As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I’m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at a gated community in a small city, sore and exhausted. Waiting for her was a stranger with a similar story. Like Anderson, Nicole Burns was from the region of South Carolina known as “the Upstate,” and like Anderson, she was also fleeing the police. It was May 2020, and both women had become key cogs in a vast drug network that South Carolina’s attorney general — in the largest narcotics-conspiracy investigation in state history — would later prosecute in a 103-person indictment called “Prison Empire.” For years, Mexican cartels had worked with South Carolina Department of Corrections prisoners to distribute meth, heroin, and cocaine. To sell the product outside prison walls, the inmates turned to women like Anderson and Burns. (via The Cut)
Anthony Burgess said Clockwork Orange was inspired by real events but it was all a lie
In April 1944, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess’s wife Lynne was working in London. Returning home from work after midnight, she was approached by four U.S. soldiers in civilian clothing, who grabbed her purse and tried to pry the golden wedding ring from her finger. One soldier “was prepared to break or even cut the finger,” according to Burgess. Lynne screamed for help, but none arrived; her yells were silenced by punches to her body and kicks were the last thing she recalled as she fainted to the ground. She happened to be pregnant at the time and lost the child. The attack inspired an early passage in A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. This is the account you will read — or a slight variation thereof — if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true. (via The Memory Hole)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise than a tradition. After 15 years, he has learned that driving a giant banana attracts attention. Especially from cops. Braithwaite figures he spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America. Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana. Often officers wanted photographs. Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation. The whole thing began in a gas station in 2008. Braithwaite, a hot-rod enthusiast, had become bored attending car shows. Then he watched an episode of the show “Top Gear” featuring bizarre custom-built vehicles, including a street-legal garden shed and a drivable couch. For the next month, his brain worked overtime. (via Cowboy State Weekly)
Her work was cited by Stephen Hawking and she turned down a $1M job offer
At just 12 years old, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski began making a Zenith CH 601 XL single-engine aircraft from a kit. The project took nearly two years to complete, with Pasterski doing much of the work herself. By the age of 14, she was already flying the plane all alone — years before she was legally old enough to get behind the wheel of a car. During her time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy she became a semifinalist for the US team at the International Physics Olympiad. She also interned at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Blue Origin. Pasterski completed her physics degree in just three years, graduating in 2014 with a perfect 5.0 GPA. After MIT, she joined Harvard University for a PhD under theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger. NASA reportedly approached her with a job offer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also wanted her to join Blue Origin, his private space company. Brown University is widely reported to have offered her an assistant professorship worth about $1.1 million. (via The Economic Times)
Pigeons can detect the difference between breast cancer tissue and regular tissue
With some training and selective food reinforcement, pigeons do just as well as humans in categorizing digitized slides and mammograms of benign and malignant human breast tissue, said Richard Levenson, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UC Davis Health System and lead author of the study. “The pigeons were able to generalize what they had learned, so that when we showed them a completely new set of normal and cancerous digitized slides, they correctly identified them,” Levenson said. Their accuracy, like that of humans, was modestly affected by the presence or absence of color in the images, as well as by degrees of image compression. The pigeons also learned to correctly identify cancer-relevant microcalcifications on mammograms, but they had a tougher time classifying suspicious masses on mammograms — a task that is extremely difficult, even for skilled human observers. (via the U of California)
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.
