From National Geographic: “Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for such a structure couldn’t be acquired. But then, everyone woke up one morning in January to find that the job had been completed—by eight beavers. For free. Beaver dams can be massive structures. The largest beaver dam on record is in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada, stretching the length of seven football fields. The dam is so big, it can be seen from space. “At this point, nothing that beavers do surprises me,” says Ben Goldfarb, a science journalist and author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”
The founder of New Yorker magazine almost lost it during a late-night poker game
From The Conversation: “Inside that first edition, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads. It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope. Ross didn’t make it home until noon the next day, and when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000. Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers.”
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She discovered the cause of Down Syndrome but for 50 years got none of the credit
From The Smithsonian: “In 1960 Marthe Gautier left the lab where she had discovered the genetic cause of Down syndrome and went on to have a successful career as a pediatric cardiologist. For decades, she remained silent as her former colleague Jérôme Lejeune continued to take credit for this pioneering discovery, and history wrote her out of the story—until 2009. On the 50th anniversary of the paper that announced the finding, she decided to set the record straight. The process of changing history did not always go smoothly. In 2014, at the age of 88, she was set to give a talk, but the event was canceled hours in advance, and she was given the medal privately the next day. Finally, toward the end of her life, Gautier got the recognition she deserved. Before she died in 2022, she was decorated by the French government for her contributions to science.”
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.
Penguins are called that because they look like a different species of bird that is now extinct
From Wikipedia: “The word penguin first appears in literature at the end of the 16th century as a synonym for the great auk. When European explorers discovered what are today known as penguins in the Southern Hemisphere, they noticed their similar appearance to the great auk of the Northern Hemisphere and named them after this bird, although they are not closely related. The etymology of the word penguin is still debated. The English word is not apparently of French, Breton or Spanish origin (the latter two are attributed to the French word pingouin), but first appears in English or Dutch. An alternative etymology links the word to the Latin word pinguis, which means ‘fat’ or ‘oil’. Support for this etymology can be found in the alternative Germanic word for penguin, fettgans or ‘fat-goose’, and the related Dutch word vetgans.”
Spain has been in the wrong time zone for over seventy years
From NPR: “It was 1940 and World War II was raging. Nazi Germany occupied Norway, Holland, Belgium, then France. Fascist Italy had already joined with Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer wanted Spain’s support next. So on Oct. 23, 1940, Hitler took a train to the Spanish border to woo Spain’s Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. But Spain was in ruins from its own Civil War in the late 1930s. Franco stayed neutral, but switched Spain’s clocks ahead one hour, to be in line with Nazi Germany. Ever since, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain and Portugal , its clocks are on the same time zone as countries as far east as Poland and Hungary. The Spanish government has debated whether to change its time zone back but so far it remains on Central European Time.”
Skiing down Mount Etna in Sicily while the volcano erupts in the background
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