From National Geographic: “A young woman is swept from her home into a foreign, enchanted world. Her captor is no mere mortal, but a powerful and mystical fairy or beast. So begins the odyssey of Feyre, the protagonist of Sarah J. Maas’s bestselling A Court of Thorns and Roses, a sprawling epic that currently spans five novels. The series has made Romantasy, a blending of romance and fantasy, a fixture on social media where readers gush about favorite characters and share elaborate fan theories. Fans lovingly refer to it as “faerie smut,” using Maas’s consciously archaic spelling, and it draws on centuries-old material with timeless appeal. Maas’s most notable source is The Ballad of Tam Lin, a Scottish ballad that dates to as early as the 16th century, and her most obvious nod to the ballad is in one of her main characters, a love interest named Tamlin.”
In the 19th century people in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan used a single written language
From Wikipedia: “Literary Chinese was the medium of all formal writing in Vietnam for almost all of the country’s history until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by vernacular writing. The language was used in China, as well as in Korea and Japan, and used the same standard Chinese characters. It was used for official business, historical annals, fiction, verse, and scholarship. Literary Chinese was a style of writing modelled on the classics of the Warring States period and Han dynasty. It remained largely static while the various varieties of Chinese evolved and diverged to the point of mutual unintelligibility. The language enabled scholars from all of these countries to communicate in writing, in much the same way that Latin did in European countries.”
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Scientists think they may have solved the case of the universe’s missing lithium
From the Perimeter Institute: “Using a model called big bang nucleosynthesis, we can calculate the relative amounts of light elements that were produced in the early universe. We can also observe how much of each element was present in the earliest stars. For the most part, the theory and the prediction line up. The model calls for three parts hydrogen to every one part helium, with a dash of deuterium and even smaller quantities of the two isotopes of lithium, lithium-6 and lithium-7. Observations find the predictions to be very accurate. But there is one outlier: lithium-7. That prediction is off by a factor of three. About two-thirds of the lithium predicted by the big bang nucleosynthesis model is missing. Perimeter Associate Faculty member Maxim Pospelov and his colleagues say this is the result of an unknown particle which they dubbed “particle X.”
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 Agatha Christie murder mystery helped save a sick baby’s life
From the New York Times: “Agatha Christie’s 16‐year‐old detective story The Pale Horse saved the life of a 19‐month‐old girl dying of a condition that baffled London doctors. The Arab baby, flown for treatment from Qatar, was semiconscious when admitted to Hammersmith Hospital. Despite intensive care, her blood pressure rose, her breathing became increasingly difficult and she appeared on the brink of death. The doctors could not diagnose the illness. Marsha Maitland, a nurse, suggested that the infant might have been poisoned by a compound of thallium, a bluish‐white metal that has poisonous salts. Nurse Maitland said that she was reading The Pale Horse and the baby’s symptoms were remarkably similar. Laboratory tests by Scotland Yard confirmed thallium poisoning, and the baby recovered after getting the right treatment.”
Sea turtles use magnetism to find their way to a specific location thousands of miles away
From Scientific American: “Loggerheads and other sea turtles are renowned for their epic migrations, in which they travel thousands of miles. Many sea turtles come back to specific foraging grounds year after year, and females often return to lay their own eggs at the same beaches where they hatched. Scientists have known for decades that sea turtles utilize Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves in certain directions as if they have a built-in magnetic compass. Some scientists have theorized that sea turtles are capable of learning specific magnetic coordinates of foraging grounds. The scientists discovered that, even with no food actually present, the sea turtles displayed their dancing behavior when they encountered the magnetic conditions associated with past feedings. This supports the notion that they learn the magnetic coordinates of foraging locations.”
What a Canadian train looks like clearing the tracks in winter
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
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