Month: April 2025

From AP: “One of the greatest mountain guides will attempt to scale the world’s highest peak for the 31st time — and possibly the 32nd time as well — and break his own record. Kami Rita, 55, flew to Mount Everest from Kathmandu to lead a group of climbers who will try to reach the 8,849-meter summit during the spring climbing season. He holds the record for the most successful ascents of Mount Everest at 30 times. In May last year he climbed the peak twice. His closest competitor for the most climbs of Mount Everest is fellow Sherpa guide Pasang Dawa, who has made 27 successful ascents of the mountain. Kami Rita first climbed Everest in 1994 and has been making the trip nearly every year since. He is one of many Sherpa guides whose skills are vital to the safety and success each year of foreign climbers aspiring to stand on top of the mountain. His father was among the first Sherpa mountain guides.”

These techno-utopians want to colonize the sea

From the New York Times: “Forty-six hours before Rüdiger Koch officially seized the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent living in an underwater fixed habitat, I took a 15-minute motorboat ride from Linton Bay Marina, in north-central Panama, to visit him. It was a warm afternoon in January, and Koch was approaching a full 120 days spent working, eating, sleeping, drinking and smoking cigars in a room 36 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. His 304-square-foot habitat was inside the underwater buoyancy chamber that helps stabilize a floating home called SeaPod Alpha Deep. Koch arrived here, in small part, via a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute, which promotes “living on environmentally restorative floating islands with some degree of political autonomy.” The Institute’s president, Joe Quirk, once said the vision is “startup societies where people could form whatever kind of community they wanted” — a libertarian-inflected world where you could “vote with your boat.”

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Continue reading “This Sherpa guide has climbed Everest a record 30 times”

From Modern Met: “For most of her life, Tilley Lockey has been championing the limb different community. The 19-year-old singer, influencer, and host lost both her arms to meningitis when she was just 15 months old. But rather than hide it or try to blend in, Lockey has embraced and celebrated her condition. For many years, she has worked with Open Bionics, which have outfitted her with top-of-the-line bionic hands. Now, Lockey has debuted a new pair of wireless bionic arms. The Hero Pro, the latest prosthetic arm by Open Bionics, is 3D-printed and allows users to do things like push a stroller or carry a suitcase, as well as fine motor actions like zipping a jacket, scrolling on a phone, or holding a guitar pick. Lockey explained that the arms have two muscle sensors — squeeze to close, flex to open — and the hands are also completely wireless, so that they can be detached and will still follow the motions the user indicates.”

He climbed Mount Fuji but had to be rescued twice after he went back to get his phone

From the BBC: “A 27-year-old university student who climbed Mount Fuji outside of its official climbing season was rescued twice in four days, after he returned to look for his mobile phone. The Chinese student, who lives in Japan, was first rescued by helicopter on Tuesday while on the Fujinomiya trail, which sits about 3,000m (9,800ft) above sea level. He was unable to descend the trail after he lost his crampons – a spiked device that is attached to the bottom of climbing shoes for better traction. But days later, he returned to the mountain to retrieve belongings that he left behind, including his phone. He was rescued again on Saturday after suffering from altitude sickness but is now out of danger. Due to harsh conditions, people are discouraged from climbing Mount Fuji outside of the official climbing season that starts in early July and ends in early September.

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Continue reading “She can control her bionic hands even when they aren’t attached”

From NBC: “A 2-year-old boy spent the night alone in the remote Arizona wilderness and walked 7 miles through mountain lion territory, authorities said. A huge search operation was launched when the boy disappeared from his home in Seligman, Arizona, about 100 miles south of Grand Canyon National Park. The sheriff’s office said that more than 40 rescuers, including Department of Public Safety rangers, joined the search, and a DPS helicopter spotted two mountain lions in the area. But 16 hours after he went missing, rancher Scotty Dunton found him on his land 7 miles away. The boy was safe and well and had apparently been led to his property by the rancher’s dog, Buford. Dunton asked the boy if he had walked all night, and he answered, “No, I laid up under a tree.”