Mussolini’s granddaughter Alessandra won Italy’s version of Celebrity Big Brother
The granddaughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has won the latest season of Italy’s version of Celebrity Big Brother. Alessandra Mussolini, 63, won Grande Fratello VIP and the $116,000 prize on the night of Tuesday, May 19. The former actress, singer and European Parliament member spent 63 days playing the game, which she won after receiving 55.95% of the audience vote, reported Italian newspaper Il Messaggero. Alessandra beat out Antonella Elia, an actress and television personality, for the grand prize. “I enjoyed everything to the fullest, just as I am. I regret nothing,” said Alessandra after her victory. Alessandra is the daughter of the dictator’s youngest child, Romano Mussolini, and Maria Scicolone, the sister of an Italian actress. She has previously shown support for her grandfather — a totalitarian dictator who ruled over Italy for two decades — and reportedly once said she was “fascist and proud of it.” In 1992, Alessandra ran for parliament as a member of Italy’s neo-fascist party. (via People)
This spider pretends it has been infected by a zombie virus so it won’t get eaten
When Alexander Bentley poked a mass covered in what appeared to be a deadly parasitic fungus during a group tour in August 2025, he was shocked to see that the spider beneath it was still alive. The herpetologist, based in Ecuador, often leads group tours through a stretch of the Amazon rainforest and is no stranger to cordyceps, the parasitic fungi featured in the post-apocalyptic franchise The Last of Us. Known as “zombie fungus,” it grows inside insects and arachnids, then manipulates the host to disperse its spores in a way that makes the victim behave like a zombie. This spider had grown two tendril-like structures, known as tubercles, on the back of the abdomen, in yellow and white — usually a sign that the cordyceps have successfully killed its host. It turned out to be a completely new species of arachnid that seems to mimic fungus like cordyceps, possibly to lure prey or ward off predators. (via CBC)
Audio on: Calling a Mickey Mouse performer to accuse her of stealing her identity
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’ve written a number of times about what has become conventional wisdom – spread primarily by academics like Jonathan Haidt – that phones and/or social media are evil, and that they cause teenagers in particular to develop anxiety, depression, etc. and therefore should be regulated. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation has either directly or indirectly led to laws against teen use of social media in Australia, the UK and Canada, and many other countries are reportedly considering similar legislation. As I’ve tried to point out in previous newsletters, all of this has come about despite the fact that there is virtually no concrete evidence in the psychological literature of any causal link between phones or social media and teen rates of depression, anxiety, or suicide – in fact, in some cases the exact opposite. Candace Odgers, a leading researcher in this area, has said in a review of Haidt’s book that his views are “not supported by the science,” and a meta-analysis of the research found the correlation between teen use of social media and rates of depression to be “indistinguishable from zero.”
Odgers is one of the most prominent researchers to take issue with Haidt’s interpretation of the science in this area, but she is far from the only one. A recent piece in The Atlantic looked at the views of another prominent psychologist – someone who at one point was a close colleague of Jonathan Haidt’s, but has since diverged from him to the point where he said he now believes Haidt’s views are diametrically opposed to the truth. The psychologist in question is Peter Gray, who is perhaps best known for exposing the Stanford prison experiment as a fake. He also wrote a book entitled Free To Learn that was published in 2013, and argued that one of the biggest contributors to anxiety, depression, and other mental challenges among young people is their more regimented upbringing compared to previous generations, and in particular, a lack of free-form play time. Here’s how his thesis is described in the Atlantic piece:
Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.
Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
If you like baseball and use social media, you’ve likely already encountered the Savannah Bananas. The team is something of a social-media darling, especially on TikTok – the Bananas’ more than 6m million followers on the app significantly outnumber those of every franchise in Major League Baseball (as well as every team in the NFL, NBA and NHL). The factors driving the Bananas’ online success are obvious. In-game clips of players swinging flaming baseball bats, pitching from atop stilts, and performing choreographed dance routines are tailor-made for social media. The Bananas competed in the Coastal Plains League (CPL), a competitive collegiate summer league. Outside of the standard CPL season, however, the Bananas began playing exhibition games which featured significant rule changes: fan-caught foul balls counted as outs, bunts were outlawed, stealing first base was permitted and ‘walks’ were replaced by ‘sprints,’ among other modifications. Games played under this new set of rules were appropriately christened “Banana Ball”. (via The Guardian)
In Sparta a competitive sport involved jumping and kicking oneself in the butt
