From The Guardian: “When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother – Carolyn Correa – turned to her and said, “There’s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you’re not going to let her, right?” Vera promised she wasn’t going anywhere; she’d tell the “bad lady” to get off her. “I was a sassy kid,” she says now, 20 years on. Remembering that strange exchange still gives Vera chills. It was Correa herself that had taken Vera away, kidnapping her as a newborn, crossing over from Philadelphia to New Jersey, changing Delimar’s name to Aaliyah and raising her as her own. Vera, 26, tells me the story of her bizarre and traumatic childhood – part horror story, part fairytale, and still in many ways a mystery.”
These twins created their own secret language
From the BBC: “Twins Matthew and Michael Youlden speak 25 languages each. The 26th is Umeri, which they don’t include in their tally. If you’ve not heard of Umeri, there’s good reason for that. Michael and Matthew are the only two people who speak, read and write it, having created it themselves as children. The brothers insist Umeri isn’t an intentionally secret language. An estimated 30-50% of twins develop a shared language or particular communication pattern that is only comprehensible to them, known as cryptophasia. The term translates directly from Greek as secret speech. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, believes there are now better and more nuanced words for the phenomenon, and prefers to use “private speech”.
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A PhD student found a lost city in the Mexico jungle by accident
From the BBC: “A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico. Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche. They uncovered the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using a survey that maps structures buried under vegetation. They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America. The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet. It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.”
Scientists have started to decode bird songs
From The New Yorker: “Language is often cited as the quality that distinguishes us as humans. When I asked Robert Berwick, an M.I.T. computational linguist, about birds, he argued that “they’re not trying to say anything in the sense of James Joyce trying to say something.” Still, he and Kleindorfer both pointed out that humans and songbirds share a trait that many animals lack: we are “vocal learners,” meaning that we can learn to make new sounds throughout our lives. “To me, the most amazing thing is that every generation of vocal learners has its own sound,” Kleindorfer said. “So, just like our English is different from Shakespeare’s English, the songbirds, too, have very different songs from five hundred years ago. I am sure of it.”
She was held in Kazakhstan after officials denied that New Zealand was a country
From Stuff: “A Kiwi tourist who travelled to Kazakhstan claims she was detained at the border by officials who were skeptical that New Zealand was, in fact, a country. Chloe Phillips-Harris, a 28 year old from Kawakawa, was attracted to Kazakhstan’s beautiful, rugged scenery and “good people”. But her adventure almost turned into a misadventure when she was told by immigration officials she’d need to supply an Australian passport upon arriving at the immigration booth. “They thought New Zealand was a state of Australia and that I needed an Australian passport.” Further complicating matters, the room she was interrogated in had a large map of the world tacked on the wall – but the map didn’t include New Zealand.”
He watches his daughter walk for the first time using a machine he created
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters 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, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com