32k7au4a83.” Taiwanese people speaking Mandarin were typing “my password” when registering for online accounts. (via Now I Know) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A former car salesman has been formally recognized as a prince of Belgium Belgium’s Prince Laurent has formally recognized his adult son, born before his marriage to Princess Claire, as a member of the country’s royal family. The prince publicly acknowledged last year he was the father of Clément Vandenkerckhove, 26, a former car salesman, but officially established paternity before a civil registrar in February. Vandenkerckhove was reportedly also present and signed the documents. Last September, Prince Laurent, in a statement published in the Brussels Times, shut down more than two decades of speculation concerning the paternity of Vandenkerckhove. February’s formality made Vandenkerckhove a prince, though he is not expected to take on any royal duties and will not be in line to the throne because he was not born inside a marriage approved by the government. Vandenkerckhove is the child of Prince Laurent, whose last name is Saxe-Coburg, and Iris Vandenkerckhove, a Belgian model, singer and actress who goes by the stage name Wendy Van Wanten. (via Global News) ## They are 150 million years older than dinosaurs and have a tail like a rat and teeth like a rabbit Deep in the ocean is an ancient fish that glides along by flapping their wing-like pectoral fins instead of swishing their rattish tail. They look similar to a shark but with bigger eyes, a more protruding snout and only one visible gill opening. These are chimaeras, also known as ghost sharks, rat fish and rabbit fish. They diverged from sharks and rays around 400 million years ago but around 50 species can still be found in our seas today. Also known as ghost sharks, chimaeras are not true sharks but are very similar to sharks and rays and have a common ancestor – these cartilaginous fish split off from elasmobranchs around 400 million years ago. There are around 50 known species of chimaera but, because they tend to live in very deep waters, scientists still have lots to discover about them. They range anywhere from 60 centimetres to 2 metres in length depending on the species and usually weigh up to around 4kg. (via Discover Wildlife) ## The way he celebrates the victory at the end is worth waiting for _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Most forms of measurement from times past – even some in common use today – are based on some part of the human body or some action a person may take. For example, the ‘inch’ was originally the width of the middle of the thumb across the knuckle. The ‘foot’ was just that – the length of an adult male foot, the ‘span’ was the full stretch of the hand from the tip of the little finger to the thumb (about nine inches) and the ‘yard’ was the length of the outstretched arm, from shoulder to fingertips, or on occasion, nose to fingertips. In England, the humble barleycorn – literally, the kernel from the seed of the barley plant – was chosen to be the basis of a new measuring system. According to The Composition of Yards and Perches, a mediaeval statute which is said to date to somewhere between 1266 and 1303, ‘three grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make one foot, three feet make one yard, five yards and a half make a perch, and 40 perches in length and four in breadth make an acre’. (via Satra.com) ## A billionaire who invested in Apple in 1980 just bought Ferrari's first EV for $40 million He has owned Apple since its IPO, and now he owns a Ferrari shaped by the same design mind that helped define the company’s most recognizable products. That makes Herbert A. Wertheim’s $40 million purchase of the Ferrari Luce more compelling than a simple tale of a billionaire spending lavishly on a new car. Wertheim bought Apple shares at the company’s 1980 IPO and continued building his position when the stock traded at around $10 during the 1990s. By 2019, his 1.25 million Apple shares were worth about $195 million. Now 87, the optometrist, inventor, and veteran investor has acquired the first production Ferrari Luce, whose design was developed in collaboration with LoveFrom, the creative collective founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and Marc Newson. The car, designated Chassis 0, crossed the block at RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction for an astonishing $40 million. (via Luxury Launches) ## He was the shortest batter to ever hit in the major leagues at 3 foot seven inches tall Bill Veeck had a track record for designing some of the most elaborate marketing promotions during his four stints as a Major League Baseball owner, including an exploding scoreboard in 1960. But his most outlandish publicity stunt was sending 3ft 7in inch pinch-hitter Eddie Gaedel to the plate at a game 75 years ago Wednesday. Sporting uniform number 1/8, Gaedel was greeted with a standing ovation at Sportsman’s Park in St Louis as he came to bat in the second game of a doubleheader on 19 August 1951 for the St Louis Browns. A famous Associated Press photo shows Detroit Tigers catcher Bob Swift sitting on his knees with a ball in his glove, towering over Gaedel and his tiny strike zone. Not surprisingly, he walked on four pitches, and was immediately taken out and replaced by a pinch-runner. Many baseball traditionalists clutched their pearls about the stunt – more about undermining the seriousness of the national pastime, than out of any concern about exploitation. (via The Guardian) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Lines of giant stones in France appear to be the oldest megalithic structures found to date The enigmatic stone alignments in the Carnac region of Brittany, France, are among the most famous megalithic monuments in Europe – alongside Stonehenge, Menga, and the megalithic temples of Malta. For the first time, it has now been possible to date parts of these alignments with a higher precision and gain new insights into their function. This breakthrough results from a French–Swedish collaboration within the framework of the ERC-funded research project NEOSEA, led by the University of Gothenburg. “The alignments in the Carnac region now appear to be among the earliest megalithic monuments in Europe, with this section constructed between 4600 and 4300 cal BC,” says archaeologist Bettina Schulz Paulsson. More than 3,000 standing stones stretch over 10 km in the region, from Carnac/La Trinité-sur-Mer to Erdeven, forming a unique concentration of megalithic alignments. (via University of Gothenberg) ## Foxes have apparently been stealing shoes from campsites in Saskatchewan A sneaky duo has been having some fun at a Saskatchewan campground, much to the chagrin of visitors. A Facebook post by the Christopher Lake and Emma Lake Community page says a pair of foxes has been stealing shoes at the Christopher Lake campground. The foxes don’t appear to discriminate. From shoes and sandals to slippers and flip-flops, the foxes are taking them all. Commenters on the Facebook post say they’ve had everything from Crocs to Air Force Ones taken by the thieves. A ‘Fox Shoe Bin’ has been created, with recovered shoes in a lost-and-found for those with missing footwear. Campers who find missing shoes around the campground are asked to put them in the bin. (via CTV News) ## Every now and then a pogo stick master appears _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

He drove his red Mercedes along Pershing Avenue with the top down, his wavy brown hair just long enough to flap in the wind. With his monogrammed shirts and pleated pants, Michael Blatt exuded a specific 1980s California cool rooted in the certainty that, no matter what, he would never, ever lose. An Army brat, Blatt said he moved 18 times before coming to the University of the Pacific to play soccer in the mid-1960s. His ambition took root. By 21, he wanted to make a million dollars. By 24, he wanted $10 million.After graduating from UOP in 1968, he worked in finance, but Blatt would never settle for managing other people’s money. One day, legend goes, he walked into a bank and asked for a million-dollar loan. The chairman, wearing a cowboy shirt and an oversized belt buckle, said, “You’re either crazy, full of bullsh—, or you gotta be right.”Blatt got the loan. Within six years, he had built 4,000 apartment units. Within a decade, his company tallied $120 million worth of construction. Later, he built a subdivision he called Blatt Estates with streets named after his children. (via The Athletic) ## During World War I the White House called a herd of sheep into service to mow the lawn In the spring of 1918, the United States was a year into World War I, and any man holding a job that could be done by someone — or something — else was a man who could be sent to France instead. That posed a problem for President Woodrow Wilson: the White House needed its grass cut and its groundskeepers freed up, and those two needs were pulling in opposite directions. The idea came from Dr. Cary T. Grayson, Wilson’s personal physician, who happened to have useful friends in horse racing. Grayson contacted his horse racing acquaintance William Woodward, who owned Belair Farm. Woodward sent along a small flock, 18 sheep in all, by wagon to the nation’s capital. The idea was simple: the sheep needed to eat anyway, and grazing on the lawn of the President’s house would mean the grass would always be well tended to. The idea worked at first, and had a nice side benefit. Sheep grow wool, and wool grown on the President’s lawn was kind of cool. But there were problems with the sheep-as-mowers scheme. (via Now I Know) ## Why did a thriving civilization in Malta collapse and disappear 4,000 years ago? The Temple Culture of the Maltese archipelago in the Mediterranean began nearly 6,000 years ago and at its height probably numbered several thousand people—far denser than the people of mainland Europe