From Atlas Obscura: “In 1997 — at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry — a man named Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to look like tobacco, processed into sheets, shredded, flavored with herbal extracts, and rolled up and boxed like any other cig. Torigian’s marketing materials claimed that Bravo “tastes (well pretty close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their harmful nicotine and tobacco tar. However, in interviews, he stressed that he hadn’t spent 40 years developing the product just to offer a safer replacement for traditional smokes. He wanted people to use Bravo as a smoking cessation tool. Even at the time, this struck many folks as an odd proposition. But Bravo wasn’t just one aging inventor’s offbeat idea. It was the most developed of many attempts, stretching back over a century, to develop alternatives to tobacco cigarettes.”
An unlikely organ helps to explain Sherpas’ aptitude for altitude
From Scientific American: “For most mountaineers, some level of altitude sickness is inevitable. But Indigenous highlanders living on the Tibetan Plateau, known as Sherpas, have inhabited the high Himalaya long enough to have an evolutionary edge at tolerating elevation compared with lowlanders born and raised farther down. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, researchers compared Sherpa and lowlander blood samples during a Himalayan trek to investigate the Sherpas’ aptitude for altitude—and they found a crucial clue in the kidney.The thinner atmosphere up high can lead to hypoxia, a dangerous lack of oxygen. Hypoxic people breathe faster to bring more oxygen into their lungs. But extra breathing also empties the lungs of more carbon dioxide than usual, which in turn reduces the production of carbonic acid in the blood. Once blood acidity shifts, the only thing that can fix it is the kidneys.”
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Under certain circumstances ordinary custard powder can become explosive
From the BBC: “Instant custard powder is a staple of many kitchens. Just add water and heat, and the powdery mixture of cornstarch and flavourings will transform into an unctuous treat. It’s hard to imagine anything more inoffensive. But on 18 November 1981, at the Bird’s Custard factory in Oxfordshire, the substance showed its dark side. A hopper of powder overflowed, and the resulting dust cloud ignited, exploding into flame. Nine people were injured in the explosion. They were lucky – powder explosions can be lethal. Fourteen people were killed in Minnesota in 1871 when a flour mill went up. Forty-four people, including a child, lost their lives to a cornstarch-based explosion in 1919 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which levelled part of the town. “The main explosion seemed to lift great buildings and hold them in tension for a moment, letting them drop with their own weight,” one observer wrote later.
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.
Does this portrait depict the doomed Queen who ruled England for 9 days in 1553?
From the Smithsonian: “In the summer of 1553, a girl of around 16 was proclaimed the queen of England. Her name was Lady Jane Grey, and she ruled for just nine days before being executed at the Tower of London. Her reign was the shortest in British history. Grey went down in history as a Protestant martyr — an innocent pawn in the ruthless ambition that defined the Tudor court, as the Guardian wrote. While many portraits of the so-called “nine-day queen” immortalized her after her death, historians have never identified a portrait of Grey painted during her lifetime. Until now. Maybe. This month, a painting depicting an unidentified woman in an elegant black dress went on display at Wrest Park, an 18th-century mansion in England. According to some experts, the painting may be the only portrait of Grey created before her execution.”
Scientists have discovered the first known animal that doesn’t breathe
From LiveScience: “When the parasitic blob known as Henneguya salminicola sinks its spores into the flesh of a tasty fish, it does not hold its breath. That’s because H. salminicola is the only known animal on Earth that does not breathe. If you spent your entire life infecting the dense muscle tissues of fish and underwater worms, like H. salminicola does, you probably wouldn’t have much opportunity to turn oxygen into energy, either. However, all other multicellular animals on Earth whose DNA scientists have had a chance to sequence have some respiratory genes. According to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, H. salminicola‘s genome does not. A microscopic and genomic analysis of the creature revealed that, unlike all other known animals, H. salminicola has no mitochondrial genome — the small but crucial portion of DNA stored in an animal’s mitochondria that includes genes responsible for respiration.”
This wing-suit flier recreated a flight on Aladdin’s magic carpet
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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