In the Czech Republic it’s an Easter tradition for boys to whip girls with willow branches

From Radio Prague: The Czech Republic has a rather unusual tradition on Easter Monday. Boys get willow branches, braid them together into whips and decorate them with ribbons to whip girls with for luck and fertility. The word for this whip in Czech is pomlázka, which has also become the name of the tradition itself. According to tradition, the boys will also sing a song that says: ‘Hody, hody, doprovody, dejte vejce malovaný, nedáte-li malovaný, dejte aspoň bílý, slepička vám snese jiný ” which means something like “Feast, Feast give me a painted egg if you don’t give me a painted one give me at least white one, the hen will give you another.” Said Noemi: “In the past it was worse because boys came really early in the morning. They hit the girls a lot, they poured water on the girls and then they wanted an egg or something sweet. It’s terrible.”

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Continue reading “A two-year-old walked seven miles through the wilderness”

From The Cut: “A friend suggested Katie and Houston try a form of communication known in the autism world as spelling. Spelling involved not just Houston but Houston and Katie as a team. Katie held in the air an 8.5-by-11-inch board or stencil covered with the letters of the alphabet and numerals 0 to 9. Houston’s role was to use a pencil to point to letters on the board to make words he wanted to say. All summer long, in 2018, Katie and Houston spent four, five, six hours every day at their dining table trying to master the technique. Each spelling lesson consisted of a reading on a topic, like constellations, followed by questions that had just been answered by the reading. After each lesson, Katie lifted a black plastic stencil letter board in front of Houston’s chest and he pointed. Three months before Houston’s birthday, he spelled I-M S-P-E-C-I-A-L. And then he spelled I C-A-N H-E-A-R T-H-O-U-G-H-T-S.”

Fans of the game Magic:The Gathering could help solve a prime number puzzle

From Scientific American: “A game of Magic: The Gathering begins well before players lay down their first card. As a collectible card game, Magic requires competitive players to select the optimal deck of cards based on how they think it will function against hypothetical opponents with many different strategies—then the game itself offers proof or disproof of the player’s predictive powers. Because about 30,000 different cards are available today—though they’re likely not all owned by a single individual—there are many degrees of variation. In the fall of 2024 a Reddit user posted a combination of 14 moves that use about two dozen Magic cards and could potentially deal infinite damage. The outcome of the game depends on the answer to a mathematical puzzle that is almost 180 years old: Are there an infinite number of prime number twins?”

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Continue reading “A podcast claims non-speaking autistic people can read minds”

From Nautilus: “It’s impossible to know exactly when each of the five mutations happened. When, deep in my marrow, one thing after another went awry, and divided my life. Like all people who have been ill, my life is split into Before and After. Did a mutation occur the summer Before, when my gallbladder inexplicably started to act up, when I got a surprisingly terrible case of hand-foot-mouth virus for an adult? Perhaps one occurred in college, silently changing my future while I took my first organic chemistry lab, being careless with a solvent. Maybe the first mutation occurred when I was 2 years old, wearing footie pajamas soaked in flame retardant. Is it possible, even, that the mutation happened generations before I was even born, perhaps when my grandmother worked in her family’s dry-cleaning shop, the chemicals triggering a change deep in one of her cells that eventually lead to her death, my father’s, and nearly mine?”

Astronomers say they have detected a sign of life on a distant planet

From the New York Times: “A team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae. “It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life. “This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.” The study was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

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Continue reading “A chemist investigates the potential causes of her leukemia”

From The Guardian: “Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, but everyone remembers the girl. Her body, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier town of Portbou, was visible to anyone looking up from the beach or across from the opposite hillside. She was barefoot, with grey-blue eyes and thick chestnut-brown hair. She wore blue dungarees over a turquoise green shirt. In these years before the Schengen agreement, guards were stationed on the French border but these officers were experts in immigration and smuggling, not violent deaths. Instead, Enrique Gómez, a 35-year-old investigator from the Guardia Civil police force was called in from the nearby city of Figueres to investigate. Carles Cereijo, an 18-year-old reporter who had just begun working with the local El Punt Avui newspaper, got to the scene before him. Cereijo had been woken by a call from a waiter friend working the breakfast shift at a cafe.