could manage at the time. The island people constructed elaborate sacred sites, such as the famous Ġgantija temple complex, and their buildings are among the earliest free-standing buildings known. But, after 1,500 years, they were gone. Caroline Malone, prehistory specialist at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, wanted to understand how the fragile island ecology sustained the people for so long despite drought, violent storms, and soil erosion—and why it ultimately failed. She ran an ambitious project, Fragsus, which drew on multiple tools to find some answers. Scientists drilled earth cores ranging from eight to 30 meters deep, dating the sediment using carbon dating to understand which time period it referred to. They counted the pollen at two-centimeter intervals and analyzed individual pollen grains using chemical signatures imprinted by the surrounding environment to understand what nutrients the parent plants were absorbing from the ground. (via Nautilus) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Brooklyn's smallest and strangest museum is hiding right in plain sight Look closely next time you find yourself in Carroll Gardens: Tucked into the residential streetscape, just past the BQE on Union Street, is a minuscule exhibition visible entirely from the street through a panel on one local artist’s front door. This is the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art, sculptor Elliott Arkin’s homage to the strange story of Leonardo da Vinci painting The Salvator Mundi. Long believed to be lost, the badly damaged 16th-century work resurfaced at a New Orleans estate sale in 2005 and became the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction. Arkin decided to trademark “Salvator Mundi,” which is Latin for "Savior of the World" and refers to a specific depiction of Christ in which his right hand is raised and he holds an orb in his left. In 2018, to promote his new brand, Arkin opened a tiny exhibition space dedicated to the painting in the 45-square-foot lobby of his home. Where once there were coats, umbrellas, and his daughter’s bicycle, there is now the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art, currently featuring an exhibition on orbs, inspired by the crystal sphere in the painting. It’s the second show of the year, and Arkin has lost track of how many shows there’ve been in total. (via Gothamist) ## Gangs of well-dressed thugs were a menace that terrorized Paris at the turn of the century The Paris of the Belle Époque saw the emergence of a certain type of street outcasts; a subculture that combined killer style with the criminal underworld. They were known as, _les Apaches_. They lived in secret dens in the city outskirts, shunned the idea of honest labor and took their name from the allegedly savage native American tribes of _Apaches._ They targeted the bourgeois middle-class, hunting and stalking their victims before mugging them of their valuables using the special Apaches revolver as a weapon if needed. Abiding by their own code of honor, they woke up late, spoke the obscure slang _Jare_ and most of all, paid very close attention to their style – particularly their footwear. It was their unlikely physical appearance that imposed both respect and fear from the Parisians and their police. An apache might have been holding you at gun point, but you perhaps would not have been able to resist admiring his shoes, or his dandy layering. Apache could steal, cheat, or kill if necessary to get hold of a pair of shoes that would enhance his image in the eyes of his gang or his lovers. The littlest scratch and the shoes were thrown to the poor. The height of Apache vanity was a pair of freshly polished pointed yellow boots with golden buttons. (via Messy Nessy Chic) ## Sometimes geometry can be a little like magic _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

When excavators explored (and emptied) King Tuntankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s, they found a lot of magnificent artifacts. The 5,398 officially noted burial objects included ceremonial figurines, chariots, pieces of jewelry and artwork, and even piles of food. Excavators also found King Tut’s underwear — more than 140 pairs of it. No one knows why King Tut was sent off to the afterlife with so many loincloths, let alone why he packed _precisely_ this many for his journey. A closer look at Tut’s garments suggested his measurements were 31”, 29”, 43”—rather hippy for a young man. Indeed, a “virtual autopsy” scan of King Tut done some years ago suggested he had a slim torso and fatty deposits around his hips. For a time, there was speculation that King Tut may have inherited a congenital disorder that impacted his body shape. Akhenaten, who may have been the boy-king’s father, was depicted in artwork as having wide hips and a protruding belly, which stood out from portraits of other Egyptian royalty. But genetic research has shown it’s unlikely the family had congenitally big butts; it’s more likely that Akhenaten had unusual taste in art. (via Popular Science) ## A double-amputee Army veteran has climbed the highest peak on seven continents A former Gurkha has become the first double above-the-knee amputee to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Hari Budha Magar, from Canterbury in Kent, completed his long-running challenge with a gruelling three-day ascent of Antarctica's 16,059ft (4,892m) Mount Vinson, the summit of which he reached on Tuesday. The veteran, who lost both legs in 2010 while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan, had spent years training in order to prepare for the record-breaking attempt. Following the loss of his legs to an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), Magar said he struggled to recover, both mental and physically, describing "dark" times and "a loss of self-worth". However, he eventually discovered a new purpose, sparked by his boyhood dream of becoming a mountaineer. His seven peaks challenge began with the 15,780 ft ascent of Mount Blanc in the Alps in August 2019, followed by Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 2020 and Everest in the Himalayas in May 2023. (via the BBC) ## Soviet scientists drilled the deepest hole ever drilled into the Earth – but why? In the late 1980s, from certain corners of cable TV, you could learn that the Soviet Union had dug straight to Hell. The story ran on a program called Praise the Lord, the long-running worship and current events program aired by the evangelical Trinity Broadcasting Network, which reached around 5 million daily viewers. Over several episodes, the program explored how a Soviet deep drilling project had accidentally tunneled into Satan’s underworld. When the Soviets lowered a remarkably heat-resistant microphone into an underground cavern discovered by their dig, so the story went, the Russians—to their horror and surprise—recorded the wailing of damned souls as they languished in temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Their lamentations were played on the air for a stunned audience. In later developments, the network reported that a winged, bat-like figure had been seen rising from the hole and blazing a trail across the Siberian sky. This was all the proof they needed to assert that, out there somewhere in the Siberian tundra laid the “Well to Hell.” (via Nautilus) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## The Great Antonio was a legendary Montreal strongman who pulled buses with his hair There’s a story my mother has told so often it’s burned into my brain and has become a family legend. In 1980, when I was four, I was walking with her on avenue Papineau in Montreal, eating ice cream. A shadow fell over us: a mammoth of a man with an iron towing chain around his neck, his long, matted dreads interwoven with rope and capped with electrical tape. My mother was afraid and yanked me back but wasn’t quick enough to stop his giant hand from alighting on my head—with a softness that rivalled hers. He turned left on rue Beaubien and found his true target: a bus full of passengers stopped at a red light. Seeing noses pressed to the glass and onlookers starting to gather, he attached his chain to the bumper, barked at the driver to put the gear into neutral, and started to pull. The light turned green, but traffic didn’t dare move. At first, the wheels didn’t turn, but he kept rocking. The bus finally gave, first a few inches and then a few feet. The giant opened his mouth to the sky and let out a victory shout. Meet Antonio Barichievich, a.k.a. the Great Antonio. The strongest man in the world. (via The Walrus) ## How a botanist's study of breadfruit changed our understanding of Polynesian migration Forster had first encountered the breadfruit a decade before, while traveling as an assistant to his father, the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, aboard the HMS _Resolution,_ during Cook’s second voyage. It was a tropical fruit that grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit — roasted on hot stones or fermented into a dough that was baked like bread — but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna, and Malakula (as he explained in his essay), could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, Forster had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree — all of them had been planted by humans. That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands. The history and movement of the breadfruit enabled Forster to develop a surprising understanding of Polynesian migration. The breadfruit’s journey was proof that the Polynesians had migrated east from Southeast Asia across the Pacific — a theory confirmed more than 200 years later by DNA and archaeological studies. (via Lapham's Quarterly) ## A world record for a mile run while pushing a baby in a stroller _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Tens of thousands of undiscovered ancient structures known as “earthworks” are