The Bibasis, a dance of men and women, was of the gymnastic kind. The dance consisted in springing rapidly from the ground, and striking the feet behind; a feat of which the Spartan woman Lampito, in the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, prides herself. She derives her strength and her beauty essentially from this exercise. The text reads: μάλα γ’ οἰῶ, ναὶ τὼ σιώ· γυμνάδδομαί γα καὶ ποτὶ πυγὰν ἅλλομαι (It’s true, I think, by the Twin Gods. I do take exercise, and I jump-kick my butt.) The dance consisted in kicking one’s own buttocks, to music, as rapidly as possible. The number of successful strokes was counted, and the most skilful received prizes in competitions. We are told by a verse from an epigram, which has been preserved by Pollux, that a Laconian girl had won by dancing the Bibasis a thousand times, which was more than had ever been done before. (via Wikipedia)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Qin Jianping had only intended to stop off in Haikou, capital of China’s Hainan province, for a few days. He drove to a seaside plaza to take an evening stroll along a seawall. He remembers slipping in the darkness, losing his balance, and suddenly falling over the edge into the sea. After plunging into the deep, dark, icy water, Qin quickly fought his way to the surface. He felt disoriented but could still hear the buskers playing for tourists taking a late-night stroll. In those first few minutes, he was confident someone would soon spot him and call for help. But then the waves began slowly dragging him further from shore. It would be another six days before he reached land again. To survive in open water, the 41-year-old entrepreneur says he clung to buoys, ate raw crabs, and attempted to keep warm using his own urine, all the while enduring an onslaught of jellyfish. On the day he was finally rescued by two fishermen, the Chinese authorities and his family had already begun to believe he was dead. (via Sixth Tone)
How many books is too many to have in your apartment? His landlord said 10,000 is
For a young Jewish scholar named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge. Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside. This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books.” (via the NYT)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old.The journey this truck has made over the previous 10 hours, by road and rail from northern France, was undertaken in great secrecy, due to the importance and value of the cargo within (reported to be insured for over a billion dollars). The Bayeux Tapestry is perhaps the most celebrated artwork to have survived from the Middle Ages. It is remarkable purely as an object: a narrative piece some 225 feet long. (via National Geographic)
She went from cleaning a space toilet to planning a Mars exploration mission
Cleaning a space toilet while on work experience was Claire Parfitt’s first introduction to a career away from Earth’s orbit. But she never imagined her time at the National Space Centre in Leicester, when she was 14, would one day see her lead a team exploring future Mars missions. Parfitt, originally from Nottingham, now works for the European Space Agency’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. The 42-year-old joined the space industry after securing a physics degree and a PhD in spacecraft power systems engineering. She has since worked on missions such as the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, which will explore the surface of Mars. She has also worked on the SMILE mission – officially known as the Solar wind, Magnetospheric, Ionic Link Explorer mission – which uses four science instruments to study how Earth responds to the solar wind from the Sun. (via the BBC)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman. Her early novels and plays raised eyebrows due to their racy nature and she wrote some rather naughty gossip columns. She was also interested in technology. In the summer of 1931, she was involved in a series of experimental glider flights. Gliders had existed in some form for around 75 years but Cartland funded a project to develop long-distance gliders that could be towed into flight by aircraft. Previously, a glider had to be launched manually from a high place or more commonly, towed along a runway by a mechanical winch. The first major flight of the “Barbara Cartland” glider was on the 20th June 1931. A bag of letters was flown from near Maidstone to a destination near Reading. The journey took just over an hour. Its tow aircraft was flown by Flt Lt Ewen Wanless with Cartland as a passenger. This was possibly the first use of “glider mail”. (via Playing Pasts)
Northern Canada has an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake
Turns out that Canada is home to the only known location of the most recursive island in the world. Say hello to Yathkyed Lake, Nunavut. As the name suggests, a ‘recursive’ island or lake is like a nesting doll of nature. There is only one (discovered) island in a lake on an island in a lake on island in a lake and that is located in one of the most remote parts of Canada – Yathkyed Lake, which is north of the Manitoba border and right in the heart of Nunavut. Ironically, the lake is just south of the geographical centre of Canada, if you find the mid-point of the East-West and North-South extremities of the country. Unfortunately, knowing that the world’s most recursive lake exists in Canada is about as far as you can get. Notwithstanding the incredibly difficult terrain and lack of infrastructure, Yathkyed Lake appears to be owned by a Canadian mining company, so it’s not even open to the public. (via Curiocity)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how little we know about human consciousness, let alone the machine kind. What is consciousness? Where does it reside? How does it emerge? How do we know that Atlantic writer Ted Chiang is conscious, let alone anyone else? And so on. If this isn’t your jam, I completely understand, and if you stop reading and move on, I will not be offended at all (but come back later!) I know that some people feel AI consciousness is a dead end, and that large-language models like Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT are just “stochastic parrots” or souped-up autocomplete tools that stole all their intelligence from others, and that talking about them being conscious or becoming conscious is like wondering if your toaster misses you when you are at work — and that those who discuss it, like Richard Dawkins did, have lost their minds or are the victims of “AI derangement syndrome.” I get that. I am not one of those people.