This philosopher didn’t think unluckiness existed until he met his wife

From New York: “Holly Davis didn’t believe in luck until she realized just how unlucky she was. Often, it was the little things. Reservations she made disappeared. Rides she booked never came. Someone else would fill out an annoying but vital online form without a hitch; the site would crash as soon as she tried. Her neighbors’ plants glowed a lustrous green while hers — same soil, same rain — shriveled with disease. Was this just adulthood, she wondered, to be waging an endless war against the everyday? The man who would eventually become her second husband didn’t think so, and he knew a thing or two about luck. He’d written a master’s thesis about it. His name was Lee John Whittington, and he didn’t believe in the salt-throwing, new-engagement-ring-buying sort of luck, either. At least in most cases he didn’t. Though he too laughed about it, hedged about it, he came to see his wife as the exception.”

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Continue reading “Her mysterious death in Spain is still unsolved 35 years later”

Writing about the government’s antitrust case against Meta is a little like putting on an old sweater — it’s comfortable and worn, but also has kind of a funky smell (maybe it’s best for everyone if I don’t continue with this metaphor). In any case, I have been writing about this topic off and on for more than half a decade now. I wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer from 2017 to 2024) when the case was first launched in 2020, at the tail end of the first Trump administration. After a bunch of presentations from the Federal Trade Commission and a variety of opinions from Meta watchers and antitrust experts, the case was thrown out because Judge Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said the government failed to provide compelling evidence that Meta had a monopoly on the market for any kind of distinct market for something known as “social networking.”

I wrote about the case again in 2020 when it was revived by the Biden administration, based in part on arguments from antitrust theorist Lina Khan, who took over as the chairman of the FTC. At that point, Boasberg ruled that the government had met his test for showing that Meta had a monopoly on a distinct enough market for him to let the case proceed. At the time, he said that “while there are certainly bones one could pick with the FTC’s market-definition allegations, the Court does not find them fatally devoid of meat.” Meta tried to get the court to dismiss the case in 2022 for a variety of reasons, none of which had much substance, and then both sides basically said they needed more time to get their arguments in order and marshall all of the evidence, and that’s how it took three years before the case actually showed up in court.

During that time, of course, the US switched presidents, and Trump returned for a second term. That’s when all hell broke loose on a host of different fronts: massive tariffs against China and dozens of other nations, threats to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, threats to make Canada the 51st state, mass deportations of alleged criminals — including some US citizens and green-card holders — to a for-profit prison in El Salvador, without a trial or any evidence being provided (Boasberg is also hearing a case about that, by a strange coincidence). Homeland Security and ICE are using artificial intelligence and surveillance software to track down “undesirables,” including anyone who has said anything even remotely positive about Palestine, or remotely negative about either Trump or his bizarre and likely also illegal policies (I wrote about this for last week’s edition of The Torment Nexus, in case you missed it).

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Continue reading “Meta may be bad but the FTC’s antitrust case is still weak”

From The Standard: “She fell in love with the book, originally written by Erich Maria Remarque in 1928, in high school. Taking the German point of view, it follows soldier Paul Baumer through the trenches during the last years of the First World War. It had twice been adapted for the screen before, but not since 1979. It stayed at the back of Paterson’s mind as she pursued a career as a triathlete, winning numerous races around the world before coming across the book again, by chance, in a charity shop. When she and her husband, Simon Marshall, enquired about the rights, they were stunned to find them relatively affordable. The pair went for it and Paterson spent the next decade trying to get the film optioned, working on drafts of the script with writing partner Ian Stokell and funding the licence fee renewals by winning triathlons.”