likely hidden in the Amazon near the border between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru. That’s what researchers concluded after flying a plane equipped with remote sensing instruments over an approximately 4,497-square-kilometer (1,736-square-mile) region in Brazil. They detected 396 new earthworks, suggesting that the Southwest Amazon could contain more of these structures than researchers ever expected—somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 in total. A particular kind of earthwork kept showing up in the images: mysterious, geometric designs in the ground called geoglyphs. The structures can extend several football fields in size, and they are a signature of the so-called Aquiry civilization that inhabited the Amazon between 600 B.C.E. and C.E. 850. Researchers think geoglyphs may have served ceremonial or cultural purposes, such as a hosting site for festivities, but their exact function is still up for debate. (via Scientific American) ## Researchers did an experiment that shows some birds fly just because they like it To investigate whether birds ‘like’ flying, we assessed the emotional states of galahs after having participated in a free flight demonstration and compared these results to days on which the birds were not allowed to fly. We selected this particular species as galahs need to fly tens of kilometres per day to feed on seeds, which is their main food source. As such, these parrots likely need to be intrinsically motivated to initiate flight. By evaluating their behaviour, testing their optimism in a cognitive bias task, and measuring corticosterone levels in their droppings, and comparing these findings on days of non-flight versus days on which they were allowed to fly, we aimed to deduce whether flight leads to a positive emotional state that could act as an intrinsic motivator. We showed that the birds consistently choose to fly when given the opportunity, indicating that flight is highly preferred. In addition, we showed that these birds were more likely to show optimisms after consecutive days of flight, while being more pessimistic after days on which they were not allowed to fly. (via Brill.com) ## Steve Henson created America’s favourite ranch dressing for his Hidden Valley guests Steve Henson was the kind of person my mom would call a “real character”. After growing up in rural Nebraska, he set out to find success in Alaska. He found it, establishing a successful construction and plumbing contracting company, which he sold for a tidy profit. Like many who make their fortune in northern climes, Steve and his wife decided to retire in California, buying a 120-acre property north of Santa Barbara. He called it the Hidden Valley Ranch and, ever the entrepreneur, turned it into a destination- a “guest ranch” where people could go for the weekend. By all accounts, Henson was a pretty good cook, a skill he said he picked up in Alaska. He was also a storyteller, and with a flourish he would serve the dressing he “invented”. In truth, it was a pretty standard buttermilk dressing of the kind Steve would have grown up with in Nebraska. But Henson added some garlic and parsley along with a pinch of MSG and BAM, he had created the Hidden Valley Ranch’s secret dressing. (via Pax Culinaria) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Leonardo da Vinci created the world’s first scientifically accurate map in the 1500s In the early Sixteenth Century Niccolò Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci accompanied Cesare Borgia on his rampages through the Romagna region of northern Italy. Leonardo was there because he had been employed by Borgia as a military architect and engineer. While working in the role of military engineer Leonardo da Vinci created the 1502 Map of Imola. Leonardo's Plan of Imola is reported to be the oldest extant ichnographic or zenith map. An icnographic map shows every location depicted as it would be seen when looking directly down from above. Da Vinci may well have walked the city with his own design of odometer, which consists of a wheel, used to measure the distance on the ground, and a tray of balls. The odometer holds a tray with a number of sections, each of which contains a ball or a stone. This tray is pushed along and when each box passes over a hole the ball or stone falls into a drawer. The number of balls dropped into the drawer gives the distance traveled. (via Google Maps Mania) ## How this Kentucky water tower wound up saying “Florence Y’all” instead of “Florence Mall” The Florence Y'all Water Tower stands beside Interstate 75 in Florence, Kentucky, and it says "Y'all" because of a paperwork problem. When it went up in 1974 it read FLORENCE MALL. The developers had given the city the land for the tower on the condition that the mall's name be painted where interstate drivers would see it, and the mall itself was still two years from opening. In July 1974 the state Bureau of Highways told the city the sign was illegal, because it advertised something that did not yet exist. The choices on the table were repainting the whole tank or covering the words with a tarpaulin. Then city staff sat down at the Stringtown Restaurant with the mayor, C.M. "Hop" Ewing, who "sketched different ideas on a napkin" and worked out that shaving the outer strokes off the M, adding a stem, and dropping in an apostrophe would turn MALL into Y'ALL. He called it a "corny solution, but cost-effective." It ran about a third the price of a repaint, and the city paid $472 to have it done. (via Boing Boing) ## Is there a White House staffer with a buzzer that wakes Trump up? You be the judge _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

It’s not uncommon for a 9-year-old child to love dinosaurs, but it is quite rare for someone so young to have opened a museum of their own dedicated to fossils and natural history. Anderson Taylor, now 11, was recently awarded the Guinness World Record for being the youngest male curator of a museum, the first to ever hold the title. He opened the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Cambridge, Illinois, on August 10, 2024, when he was just 9 years and 340 days old. Taylor had been thinking about the museum for years. “Back when I was around 3 years old, I was watching a show on dinosaurs, and I decided that I wanted to go find some fossils,” he tells _Smithsonian_. “So I went outside to my driveway.” In a remarkable turn of events, he happened to find a fossil in his yard, jump-starting his passion for paleontology. (via The Smithsonian) ## Study showed 2.6% of people will swerve in order to drive over a turtle In 2012, Nathan Weaver, a senior at Clemson University, decided to tackle a problem. He noticed that the population of box turtles in the area was in decline, and roadkill was a major factor. His goal was to try to create a safer way for the turtles to cross the road. But to do so, he needed to better understand the cause of the squished turtles. So Weaver designed an experiment to study the problem, placing realistic rubber turtles in the middle of a busy lane near campus. Then he stepped back and watched. Over the course of an hour, seven drivers deliberately swerved to crush the fake turtle. Several more appeared to try but missed. Another day of observation yielded similar results — he placed his fake turtles on a residential street, and the second car to pass by crossed the center line just to pulverize the decoy. In the first phase, seven out of 267 cars purposely crushed the fake turtles in the space of an hour” — about 2.6%. And those numbers held up over the course of his other trials. (via Now I Know) ## The bomb ended World War 2 and other myths about nuclear weapons Sixty seven years ago on this day, a bomb fueled by the nuclear fission of uranium leveled Hiroshima in about six seconds. Since then, two foundational beliefs have colored our views of nuclear weapons; one, that they were essential or at least very significant for ending the war, and two, that they have been and will continue to be linchpins of deterrence. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become so ingrained in our minds as symbols of the power of the bomb that we scarcely think about whether they really served the roles that they have been ascribed over the last half century. But troubling and mounting evidence has emerged in the last half century that is now consequential enough to deal a major blow to this thinking. Contrary to popular belief, this is not "revisionist" history; by now the files in American, Soviet, Japanese and British archives have been declassified to an extent that allows us to piece together the cold facts and reveal what exactly was the impact of the atomic bombings of Japan on the Japanese decision to end the war. They tell a story very different from the standard narrative. (via Wave Function) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## A Mexican ghost town re-emerges from the banks of the drying Rio Grande The reservoir’s shoreline was nowhere in sight when we arrived in the resurrected city, walking the narrow, cobblestone streets—allegedly hand-laid by children working off their misdeeds, per the archivist. The structures closest to the river had been submerged the longest, but Ceballos Sánchez explained that the building materials, more than the water levels, determined their fate. Cheap, plant-based mortar means more rubble. By contrast, the mineral-based mortar had kept the masonry of a two-story hotel largely intact, with prickly pear growing along the top of the thick, sandstone walls. The flagstones of the town square remained firmly in place. The boys school, completed just a few years before the dam was announced, was almost entirely intact despite its low-lying position by the river, thanks to the concrete and rebar that held up well. The arcades of the open-air market were second in prominence only to the central basilica. (via Texas Monthly) ## Life inside Icelandic turf houses was cozy but also smelly at times Let’s tour an Icelandic turf house. From the side, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a hill; a thick carpet of grass grows up the walls and over the roof. But look closer and you can see a little windowpane peering out from behind the dandelions, and around the side there is a house-front and a door leading into a dark passageway. Inside, a hallway paved with flat stones and packed earth opens on one side to the kitchen, with its stone hearth and huge iron pots; above, strings of fish hang to dry in the smoke. On the other side is the pantry, with butter churns and great tubs of skyr. Up a steep little staircase you’ll find a long lofted room known as the baðstofa, where everyone except the master and mistress of the house crams together to sleep, two to a narrow bed. And by everyone, I mean _everyone_ —not just the children, but also grandparents, servants, and local “paupers”—widows, orphans, or people with disabilities who were placed with the family as household help. (via JSTOR Daily) ## A perfectly-timed skateboard trick in Spain _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

