Scientists used to believe that babies couldn’t feel pain

From Marginal Revolution: “As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. Anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was no evidence that babies feel pain. Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia.”

This New Zealand-born journalist knew and spoke almost 60 different languages

From Wikipedia: “Harold Whitmore Williams was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of The Times and polyglot who is considered to have been one of the most accomplished polyglots in history. He is said to have known over 58 languages. He was proven to know every language of the Austrian Empire, as well as Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Romanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Irish, and other dialects. As a schoolboy he constructed a grammar and vocabulary of the New Guinea language Dobu from a copy of St Mark’s Gospel written in that language. By high school he had managed to teach himself Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and other Polynesian languages.”

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.

An archaeologist discovered the fractured pieces of a 1 million-year-old face

From Popular Mechanics: “When a fragment of a skull emerged from a cave in northern Spain, archaeologist Rosa Huguet was almost certain it came from a human ancestor. What she didn’t know at the time of the excavation was that she was coming face to face with the most ancient human visage in Western Europe. Huguet nicknamed the hominin “Pink.” The oldest faces on the European continent—which are also the most ancient outside of Africa—were unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia, and belong to five 1.8 million-year-old skulls from a hominin group known as Homo georgicus, thought to be closely related to Homo erectus. When early humans arrived in the western part of Europe was less certain, until now. The cheek and upper jawbone fragments that Huguet and her team found in 2022 (and have been investigating since) are between 1.1 and 1.4 million years old, making them the oldest human fossils in Western Europe.”

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.

Some office buildings are using “ice batteries” as a way to store energy and cool the air

From the Washington Post: “Thousands of buildings across the United States are staying cool with the help of cutting-edge batteries made from one of the world’s simplest materials: ice.When electricity is cheap, the batteries freeze water. When energy costs go up, building managers turn off their pricey chillers and use the ice to keep things cool.A typical building uses about a fifth of its electricity for cooling, according to the International Energy Agency. By shifting their energy use to cheaper times of day, the biggest buildings can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their power bills. They can also avoid using electricity from the dirtiest fossil fuel plants.In places where the weather is hot and energy prices swing widely throughout the day — for instance, Texas, Southern California and most of the American Southwest — buildings could cut their power bills and carbon emissions by as much as a third, experts say.”

The mother of Monkees’ guitarist Mike Nesmith invented Liquid Paper

From La Brujula Verde: “Bette Nesmith Graham was hired as a typist at Texas Bank and Trust, and gradually climbed the ranks to become an executive secretary. Since she had some artistic skills, she offered to paint the bank’s windows with holiday decorations in the winter. While doing so, a light bulb went off in her head. She later explained: “When an artist is lettering, they never correct mistakes by erasing but always paint over them. So I decided to use what artists use. I put some tempera paint in a bottle, took my watercolor brush, and brought it to my office. I used it to correct my mistakes.” Tempera paint is a type of paint in which the pigment’s solvent is water, and the binder can be animal fat, glycerin, casein, gum, or egg. In 1956, she patented the product, naming it Mistake Out, though she later changed it to a more serious name, Liquid Paper.”

An owl flying through a cloud of bubbles reveals wingtip and tail vortices

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