The strange tale of how a sea lion in California came to be called Alice

From Strange Company: “Alice and her husband of many years, Lee, were both from Mississippi, but since 1917, they lived in California and the Pacific Northwest, where Lee worked as a salesman and saw sharpener.  In September of 1965, Alice died at their home in Santa Cruz, and Lee arranged to send her body to her home town of Terry, Mississippi, for burial.  At the same time, the Boyd Science Museum in San Rafael, California, was awaiting the arrival of a sea lion that was also being shipped from Santa Cruz.  This was when Fate arranged that the young sea lion and the elderly housewife would be forever entwined. During the shipping process, the bill of lading that was meant to accompany Alice’s corpse somehow wound up in the crate containing the sea lion.  When the animal arrived at the museum, the employees were both intrigued and extremely confused.  Who was Alice Parsons, and why was a sea lion named in her honor?  They shrugged and decided to roll with it.  From then on, the creature was known as “Alice.”

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Continue reading “She ran triathlons for 16 years to finance this Netflix movie”

From Amusing Planet: “Sometime in the summer of 1791 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell ill. By late November, his condition worsened dramatically. He became bedridden, suffering from swelling, pain, and persistent vomiting. Around two weeks later, on 5 December, he died at his home in Vienna. Mozart himself was deeply troubled by his deteriorating health and feared he was being poisoned. He believed the poison was Aqua Tofana, a colourless, tasteless, and odourless liquid that could be mixed with the victim’s food without detection. When administered gradually, it mimicked symptoms of common illnesses such as cholera or influenza. This poison is believed to have been invented by an Italian woman named Thofania d’Adamo in the 17th century. It quickly gained notoriety in southern Italy, particularly among women seeking to rid themselves of their husbands and claim their inheritances.”

Google is developing an LLM that could help us communicate with dolphins

From Scientific American: “Dolphins are renowned for their intelligence and social skills. These large-brained marine mammals communicate using individualized signature clicks and whistles and even seem to recognize their own “names.” Now a few researchers think a form of two-way communication with dolphins could be on the horizon. In collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the nonprofit Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), Google has announced progress on what the team has as the first large language model (LLM) for dolphin vocalizations, called DolphinGemma. WDP provided acoustic data from the species to train the LLM. Teams at Georgia Tech and Google then asked the model to generate “dolphinlike” sequences of sounds. “Half of it was background noise stuff that you expect from the ocean,” says computer scientist Thad Starner. But the rest had authentic-sounding clicks, whistles and burst pulses—rapid sequences of clicks that dolphins often utter during fighting and other behavior.”

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Continue reading “Aqua Tofana was the 17th-century husband killer”

From the ICIJ: “Although his own empire’s resources were depleted, Churchill wanted the United States to control the Soviets in Europe through the use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets still appeared far away from developing their own atomic weapons, and would respect American dominance if exerted. Dropping the bomb—or at least “a showdown” with the implied threat of doing so—must be a vital tool in curbing Soviet communism, Churchill argued. Privately, Churchill suggested that America strike first, before it was too late. According to FBI records, he urged Sen. Styles Bridges, a conservative Republican from New Hampshire active in foreign affairs, to back a preemptory and devastating attack on Moscow. “He [Churchill] pointed out that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin wiping it out, it would be a very easy problem to handle the balance of Russia, which would be without direction,” Bridges told the FBI.

This medieval manuscript features a Yoda lookalike, killer snails and savage rabbits

From Open Culture: “As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field would hesitate to take on the challenge of such a manuscript in full. But what if we told you it comes with illustrations of demons running amok, knights battling snails, killer rabbits and other animals taking their revenge on humanity, a dead ringer for Yoda, and the penitent harlot Thäis? These are just a few of the characters that grace the pages of the Smithfield Decretals. When it was originally published as an already-illuminated manuscript in the 1230s, the margins of the text were deliberately left blank by the original French scribes so that future owners of the text could add their own notes and annotations. And they did.”

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Continue reading “Churchill urged the US to hit Moscow with an atomic bomb”

From The Guardian: “Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie. Rudi explained to Peter that what he was about to tell him had to stay secret. He could not discuss it with his friends, and certainly not with Michael, his younger brother. Peter nodded, and Rudi began: “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.” Rudi came to the most important part of the conversation. “Would you be willing to become an intelligence officer like me?” he asked. Peter’s head was spinning, and he didn’t know what to think or say. But he nodded his assent.”