A boy’s scream can be heard in the distance on body camera footage released by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources showing how rescue teams last week found two women and a nine-year-old boy who had been stranded for three days when their river tubing trip went wrong. Sarah Vida, 28, and her son Kayden Kovalcik, 9, along with Jazmin Hock, 28; wearing just their swimming suits. Hock’s legs are almost entirely covered in deep, red cuts from scrapes after walking for days through the brush. They have a broken phone and a single water bottle with only a few sips left. The trio had been on a tubing trip on the Muskegon River in the small community of Twin Lake on Tuesday when they’d hit logs and their tubes popped, according to officials. They were reported missing after one of the women didn’t show up to her dentist appointment. The group was found Friday about seven miles (11.27 kilometres) from where they entered. (via CTV News) ## A Cleveland dad set an unofficial mile record while running with his baby in a stroller Sometimes, for the sake of history, you have to ignore bedtime.That’s what Stephen Biebelhausen decided when he and his daughter, Blake, entered the stroller category of Saturday’s Guardian Mile, a Cleveland race over the Hope Memorial Bridge. The race started at 7:45 p.m., a full 45 minutes past the time Blake usually goes off to dreamland.Four minutes, 17.707 seconds later, Biebelhausen, 30, and Blake, 1, unofficially broke the stroller-mile Guinness World Record of 4:26.29 set by Silas Frantz in California in 2025. His Division I years long behind him, Biebelhausen signed up for the stroller mile to support a friend running in the elite competition. While he has run marathons since college and often takes his daughter on casual jogs through his neighborhood, he and Blake only did one workout at speed before the Guardian Mile. Biebelhausen’s original goal was to break the course record, which was 4:44. With two hands on the stroller, Biebelhausen wasn’t able to check his pace until he was halfway over the bridge, where he realized he was ahead of the record. (via The Athletic) ## This town in Belgium is only three miles wide but it has 22 borders inside it Baarle-Hertog is a Flemish municipality of Belgium, much of which consists of a number of small Belgian exclaves fully surrounded by the Netherlands. Parts of Baarle-Hertog are surrounded by the Dutch province of North Brabant, but it is part of the Belgian province of Antwerp. As of 2021, it had a population of 2,935. The total area is 7.48 square kilometres (2.89 square miles). In total, the municipality of Baarle-Hertog consists of 26 separate parcels of land. Four are linked to other Belgian municipalities, from west to east: the largest single section, Zondereigen (named after its main hamlet), is located within mainland Belgium on the contiguous Dutch-Belgian border. In addition to this, there are 22 Belgian exclaves fully within the Netherlands. There are also seven Dutch enclaves within the Belgian exclaves (i.e., counter-exclaves) that are part of the territory of the Netherlands. Six of these Dutch enclaves are located within the largest Belgian exclave, and a seventh in the second-largest Belgian exclave. (via Wikipedia) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## She looked at an eclipse for only a few seconds and saw the image for the rest of her life The eclipse of 21 August 2017 was, in the specific sense that matters to astronomers, an ordinary eclipse. It was total across a narrow band of the continental United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, and partial across the rest of the country. The public interest in it was, however, extraordinary. Tens of millions of people bought or borrowed protective eyewear. Millions more stepped outside and looked up at the sun anyway. Among the people who stepped outside that afternoon was a 26-year-old woman in New York named Nia Payne. She did not have protective eyewear. She glanced up for about six seconds. By the time she went inside, her left eye already had a blurred area in the centre of her visual field. Over the next two days, the blurred area resolved into an unmistakable shape. A crescent, positioned exactly where the moon had been when she had glanced at it, sitting in the middle of everything she tried to look at. (via Space Daily) ## Two sisters bought an island in Cornwall and created a wildlife and nature reserve Roselyn “Babs” Atkins and her sister, Evelyn “Attie” Atkins, were women who defied the conventions of their time. The pair never married and instead invested in their careers and took up hobbies such as mountaineering and rifle shooting. Then, when Attie was in her mid-50s, the chance came to realise a long-held dream to own an island. She bought Looe Island along with her sister in 1965 for £22,000 and became a daffodil farmer; Babs joined her later when she retired. Cornwall Wildlife Trust took over the island in 2004, after Babs’s death, and the charity manages the 9 hectares (22 acres) of woodland, maritime grassland and rocky shoreline. Apart from the cottage, visitors can stay in a bell tent, which sleeps two, overlooking Trelawny Island to the south-east. Additional revenue comes from the landing fee charged to day trippers, who come across with Looe Sea Safari a few times a day when the weather allows. (via The Guardian) ## The object of this game: Don't touch the can _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_ ##

Thijs de Buck, an MRI physicist based in the Netherlands, recently built a speed and distance tracker for his hamster Mollie’s wheel, with the data automatically uploaded to Mollie's own Strava account. One recent activity showed 6.06 miles in 4 hours and 37 minutes. The next night, Mollie logged 5.55 miles in 3 hours and 56 minutes. At first, de Buck just wanted to know how much distance Mollie was covering after dark. “I bought a very cheap bicycle computer pretty much right away,” he told _Runner’s World_. But the sensor would shift into standby mode once Mollie stopped running for more than five minutes. The build itself is clever, but the basic idea is simple. As de Buck explains it, a magnet on the wheel passes a hall sensor, which detects each rotation. An ESP32—basically a tiny programmable computer—keeps track of the data overnight. In the morning, he says a script on his laptop collects the information, turns it into a Strava-compatible .FIT file, and uploads the activity through the Strava API. (via Runner's World) ## The Roman emperor Claudius invented three new letters but no one wanted to use them During his tenure as Rome’s _princeps_ , Claudius not only provided the empire with sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, public health and peace, but also found time to reform the alphabet. The writing system, approaching two thousand years old in Claudius’ day, comprised twenty-one letters, pruned back to spell well the sounds of spoken Latin. It ran from A to X, with the Greekish letters Y and Z hovering on the margins. Literacy was flourishing; the alphabet had already percolated through Roman society, from senators and scholars to the scatological scribblers of Pompeii. Claudius thought, however, that there was room for improvement. Whatever the emperor’s motivations, later biographers, like Tacitus and Suetonius, include the detail that the emperor deliberately created new letters. The emperor’s biographers agree that Claudius created and promoted new letters; that there were three of them; and that the three didn’t last long after his death in 54 AD. (via Danny Bate) ## Scientists put harnesses on magpies and they all helped take them off each other Joel Crampton, Celine Frère and Dominique Potvin worked with a social group of magpies at Pacific Paradise on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The team spent weeks habituating the birds to a feeding station before catching five in one morning: one adult male, two adult females and two juveniles. Each bird received a GPS logger and harness weighing about 2.7 grams in total, plus identification bands. The harness included a deliberate weak point. When a tagged bird returned to the feeding station, a magnet was supposed to trigger the release so the tracker could be recovered without another capture. Before deployment, the design had survived strength tests. A magpie trying to remove it without the magnet would need to find the one vulnerable section and apply a sharp, targeted force. That safety feature appears to have become the birds’ exit. (via Space Daily) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## On her first day as a dancer she helped save 400 people on a cruise ship that sank Rose Metcalf was just 23 and starting her first day as a professional dancer aboard the Costa Concordia when the cruise ship