I’m not saying I believe that AI engines like Claude or ChatGPT are conscious or even that I think they will become conscious! But at the same time, I’m not saying they aren’t or won’t. David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University and a prominent researcher in the field of AI consciousness, told New York magazine recently that the odds have gotten significantly higher that an AI could be conscious — in 2023 he said the probability was around 10 per cent. “I don’t know if I’d say that these systems are conscious yet,” Chalmers said, but “people who are confident that they’re not conscious maybe shouldn’t be. We just don’t understand consciousness well enough, and we don’t understand these systems well enough.” Chalmers and Yoshua Bengio — who worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun on the development of neural networks — have written a paper that concludes that based on various criteria current AI engines are not conscious but future ones could be.
In the world of consciousness research, as I understand it, there are a (large) number of different models of how consciousness might work in human beings — or anywhere else, for that matter — and how we might find evidence of it working, or at least see the signs of it in operation. One of the most popular is called Global Workspace Theory or GWT, and it was developed by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars in the 1980s. In a nutshell (and I am paraphrasing and condensing significantly here) this theory of consciousness suggests that the human brain operates a little like a theater where a play is being performed. Backstage, in the dark, there is a huge amount of unconscious work happening — things like regulating your breathing, recognizing visual input, retrieving memories, and so on. The stage is a kind of global workspace, where if a piece of data is important enough, it is shoved into the spotlight so that the rest of the brain can have access to it, and this is the foundation of consciousness.
Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. Hofer was an alpinist himself and a mountain-rescue volunteer. He led groups of young people on summer hikes. The case against Plamberger was nearly unprecedented. Hundreds of unfortunates — hikers, climbers, skiers, snowboarders — die in the Austrian Alps each year, but these fatalities rarely result in criminal charges. Gurtner, thirty-three, had frozen to death a few dozen yards from the Grossglockner summit after Plamberger, then thirty-six, parted ways with her at around 2 a.m. on a winter night. (via the New Yorker)
In Italy they store their cheese in a bank vault because people keep stealing it
Northern Italy. In the dead of night, a group of thieves creeps toward a locked vault. Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion? No — Parmesan. And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police apprehended the thieves. Credito Emiliano SpA is a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese’s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which are worth $950–$1,900 each) known as the “Fort Knox of cheese.” (via Longreads)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
The waves were more than two metres high, tossing the sailing boat around like a walnut shell. Below deck on the Bavaria C50 yacht, just 15m (50ft) long, a Ukrainian diving crew waited nervously. The skipper had seen much worse and before the war he had sometimes enjoyed taking his clients into mild storms. But now he was concerned. “This isn’t diving weather. Are you sure?” he yelled. They were not. One by one the divers voted to abort their mission and return to port. Then the lone woman among them, in her thirties, stood up. I’ll call her Freya. “Let me go alone, I’ll finish quickly,” she said. Freya’s buddy went into the water first and rigged the bomb, a makeshift device fashioned from a diver’s breathing tank. “This will be fun,” Freya called to him. Then she plunged. Freya — whose name, like those of her fellow saboteurs, has been withheld for security reasons — was born in Kyiv in the mid-1980s and raised mainly by her mother. By the time she finished high school she spoke some English and Spanish, and she chose a university course that would allow her to travel. (via The Times)
Scientists say they have found a way to make quantum time run backwards
Scientists have developed a new way to control quantum systems that can make their behavior appear more consistent with time moving backward rather than forward. The research, published in Physical Review X, introduces quantum control protocols that reshape a system’s “arrow of time,” the concept that time naturally moves in only one direction. The approach could eventually support new methods for extracting energy from quantum systems and preparing quantum states. A quantum system, such as a group of qubits, follows the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Using the newly developed control protocols, researchers can suppress the usual emergence of the arrow of time or even reverse its apparent direction, making quantum processes look as though they are unfolding backward. As a demonstration of the technique, the team also created a measurement engine that can harvest energy from the act of making quantum measurements. (via Science Daily)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