Breakthrough Prize winning physicist says quantum physics is nonsense

From Scientific American: “In the pantheon of modern physics, few figures can match the quiet authority of Gerard ’t Hooft. The Dutch theoretical physicist, now a professor emeritus at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has spent much of the past half-century reshaping our understanding of the fundamental forces that knit together reality. But ’t Hooft’s unassuming, soft-spoken manner belies his towering scientific stature, which is better revealed by the prodigious numbers of prestigious prizes he has accrued, which include a Nobel Prize, a Wolf Prize, a Franklin Medal, and many more.His latest accolade, announced on April 5, is the most lucrative in all of science: a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth $3 million, in recognition of ’t Hooft’s myriad contributions to physics across his long career. In a conversation with Scientific American, ’t Hooft spoke about his Breakthrough Prize, his optimism for the future of particle physics and his dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics.”

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Continue reading “His father recruited him to be a deep-cover KGB spy in the US”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus that was titled “Be careful what you say on social media, they are listening,” which was triggered in part by the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia University who took part in pro-Palestine demonstrations on the campus. Khalil was taken by agents of ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security — and told that his visa was revoked. When they were told that Khalil had a green card, making him a legal resident of the US, the agents said that this was being revoked as well, something that typically requires a ruling from an immigration court judge. Since I wrote that, Khalil has been in a detention facility in Louisiana. His attorney said this week that his case will be heard by Friday, and a judge will determine whether he can legally be deported or must be released. The judge ordered the government to provide all the evidence against Khalil by end of day Wednesday. To quote my previous post:

The notice given to Khalil after he was detained said that he could be deported because “the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” What is this based on? No evidence was provided at the time. Did he throw any bombs? No. Did he shoot someone? No. Did he advocate violence against Jews? Not as far as we know. But isn’t participating in a peaceful protest protected by the First Amendment? It certainly used to be. But Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has said that Khalil’s detention is “not about free speech,” and that “no one has a right to a green card.” The President said on X that ICE “detained a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student,” and that this would be what he called “the first arrest of many to come.”

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Continue reading “Be careful what you say on social media, part 2”

From Now I Know: “LaChappa is 41 years old right now. His three-year pro career topped out in the low minors more than two decades ago. But if prior history is any indicator, sometime in the next few weeks, the San Diego Padres will sign LaChappa to a minor league contract — just like they have every year since 1996. When the Padres drafted LaChappa in 1993, they had high hopes for the local-born left-handed pitching prospect. He was taking some practice throws off on the side when something went wrong; he clutched his chest and fell to the ground. He was having a heart attack, caused by an undiagnosed virus around his heart. LaChappa survived but would never be the same. At age 20, his career was over. It was unlikely that LaChappa would ever be able to work again, in any capacity. So, the Padres brought him back the next year, and have continued to do so every year, not only providing him with some much-needed cash but, more important, allowing him to maintain his medical insurance.”

Authorities in Boston have busted a high-end brothel charging $600 an hour

From the Wall Street Journal: “Eager to gain access to an exclusive establishment near Harvard University, biotech executives, doctors, lawyers and politicians filled out applications and handed over IDs, work badges and personal references. This elite club was a high-end brothel charging up to $600 an hour for sexual encounters in luxury apartments in Cambridge, Mass. Now, that unusual trove of personal information is serving as evidence in a series of criminal hearings that have pulled back the curtain on upscale sex work. Dozens of prominent Boston-area men, who lost a legal battle for anonymity, are facing misdemeanor charges that have caused major public fallout. Cambridge City Councilor Paul Toner, among the alleged sex buyers, is confronting calls for his resignation and has been stripped of committee assignments. Others have left high-profile posts in business and medicine without explanation. Most have avoided the closely watched proceedings, dubbed “The Cambridge Brothel Hearings” by local media, where names—more than 30 so far—have emerged in batches.”

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Continue reading “The Padres signed him but he hasn’t played in 20 years”