struck a reef near Italy's Giglio Island on January 13, 2012. As the vessel began taking on water and listing heavily, Metcalf found herself helping organise hundreds of people in a rapidly deteriorating situation. She said she was one of only about 12 fluent English speakers among the crew and eventually became responsible for around 400 people. She helped organise a human chain inside the tilted ship and later improvised a way to signal rescuers. She was initially asked to carry out a roll call involving around 30 crew members. As the situation deteriorated, however, she said she ended up taking responsibility for roughly 400 people because other crew members were not stepping forward. The Costa Concordia was sailing close to the Italian island of Giglio on the night of January 13, 2012, when it struck underwater rocks at about 9:45 p.m. local time. (via Times of India) ## The Museum of Natural History has an oyster with a pair of human teeth attached What grows a calcium carbonate shell, breathes through gills and boasts an impressive set of humanlike teeth? If you thought of a sea monster, guess again. It’s actually an oyster, and it has a story to tell about the history of the Chesapeake Bay. In 1898, a dredging boat collected a set of dentures with an oyster attached to them from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. The strange specimen was sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it has remained since—but not without pushback from several toothless individuals claiming ownership of the dredged-up dentures. Despite the specimen’s unusual appearance, this oyster was doing what all oysters do: searching for a safe hold above the mud. Once hatched, baby oysters swim freely through the water using tiny, hairlike structures called cilia. After a few weeks, they’re ready to settle down and develop a temporary foot that they use to attach themselves. While most oysters opt for a rock or another oyster, some have more unconventional tastes. (via The Smithsonian) ## When your car has a mind of its own and it wants to leave without you _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

The Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a prominent politician in the Tuscany region of Italy in the 16th century, died under mysterious circumstances in 1587 – with the suddenness of his death giving rise to rumors that he'd been poisoned. According to historical documents, Francesco's brother and political rival, Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, was the prime suspect, especially as Francesco's wife, Bianca Cappello, also died within a day of her husband. In a new study published in _iScience_ , researchers from Yale University in the US and the University of Pisa in Italy have confirmed the real killer. The team analyzed genetic material extracted from the skeletal remains of Francesco de Medici to find two species of _Plasmodium_ parasites, single-celled organisms known as protozoans that cause malaria and are spread by mosquitoes. Malaria was widespread in central Italy for centuries, so the clues stack up. (via Science Alert) ## Researchers show that living in an area with mountain lions makes driving safer Hearing the roar of a mountain lion in the distance while you’re just outside your house might sound scary. Yet living in an area inhabited by these large predators might actually make you safer. Every year in the U.S., deer are involved in more than 1.5 million collisions with vehicles, resulting in the death of more than 200 people, tens of thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in damages. The team of scientists behind the new study, published on Wednesday in _Current Biology_ , wanted to see whether pumas could play a role in decreasing those numbers. The researchers analyzed data from 503 camera traps and 59 GPS collars tracking pumas’ presence in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula between 2020 and 2025. They also looked at data on the distribution and behavior of black-tailed deer and elk in the landscape and on collisions between vehicles and the animals. In those five years, the deer and elk were involved in more than 950 collisions with vehicles on the peninsula. (via Scientific American) ## What it's like to surf a wave in Alaska that goes on for six miles On a cold, windy, wet summer evening last month, Pete Beachy giggled as he peered into his binoculars and prepared to do something even he admitted can seem very, very stupid. “There she is,” he muttered. “That’s a wave.”Parked along the Seward Highway in Alaska, Mr. Beachy had spotted the first hint of foam curving around Bird Point, 30 miles southeast of Anchorage, and heading toward an inlet known as Turnagain Arm. The “wave” was a tidal bore, a twice-daily surge of water formed when the incoming high tide from the Pacific Ocean is forced into the narrow arm of Cook Inlet against the outgoing current. The resulting breaker can reach 10 feet in height, with speeds of 10 to 15 miles an hour — and surfers can ride it for miles if they’re tough enough to withstand the cold and skilled enough to stay upright.“One moment it’s still, and you’re looking up at the mountains and eagles and goats, and the next you feel like you have the entire ocean coming up behind you,” Mr. Beachy said. “It’s magical, man.” (via the NYT) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## She was the first woman to drive from coast to coast across the US in 1909 Alice Huyler Ramsey was an American who was the first woman to drive an automobile across the United States from coast to coast, a feat she completed on August 7, 1909. In 1908 her husband bought her a new Maxwell runabout. That summer she drove over 6,000 miles near their Hackensack home. In September 1908 she drove one of the three Maxwells which were entered in that year's American Automobile Association's Montauk Point endurance race, being one of only two women to participate. She won a bronze medal by getting a perfect score in the race. One of the other Maxwell drivers was Carl Kelsey, who did publicity for Maxwell-Briscoe. It was during this event that Kelsey proposed that she attempt a transcontinental journey, with Maxwell-Briscoe's backing. The company would supply a 1909 touring car for the journey and would also provide assistance and parts as needed. The drive was originally meant as a publicity stunt for Maxwell-Briscoe and would also prove to be part of Maxwell's ongoing strategy of specifically marketing to women. (via Wikipedia) ## This German island had a festival where men would smack women with cow horns Germany is known for its charming and sometimes outlandish Christmas traditions - many of which are simply part of the fun of the festive season. This year, however, one popular custom on the East Frisian island of Borkum sparked fury across the nation after it was reported on by ARD's political news show, Panorama, and SRTG_F. The Klaasohm festival, which has been practiced on the island for almost two centuries, was at the centre of the unfolding scandal. This wild street celebration happens on the eve before _Nikolaustag_ on December 6th, involving drinking, dancing and carnival-esque costumes. As part of the festivities, a small group of men dress up as the figure of "Klaasohm" by wearing large helmets covered in fur and feathers. Surrounded by male "helpers", the groups hurtles through the town, hunting down young women to catch and beating them on the bottom with cow horns. The tradition allegedly dates back to whaling times, when men would return after a long period at sea and try to re-assert their dominance in the community. (via The Local) ## A sea lion jumped on board this fishing vessel and climbed into a bunk _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

At each of the bomb sites⁠ — among the scattered detritus of pipe fragments, shell casings, broken plaster, glass, nuts, and bolts ⁠— police kept encountering one thing that was not like the others: a partially consumed throat lozenge. Finding a used cough drop on the floor in a public place was not a surprise, but detectives detected all of these in close proximity to⁠ — or in one case _inside_ ⁠ — the pipe casings. And they were all of the same Parke-Davis brand. The point or purpose of the lozenge was as mysterious as the bomb-maker’s motives. Police dusted the pipe and mailing envelope for fingerprints and found only smudges. But the envelope provided the investigators with their first clues about their bomber: A postmark from White Plains, New York. A return address from “Lehman and Lehman,” a fictional entity. An address written by hand in all caps, providing police with a distinctive handwriting sample⁠—one with some unusual letterforms, especially the letter G. Larger than the neighboring letters, the G resembled a capital C with horizontal bars on both ends of the loop. (via Damn Interesting) ## Hundreds of people gathered in a German church to hear an organ play a single note A small organ in eastern Germany is the headliner of the world’s slowest concert. It has been playing the same piece of music by composer John Cage at a glacial pace for nearly 25 years. A rare chord change on Wednesday — from seven notes to eight — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt. It was a historic moment inside the medieval Burchardi Church, in Halberstadt, Germany, that reflected the past, present and future of the project, as well as those who are following its — albeit very slow — progression. While the project commenced in 2000, the performance began Sept. 5, 2001 — Cage’s 89th birthday — with a silent pause that lasted until Feb. 5, 2003, when the first chords could actually be heard. The composition — called “ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)” — is scheduled to finish on Sept. 4, 2640. More than 150 people squeezed inside the church Wednesday to witness what was the piece’s 17th chord change. (via the AP) ## Parts of Europe still eat this large dormouse