From RR Auction: “A previously unknown 8mm color film capturing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963, has been sold for $137,500 at auction. The silent color footage, shot by local truck driver Dale Carpenter, Sr., captures the presidential motorcade moving through downtown Dallas, followed by a dramatic sequence of the limousine speeding along North Stemmons Freeway en route to Parkland Memorial Hospital. The film’s most powerful image shows Secret Service Agent Clint Hill on the back of the vehicle, shielding First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as the car raced toward the hospital at 80 miles per hour. For decades Mr. Carpenter’s 8-millimeter snippets of what transpired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have been a family heirloom. When he died in 1991 at 77, the reel, which included footage of his twin boys’ birthday party, passed to his wife, Mabel, then to a daughter, Diana, and finally to a grandson.”
The Hum is a mysterious auditory phenomenon that’s baffled the world for decades
From The Independent: “t was around 2005 that Simon Payne started hearing it. A strange, low, rumbling sound that travels through walls and floors and seems to come from everywhere. At first, he was convinced the noise was from some kind of machinery, but he couldn’t find the source. It didn’t go away; he couldn’t run from it. Even when he travelled 12,000 miles from his Cambridgeshire home to New Zealand, he could still hear it. It wreaked such havoc on his life, he had to quit his job. He became increasingly isolated and stopped seeing friends. But when he started to look around on the internet for more information, he discovered he was not alone. “I found out that it was all over the place,” he says. “There’s no hiding from it.” Payne was hearing “the Hum”, a mysterious global phenomenon that is thought to affect as many as 4 per cent of the world’s population.”
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How two brothers invented modern deep-sea diving and helped save the British empire
From Epic magazine: “Charles and John Deane, along with a small crew, gathered on the deck of a boat owned by John and readied their equipment. Eighty feet below lay the Royal George and $2.8 million worth of cargo and matériel. It was October 29, 1834, and the Deane brothers were sure that their diving suit was ready for the challenge of reaching the lost battleship. John stood behind Charles and lashed rope into a seal around his brother’s wrists. For insulation, Charles wore an underwear ensemble that included a wicker corset, layers of wool frocks, long johns, and a red wool cap. (The cap would later be adopted and made famous by French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.) John fixed a safety line around Charles’ leather waist belt, and the crew strapped on 80 pounds of lead for quick descent. Then Charles shuffled to the gunwale, where John carefully placed a gleaming copper helmet over his brother’s head.”
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. And I appreciate it, believe me!
Genetic testing shows that this colony of aspen trees could be 80,000 years old
From Nature: “DNA samples from one of the world’s largest and oldest plants — a quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando — have helped researchers to determine its age and revealed clues about its evolutionary history. By sequencing hundreds of samples from the tree, researchers confirmed that Pando is between 16,000 and 80,000 years old, verifying previous suggestions that it is among the oldest organisms on Earth. They were also able to track patterns of genetic variation spread throughout the tree that offer clues about how it has adapted and evolved over the course of its lifetime. Pando consists of some 47,000 stems that cover an area of 42.6 hectares in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest. Because of the way the plant reproduces, this collection of aspens is technically all one tree, supported by a single, vast root system.”
A German paraglider was sucked into a lightning storm and pushed higher than Mount Everest
From the Sydney Morning Herald: A German paraglider survived lightning, pounding hail, minus 40-degree temperatures and oxygen deprivation after a storm system sucked her to an altitude higher than Mount Everest. Ewa Wisnierska, 35, passed out due to a lack of oxygen and flew unconscious for up to an hour covered in ice after reaching an altitude of 9947 metres – near the cruising height of a jumbo jet. The champion sportswoman’s survival was like “winning Lotto 10 times in a row”, Australia’s most experienced paraglider says. Wisnierska says experience told her she had no chance of survival, but a doctor told her that blacking out had saved her. “It was because that I got unsconscious because then the heart slows down all the functions – it saved my life,” she said.
Many people can play multiple instruments, but not like this guy
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