From The Guardian: “A Chinese paraglider who was accidentally propelled more than 8,000 metres high by an updraft has been banned from the activity for six months after a video of his ordeal went viral. Peng Yujiang began from an elevation of about 3,000m in the Qilian mountain range in northern China, where he intended to test a new second-hand equipment purchase without making a proper flight, according to an investigative report by the Gansu Provincial Aviation Sports Association. However about 20 minutes into his practice he was caught in a strong updraft, which sent him soaring more than 5,000m higher, in line with flight paths and nearly the height of Mount Everest. Video from Peng’s mounted camera showed him above the clouds and covered in icicles as the temperature dropped to a reported -35C, as he tried to control his equipment.”
The hats that Smurfs wear are connected to freed slaves and ancient Rome
From Pipeline Comics: “The hat that Smurfs wear, with a peak that is slumped over, isI called a Phrygian cap, and this style of headgear is over 2000 years old. Phrygis, in case your curious, is the name of an ancient group of people who lived in the Balkans region of eastern Europe — Greece, Turkey, Romania, etc. Their language and culture went extinct by the 5th century AD. Near the end, the Romans thought of them as being lazy and dull. The hat was adopted during the French Revolution as “the red cap of liberty” by the revolutionaries. And while the artist Peyo — creator of the Smurfs — was Belgian, he was working with French publishers, so drawing inspiration from a French symbol isn’t too crazy. The thing that Peyo maybe didn’t realize and the French revolutionaries definitely didn’t realize, though, is that it’s the wrong hat.”
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From the New York Times: “Kelly Wakefield, a professional gardener, was doing her spring cleanup of a public park in St. Albans, Vt., when she stumbled upon a mysterious metal box under a pile of leaves. She shook the box and heard the telltale jangle of coins. She opened the metal box and was floored by the bounty inside. She ran to her truck and drove straight to her mother’s house. What exactly had she found? Was any of it real? Did she need a lawyer? Wakefield, 46, soon learned that she had stumbled upon a treasure chest intentionally hidden by Michael Cloherty O’Connell, the author of two history books that led readers on scavenger hunts around the Northeast. The box contained coins, antiques, a Civil War-era bullet, a map and a note from the author himself. It is now in a safe deposit box, Wakefield said, and has yet to be appraised.”
Why we call dogs that are trained to help the blind “seeing eye” dogs
From Neatorama: “Have you ever wondered why a blind person’s guide dog is called a seeing eye dog instead of just a guide dog? That’s because they came came from the organization The Seeing Eye, founded in 1929 by Morris Frank. Frank lost his sight in one eye at age six, and the other at 16. He heard about an innovative program in Germany that trained dogs to guide blind people. Frank ended up going to Switzerland to work with dog trainer Dorothy Harrison Eustis and came back with a female German shepherd he named Buddy. The real innovation in training Buddy and other guide dogs was “intelligent disobedience.”Buddy was trained to disregard her owner’s commands when the situation called for it, such as in dangerous traffic. In 1928 Frank gave a demonstration in New York City to show reporters how Buddy could guide him safely in walking through Manhattan. The next year, Frank and Eustis opened the dog training program that’s still in operation today.”
Archeologists studied a Da Vinci sketch and found secret tunnels underneath a castle
From Popular Mechanics: “The artworks of Leonardo da Vinci are vast and storied. But even amongst such a well-studied body of work, there can still be a few surprises left to discover. And recently, a team of researchers discovered one of those surprises — one drawing of a castle tunnel from a 1400s-era castle. The drawing was of Sforza Castle, and it included depictions of numerous underground tunnels — tunnels that had never been found. The team — which included experts from Polytechnic University of Milan, Codevintec, and Sforza Castel—teamed up to employ ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning that mapped multiple feet under the castle. In doing so, they discovered not only that the tunnels Leonardo alluded to in his drawings existed, but that they may only be a small piece of an intricate system weaving throughout the site.”
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.
This 1,200-year-old school is the oldest continuously operating university
From Wikipedia: “The University of al-Qarawiyyin is located in Fez, Morocco. It was founded as a mosque by Fatima al-Fihri in 857–859 and subsequently became one of the leading spiritual and educational centers of the Islamic Golden Age. It was incorporated into Morocco’s modern state university system in 1963 and officially renamed “University of Al Quaraouiyine” two years later. The mosque building itself is also a significant complex of historical Moroccan and Islamic architecture that features elements from many different periods of Moroccan history. Scholars consider al-Qarawiyyin to have been effectively run as a madrasa until after World War II. UNESCO and the Guinness World Records, have cited al-Qarawiyyin as the oldest university or oldest continually operating higher learning institution in the world.”