that was a favorite of the ancient Romans The edible dormouse was farmed and eaten by the ancient Romans, the Gauls, and the Etruscans (usually as a snack), hence the word edible in its name. The Romans would catch dormice from the wild in autumn when they were fattest. The dormice were kept and raised either in large pits or (in less spacious urban surroundings) in terra cotta containers similar to contemporary hamster cages. They fed these captive dormice walnuts, chestnuts, and acorns for fattening. The dormice were served by either roasting them and dipping them in honey or stuffing them with a mixture of pork, pine nuts, and other flavorings. It was, however, very important to upper-class Romans that the dormice be separated from other products of the hunt, like the large game, for presentation purposes. Wild edible dormice are still consumed in Slovenia, where they are considered a rare delicacy and dormouse trapping is a tradition. (via Wikipedia) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## The most dangerous golf hole in the world is a par 3 in the middle of a minefield Camp Bonifas, the United Nations Command post 400 meters south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, has a golf course. One hole, par 3, with an AstroTurf green — and minefields on three sides. Sports Illustrated called it "the most dangerous hole in golf," and there are reports that at least one shot detonated a land mine. The camp houses the security battalion that monitors and enforces the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, and its soldiers escort the official orientation tours of the Joint Security Area, where North and South Korean troops face each other across the Military Demarcation Line. There's also a gift shop selling DMZ souvenirs. The Washington Post described the place in 1998 as a "small collection of buildings surrounded by triple coils of razor wire" that, minus the minefields and soldiers, would "look like a big Boy Scout camp." The camp was renamed in 1986 for Captain Arthur G. Bonifas, one of two American officers killed by North Korean soldiers in the 1976 "Korean axe murder incident." (via Boing Boing) ## The rotary dial phone was invented by a funeral home owner frustrated by a competitor The dial phone can trace its roots to an undertaker — Almon Strowger. There are conflicting accounts about what sparked Strowger’s interest, but this version seems believable. Back in the 1880s, when Almon Strowger was an undertaker in Topeka, Kansas, you had to turn a crank on your phone to get the attention of the local telephone operator, tell her the number of the person you wanted to speak to, and then she would manually connect the call through a switchboard. So when a close friend died and Strowger wasn’t called to provide services, he suspected the local operator was in cahoots with a competing undertaker and diverted the grieving family’s call. This underhanded connection supposedly set Strowger on a quest to find a way that people could skip the telephone operator and make their own phone calls. And he did. In 1892, Strowger patented his automatic telephone exchange and rotary dial designs and started the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company with family and friends. (via Ooma) ## Bank robbery goes wrong in a hilarious way _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Before the summer of 1936, people were used to dressing in a lot of layers. And while the materials in summer were lighter, they were still hot. That arrangement was tolerated most summers. Temperatures would climb, and everyone would grimace and bear it, sweating underneath coats and petticoats, vests and corsets, hats and gloves. But the summer of 1936 was too much. It was a summer when people perished because of their choice of clothing. In Yonkers, on June 21, two reporters from the _New York Daily News_ — hoping to test the city's anti-shorts law — were arrested for wearing shorts. They were given the choice to leave the city or put on more appropriate clothing. They refused and were eventually brought forth before city judge Charles W. Boote. The judge was probably sweating underneath his robe when he made his decision on July 10, when the high was 102. Boote was sympathetic to the journalists, fining them $10 (adjusted for inflation about $240) but suspending the fines. (via National Geographic) ## How a homeless woman became friends with Renee Zellweger and Zach Galifianakis The last 25 years of Marie "Mimi" Haist's life sounds almost too unbelievable to be true: Divorced, jobless, and without a home, she sought shelter in a laundromat for nearly 20 years in an upscale Santa Monica neighborhood. She slept between the first row of washers and dryers and earned money by helping fellow customers wash their clothes. It wasn't much, but enough to at least buy a little something to eat. Then—because life is odd, random, and totally unexpected—Mimi met a couple of movie stars who ended up becoming her friends. In the late '90s, Zach Galifianakis was still years away from superstardom when he met Mimi at the laundromat. "I taught him how to wash his clothes," remembers Mimi. "I later met Renée [Zellweger] through Zach." Although Mimi didn't know who Zach was at the time, things were a bit different when she was introduced to Zellweger. "Of course, I recognized her right away from the movies!" (via Glamour) ## Maybe we could learn something from the way the Amish handle technology I first began studying the Amish in 2012 as a doctoral researcher of media studies at Indiana University, located within a few hours of settlements in Elkhart, LaGrange, and Daviess counties. Going into the project, I knew what most everyone else did: that the Amish prized simple living, communal values, and religious discipline, while resisting certain technologies such as cars, TV, and electricity. In the end, I came to realize that the Amish are, in fact, technology-_agnostic_. They do not care much about what a new technology _is_ or how it works; they care about what its adoption would mean for the surrounding community. In Joe’s settlement, the black-box phone was developed in response to a very specific social problem: Roughly 100 crews left the settlement daily for their construction jobs and needed a way to communicate while away from home. At the same time, several ministers believed that private text messages could facilitate extramarital relationships and smartphones tempted users to access unfiltered, immoral content such as pornography.(via MIT Press) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Radiation detectors rely on steel harvested from ships that sank before 1945 The Trinity test took place in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Hundreds of above-ground nuclear tests followed around the world, particularly during the 1950s and early 1960s. Their fallout distributed artificial radionuclides through the atmosphere and across the surface of the planet. Steel made before that period could not have incorporated fission or activation products from weapons fallout during its original manufacture. That made older material attractive for laboratories trying to push their background count as low as possible. A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory account of low-background steel explains that several US Department of Energy facilities built counting-room shields from pre-World War II metal. These rooms were used for measurements in which a very small amount of radioactive material inside a person had to be distinguished from radiation arriving from everywhere else. (via Space Daily) ## Research shows how avocado plants reverse sexes throughout the day To avoid self-pollination, avocado trees alternate between opening male and female flowers at different times of day. Some avocados are female in the morning and male in the afternoon, while others are on the opposite schedule. How avocados do this has been unclear. In a new study, a team led by researchers from the University of California, Davis, revealed that this rhythm is dictated by variation in a single gene that evolved about 42 million years ago. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this finding could help avocado breeders and researchers quickly sort seedlings to maximize yield and develop new varieties. All avocado trees are hermaphrodites, but at any given time their flowers function either as male by releasing pollen, or as female by receiving pollen. Approximately half of all avocado trees (“A-type” plants) open female flowers in the morning and male flowers in the afternoon, whereas the other half (“B-type” plants) follow the opposite pattern. This partitioning minimizes the risk of self-pollination, which can result in inbreeding. (via UC Davis) ## Why football player CeeDee Lamb practices with a plastic bag over his head _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