From mulled wine at Christmas to hot cross buns at Easter, nutmeg has become an essential spice in Europe. But its widespread adoption — including in the traditional Dutch breakfast pastry of ontbijtkoek — comes on the back of a sordid history of colonial exploitation. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn. The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621. The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the perkenier system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk). (via JSTOR Daily)
He restores and installs free-to-use pay phones in Vermont using VoIP
Remember pay phones? Those relics of telecom’s distant past were once everywhere — on many busy street corners, in bars and restaurants, even built into airliners’ seatbacks. Now, an engineer in Vermont is aiming to give the old-fashioned device some present-day relevance. Patrick Schlott, 32, is an electrical engineer by training who works at the South Burlington, Vt.–based eVTOL maker Beta Technologies. Inspired in part by the free-phone projects Futel and PhilTel, he’s restored and installed free-to-use pay phones at over half a dozen locations across Vermont. With Schlott’s phones, users can make coinless calls anywhere in the United States or Canada—with each phone routing its calls through local internet connections via a simple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway. Schlott recently spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the rugged charm of old tech and the joys of reverse engineering. (via Spectrum IEEE)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen – which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. Cockroaches breathe through pores called spiracles on their abdomen. But Sato and his team were unhappy with the insects’ inability to search flooded areas, which aren’t uncommon in disaster zones, so they have developed a diving suit to allow them to operate underwater. The researchers 3D printed a watertight resin suit, which protects the abdominal spiracles from water. Tiny hoses run forwards from the suit to connect directly to the thorax. (via New Scientist)
Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of the bus
Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Anyone can see that the wheel needed to be invented, and that some further innovations were required to build carriages large enough for a substantial group of people to travel in them simultaneously. Once big carriages were invented, however, we might assume that people automatically started running them on regular timetables between fixed locations. The practice is so universal today, and its advantages so obvious, that it does not seem to require active innovation. Surprisingly, however, this is not true. The world had thousands of wheeled vehicles for millennia before it had a single bus. We know exactly who invented buses, when he did so, and how quickly his invention spread across the world. Wheels started being used for transport some time after 3,500 BC. For a very long time, however, wheels were not a world-changing technology. Early carts were precarious, and roads were too bad for them to be very useful. (via Works In Progress)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
I scanned the room, and my eyes locked on three women whose eyes were already locked on me. The three women were Midwestern and white, and I am Southern and Black. I intended to tell them some information that I had only recently learned in detail — that our grandfathers had been together in the 1910s as children at the Lafon Orphan Asylum for Colored Boys in New Orleans. They were brothers: George and Edward DeGrange. In photos, they bear the resemblance of siblings, but they grew to be a few shades apart in skin tone. This slight contrast would make a world of difference as they aged out of the orphanage into the reality of segregation. Edward boarded a train to Chicago. Upon arrival, he presented himself as white. He eventually married and had children in Chicago — white children — who had children. George, too dark to pass even if he had wanted to, chose to stay behind in New Orleans. (via the New York Times)
A Norwegian watchmaker found a perfectly preserved 18th-century shipwreck
Espen Saastad makes watches for a living. He also runs a small underwater survey and salvage operation, which is how he found himself looking at an 18th-century merchant ship sitting almost perfectly upright on the floor of the Skagerrak strait, about 1,900 feet (600 meters) below the surface, with much of its cargo still inside. The ship had rested there for roughly 275 years. Large amounts of Chinese porcelain remained within the hull, along with rows of cargo that had barely moved. A fishing net had shifted objects in a few places, but most of the wreck appeared undisturbed. Archaeologists still do not know where the vessel began its journey or where it was headed. The Norwegian Maritime Museum announced the discovery in June 2026, describing it as the best-preserved cargo of its kind ever found in Northern Europe. (via Discover)
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