On June 12, 2009, a man checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland under the name Peter Bergmann and a nonexistent Austrian address. He paid cash every night. Over the next three days, cameras around town filmed him leaving the hotel with a purple plastic bag of belongings and coming back without it, using the blind spots between cameras to dispose of whatever was inside. He bought eight 82-cent stamps and airmail stickers at the post office, and asked a taxi driver where to find a quiet beach for swimming. On June 15, he checked out, ate a toasted ham and cheese sandwich at the bus station while reading scraps of paper from his pocket, tore them up, dropped them in a bin, and took the 2:20 bus to Rosses Point. Sixteen people saw him walking on the beach, greeting passersby. His body was found the next morning. Every clothing label had been cut out, and he carried no wallet, money, or identification. The pathologist found no signs of foul play, but did find advanced prostate cancer and bone tumors. (via Boing Boing) ## The reason a JetBlue flight suddenly went into free fall seemed almost too bizarre to believe The JetBlue airliner that suddenly went into a dive over the Gulf of Mexico last October 30 did not crash. Despite how long the ordeal felt to passengers like Turner, the plunge lasted only about five seconds before the autopilot returned the aircraft to level flight. The flight crew, spooked, turned the plane toward the coast of Florida and brought it in for an emergency landing in Tampa. Twenty-two people were treated for their injuries. But because no one died, the flight didn’t receive widespread coverage. A dedicated team of investigators went to work. But in the days and weeks that followed, they became increasingly flummoxed. It wasn’t what had happened that puzzled them but why. As they examined the obvious potential causes, nothing matched up.Working their way down the list of possibilities, they found themselves in increasingly arcane and implausible-sounding territory. And the final option left to them — the only thing that could be true so had to be true — was so extraordinarily implausible that a normal reaction would be to dismiss it out of hand. (via NY Mag) ## They thought they were going to space but it was just an elaborate hoax In December 2005, a group of outgoing twentysomethings were gathered in front of cameras on a remote airstrip. They had signed up for a reality TV series called Thrill Seekers and, after five months of auditions, they were about to find out the exact premise of the show. The host, Johnny Vaughan, told the excited gang: “You are about to become … the very first televised British space tourists.” They started screaming, jumping up and down and hugging each other. They were going into actual space! Except, they weren’t. Despite now lingering forgotten, Space Cadets, launched 15 years ago by Channel 4, was one of television’s biggest ever pranks. A meticulously executed televised stunt (costing a reported £5m) that wanted to test how far the limits of reality could be pushed. Could they convince a few members of the public that they had blasted off from a Russian space camp into the galaxy on a five-day orbit of the Earth? (via The Guardian) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## This is why your kitchen cookware got a lot worse but has the same brand name Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought. The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a lower thermal safety margin. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not. In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. Cornell Capital, a private equity firm, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. (via Worse On Purpose) ## All Roquefort cheese is made from burned bread stored in moldy caves on a tiny strip of land The tiny town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, with some 600 permanent inhabitants, draws visitors from around the world, who flock here to discover more about what many consider to be the king of cheeses, produced only in the certified Roquefort cellars lined up on a strip of land in the Aveyron only a mile and a quarter long and less than 330 yards wide. Today all true Roquefort is still created in chilly, damp caves owned by only seven cheese-making companies. Some, like Société, have grown into multimillion-dollar industries, while others, like Yves Combes and Carles, work with fewer than twenty employees. Of course each cellar guards its own secrets for producing its own special version. With over 700 varieties of _Penicillium roqueforti_ in existence, the possibilities seem infinite. Papillon, the only producer to also bake and burn its own bread, produces a Roquefort with deep blue-green cavities. A lighter shade of green dots Roquefort Société, crafted with liquid _Penicillium roqueforti_. (via France Today) ## The odds of a rabbit knocking you off your motorized scooter are low but they are not zero _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics. For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, those changes reflect a wider priority shift that has caused support for his work to slowly dwindle. For years, Blumstein has overseen one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, focused on yellow-bellied marmots in central Colorado. Marmots — soccer ball-sized rodents — are easily tagged and captured, highly social and vocal, and don’t move vast distances, all of which makes them an ideal species to study over time. And since 1962, generations of “Marmoteers” have observed these animals to learn about everything from their social behavior to their communication to how they’ll adapt to climate change. (via SFGate) ## Meet the man who has made more than six million edits on Wikipedia Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Pruitt is forty-two, and works full time as a records-management contractor for the federal government. After graduating from the College of William & Mary, in 2006, he moved back in with his parents and in recent years, he helped his mother care for his father. Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than thirty thousand articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the world. (via The New Yorker) ## Lost shipping containers became an accidental scientific goldmine To the casual observer, the look and feel of shipping containers suggests a world of smooth, lossless transportation, almost immaterial in its implementation of a logistical ideal. However, the system is far from lossless. In fact, during storms and shipwrecks, shipping containers regularly go overboard. Nobody knows exactly how many of these vast, 20- or 40-foot-long steel capsules are lost each year, but estimates suggest that of the hundreds of millions in circulation annually, several thousand containers vanish — sometimes forever. And what becomes of the containers that disappear? In May 1990, the _Hansa Carrier_ , a German cargo ship traveling from Korea to the U.S., lost 21 containers in a Pacific storm north of Japan, and four of the containers broke open. The payload, more than 60,000 pairs of Nike sneakers, poured out into the sea. However, for Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Seattle, the mishap presented a unique research opportunity. (via MIT Press) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## Radiation fruit: How 1950s ‘gamma gardens’ created today’s grapefruit The ruby-red grapefruit is a staple of grocery stores’ produce section. Its rosy-colored flesh is sweeter and more mellow than that of a yellow grapefruit, and has become a familiar favorite across the United States. The grapefruit, so named because it grows in clusters vaguely reminiscent of grapes on a vine, is actually an accidental hybrid. The first grapefruit seedling, a cross between a Jamaican sweet orange and an Indonesian pomelo, sprouted on the island of Barbados in the 18th century. George Washington tasted grapefruit during a visit to Barbados between 1750 and 1751, and noted the experience in his journal. The first pink grapefruit, a chance mutation among the otherwise pale-yellow-fleshed fruits, was discovered in 1906. Finding the color appealing, growers propagated more of them. This pink grapefruit, though, was not quite the same as the varieties available in grocery stores today. For ruby-red and other trademarked grapefruit varieties, we can thank radioactivity. (via Popular Science) ## A near-death experience led to the discovery of an ancient sea dragon When Matthew Myerscough walks along a beach, he cannot help hunting for fossils. It was on Lavernock beach near Penarth, south Wales, that he recently stumbled across the fossilised bone of an early type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that roamed the oceans while dinosaurs stalked the land during the early Jurassic period. Encased in hard limestone bedrock, the 201m-year-old jaw – with its unusual spoon-shaped end – once belonged to “a sea dragon” known as a rhomaleosaur, and was the first of its kind found in Wales. For Myerscough, however, fossil hunting is not just about finding fossils. It is tied to his recovery from a terrifying near-death experience. In February 2014, he was hiking up Yr Wyddfa in north Wales when he was thrown off a cliff during an avalanche. He was discovered unconscious, barely breathing, 20 minutes later, buried beneath more than a metre of snow. It took him only a few days to recover physically after he was rescued from the mountain. But he found his thoughts returning repeatedly to the accident, the near-misses, the what-ifs. (via The Guardian) ## It's a myth that armor was so heavy that knights had problems moving _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.Then he rolled over. Something wasn’t right. Mr. Cifaldi, 32, had impaled himself on the pole. He immediately went into nurse mode: Mr. Cifaldi is a wound nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont.The pole was jutting at an angle into his left lateral muscle, below his armpit, and out through his back. He wasn’t in pain, there was no blood, he was able to take deep breaths and could feel the trekking pole through his skin. He was two to three miles from the summit of Granite Peak, elevation of about 12,800 feet. Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter, he walked around and found he wasn’t lightheaded and told his friends, “I think we can get out of here.” (via the NYT) ## Harp therapist plays music for lemurs, rhinos and fish at Canberra zoo Most musicians would be disappointed if their performances were met with silence. But not Alison Ware. Every fortnight, the Canberra harp therapist performs for some of her most attentive audience members — rhinos, lemurs, lions and a school of Amazonian fish at the National Zoo and Aquarium. For the past five years, Ms Ware has been volunteering at the zoo, using music as a form of animal enrichment. Armed with several different harps of varying sizes, she moves between enclosures, carefully adapting her performance to suit each animal. Alison spends time watching each animal, adjusting the tempo, tone and volume of the music as she gauges their response. Some animals wander over to investigate. Others simply settle where they are. But Ms Ware's audience extends beyond furry and feathered animals. Even the aquarium's South American pacu often swim toward the music as Ms Ware plays. (via ABC.net) ## He won $2 million then the company said it was a glitch and refused to pay A Betfred punter denied a £1.7m jackpot over an alleged software glitch has won a legal battle to claim the winnings. Andy Green, from Lincolnshire, scooped the prize in January 2018 while playing a blackjack game on his phone. The bookmaker refused to pay out, claiming the error meant the game was not operating properly. High Court judge Mrs Justice Foster ruled in Mr Green's favour and said the company had no grounds for withholding payment. The judgement means Mr Green, from Washingborough, will finally receive his payout, plus interest, after a three-year battle. Speaking in 2018, he said he had gone "absolutely crazy" after scooping the jackpot on the Frankie Dettori Magic Seven Blackjack game. Following the win, he extended his overdraft and spent more than £2,500 celebrating with family and friends. A few days later, a Betfred director called him to say there had been a "software error" and it was rejecting the claim. Mr Green said he felt like he had been kicked and had his "insides ripped out" after receiving the call. (via the BBC) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## They paid to watch a house full of cam-girls and then tried to rescue them Chaturbate tends to attract a particularly obsessive kind of porn watcher. These are the simps, men who get off on slavishly following, praising, and paying the women of the attention economy for slivers of time and intimacy. The most devoted among them congregate on a private Reddit-esque message board called SimpCity, where they discuss their favorite streamers. Eventually, there were hundreds of pages of comments discussing one operation on SimpCity. The men fawned over the models, traded clips from streams, and questioned their professed backstory: a group of innocent young friends had met in high school and started streaming together for fun. “The likelihood is pretty close to 0% that any of them are virgins,” one poster griped.But some men in SimpCity perceived a darker undercurrent. They noticed signs of tension, models with bruises, and men who seemed to lurk just offscreen, running the show. Sometimes, these men yelled at the models or threw things at them. (via The Cut) ## This horsehair bed is said to be very comfortable and it only costs $75,000 A new car will cost $40,000 or so. A nice vacation could easily run in the low-five figures. A reasonably-priced mattress could be as cheap as a few hundred bucks. And then there are those people who buy themselves the Hästens 2000T. A queen-sized one can be yours for the low, low price of $74,180. The bed isn't made of solid gold, despite what the price suggests. The 2000T is actually filled with horsehair — yes, hair from actual horses, and primarily from their tails. When you buy a high-end car, you often bring the car back to the dealership and they do whatever is necessary to make sure the vehicle is in fine working order. If you spend college tuition on a 2000T, Hästens will offer you the same type of service. Called their “Bed Spa” program, technicians will come to your house and restore the mattress — opening it to redistribute the horsehair and cotton fillings, restoring the loft of the natural materials, inspecting the bed, and performing any needed maintenance. The company notes that, with this periodic maintenance, the mattress can remain comfortable for decades. (via Now I Know) ## Squirrel discovers that he likes being petted _**Acknowledgements** : I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_

Wearing an extra-large tan prison uniform, the man who seduced legions of U.S. Navy officers with prostitutes and bribes shuffled into a visiting room at a remote federal penitentiary on the Pacific coast. He squeezed his hulking frame into a tiny plastic chair. In an exclusive interview, Leonard Glenn Francis — the con man better known as Fat Leonard — revealed for the first time how he bamboozled U.S. authorities in 2022 by escaping house arrest and fleeing to Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela before he was caught and returned to the United States 15 months later.Federal officials have never fully explained how Francis, a defense contractor who once played a critical role supporting Navy operations in Asia, absconded from home detention in San Diego nearly four years ago, despite warnings from prosecutors that he was “an extreme flight risk.” By court order, the 350-pound maritime tycoon was supposed to be under 24-7 surveillance as he awaited sentencing for bribery, fraud and conspiracy. (via Washington Post) ## Actor Cary Grant took LSD multiple times and started a trend in Hollywood I was struck by the public enthusiasm for the use of substances like LSD and mescaline in therapy—as manifested not just in scientific studies, but in newspaper articles and even television specials. (My favorite is this remarkable 1957 broadcast which shows a woman taking LSD on camera, then uttering memorable lines like “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life” and “I wish I could talk in Technicolor.”) Above all, I was surprised by the public response to the Hollywood actor Cary Grant’s reveal that he was regularly using LSD in psychedelic therapy sessions. In a series of interviews starting in 1959—the same year he starred in _North by Northwest_ —Grant went public as an unlikely advocate for psychedelic therapy. It was the surprisingly positive reaction to Grant’s endorsement that most struck me. As recounted in my book, the journalist who broke the story was overwhelmed by phone calls and letters. “Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD,” he remembered. “Every actor in town under analysis wanted it.” (via Nautilus) ## In Finland on a certain day if you sleep late you could wake up in the lake Every year, some families in Finland celebrate a holiday of sorts called “Unikeonpäivä,” which literally translates to “Day of the Sleep One.” But it’s more accurately described as “National Sleepy Head Day” — and it’s not an excuse to sleep late. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. In households that celebrate, the last person to wake is dubbed the “laziest” of the household, and that person was traditionally awakened with water, either by being thrown into a lake or the sea, or by having water thrown on them. The custom dates back to the year 250 CE, when, per Christian legend, Romans persecuted seven young men for wanting to practice Christianity. The boys sold their worldly goods to the poor and retire to a mountain cave to pray, where they fell asleep. The Emperor ordered the mouth of the cave to be sealed. The young men were dubbed the “Seven Sleepers,” and parts of Finland celebrate the legend. In an effort to get people to not oversleep the latest sleeper gets a watery punishment. (via Now I Know) _Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either_ through my Patreon_or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called_ The Torment Nexus_._ ## This 11-year-old has spent over 100 hours reading to dogs and cats at a shelter Most 11-year-olds spend their free time playing sports, video games or hanging out with friends. Nehemiah Turner chose something entirely different. The Florida boy has become the first child to complete more than 100 volunteer hours in the Jacksonville Humane Society's Pawsitive Reading programme, where children read aloud to shelter dogs and cats waiting for adoption. Over more than two years, Nehemiah's calm voice and unwavering dedication helped comfort anxious animals, making their stay at the shelter a little less stressful. His remarkable achievement has inspired animal lovers across the US, proving that a simple act of kindness can make a lasting difference to the lives of homeless pets. His story is a powerful reminder that compassion has no age limit, and that even small acts of service can improve animal welfare while inspiring others to give back to their communities. (via Times of India) ## Joseph Palmer was persecuted in the early 1800s just for wearing a long beard A farmer from Notown, a village on the outskirts of Leominster, Massachusetts, Palmer was a veteran of the War of 1812. Possibly influenced in childhood by a bearded itinerant evangelist named Lorenzo Dow, Palmer took to wearing a long beard. Few men in the US wore beards after about 1820, and Palmer was considered eccentric and slovenly. Nicknamed "the old Jew", he was regularly harassed and questioned about his insistence on wearing a beard. One day early in May 1830, four men armed with scissors and razors attacked Palmer and attempted to shave him. Palmer successfully fended off his attackers. He was even able to use his jackknife to wound two of his assailants. Charged with "unprovoked assault", Palmer refused to pay the $10 fine and was thrown into the Worcester County Jail and kept there for more than a year. Palmer joined the short-lived Fruitlands commune and bought the group's property when it dissolved. Emerson and Henry David Thoreau visited him there. (via Wikipedia) ## He set a world record by riding backwards on one wheel down a slope _**Acknowledgements:** I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as _The Morning News_from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's_ Curious About Everything_, Dan Lewis's_ Now I Know_, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's_ The Browser_, Clive Thompson's_ Linkfest_and_ Why Is This Interesting_by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy_._If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com_