There are dozens of Christian saints who would be considered transgender today
From The Conversation: “There are at least 34 documented stories of transgender saints’ lives from the early centuries of Christianity. Originally appearing in Latin or Greek, several stories of transgender saints made their way into vernacular languages. Of the 34 original saints, at least three gained widespread popularity in medieval Europe: St. Eugenia, St. Euphrosyne and St. Marinos. All three were born as women but cut their hair and put on men’s clothes to live as men and join monasteries. Eugenia, raised pagan, joined a monastery to learn more about Christianity and later became abbot. Euphrosyne joined a monastery to escape an unwanted suitor and spent the rest of his life there. Marinos, born Marina, decided to renounce womanhood and live with his father at the monastery as a man. Eugenia’s story appeared in two of the most popular manuscripts of their day – Ælfric’s “Lives of Saints” and “The Golden Legend.”
He had less than 30 seconds to sink a basketball from four different spots for $10,000
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
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I don’t have an iPhone, I have a Pixel. And I run Windows and Linux on my desktops, not MacOS. That said, I am a longtime Macbook Air fan, having had more than half a dozen (including the one I am typing this on), and a longtime iPad owner. To me, the Macbook Air is an amazing device — there are some that can duplicate the specs, but the build quality is unparalleled. Same with the iPad: I have tried multiple Android tablets and none were as good. And when I first got an iPhone way back when (I had a BlackBerry before that, as any good Canadian would), I was blown away by how revolutionary it seemed. Inventing that device was the modern equivalent of inventing the wheel or the internal combustion engine — a spectacular stroke of genius that changed the world forever (for better or worse, depending on your perspective on smartphones). Steve Jobs was definitely a genius on multiple levels, although he could be somewhat problematic as a person.
In any case, none of that means I won’t criticize Apple when it deserves to be criticized, and there are plenty of times when that is true — for example, when the company brags about its commitment to privacy, but still hands over control of user data in China to the government, including access to the encryption keys. Or gives the National Security Agency in the US access to servers so the agency can mine that data in search of who knows what. Or is accused of benefitting from cheap supply chains where suppliers like Foxconn run what have been called “labour camps,” and other companies use children as young as seven years old to dig up the precious minerals involved.
The most recent glaring flaw in what is otherwise a great company was highlighted with a court decision earlier this month, but in reality it has been obvious (to me, at least, and I’m sure to many others) for quite some time. The court ruling was just the most recent event in a lawsuit that has been in progress now for almost five years. The decision came from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a district court judge in California who has been hearing the case since 2021. Without going back through the weeds on every aspect of this case, it was launched by Epic Games in 2020, and its target was the heart of the iPhone money machine: namely, the 30-percent fee Apple takes whenever a user buys anything through an app. Handling transactions outside of the app store in order to avoid this 30-percent fee can get an app maker suspended or banned.
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From National Library of Medicine: “The structure of modern residency programs in North America originated at Johns Hopkins Hospital during the last decade of the 19th century, under the aegis and influence of William Stewart Halsted. Halsted was a surgical innovator who greatly shaped surgical practice in the 20th century. As a young surgeon in New York, Halsted was a highly skilled, bold, fast and daring surgeon who was charismatic and sociable and excelled at teaching medical students. In Baltimore, he was a slow and meticulous surgeon who was a recluse and who avoided teaching medical students when possible. Between these 2 periods, Halsted and some colleagues accidentally became addicted to cocaine, when in late 1884 they, being aware of a new report that cocaine could be used as local anesthesia, experimented upon themselves.”
A group of chimpanzees have learned how to communicate over long distances
From La Brujula Verde: “A team of researchers documented a previously unseen behavior in a group of wild chimpanzees in the forests of Guinea-Bissau, Africa: the deliberate use of stones to produce sounds, which they interpret as a sophisticated form of long-distance communication. The team, led by biologist Sem van Loon, discovered that adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, leaving behind piles of these rocks at the base. Van Loon explains that this behavior, which she calls “stone-assisted drumming,” is a variant of a previously known practice in these primates. But there are differences, because while traditional drumming is usually preceded by silence and then bursts into loud sounds, in this new pattern the chimpanzees first emit loud vocalizations before striking the stones against the trees again.”
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From The Wrap: “A remote indigenous tribe Amazon tribe in Brazil has sued The New York Times, claiming a story about its first exposure to the internet has led to widespread reports that its members have become addicted to pornography. Filed last week in Los Angeles, the Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley’s lawsuit also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants and seeks at least $180 million from each. The sovereign community alleges the story, about the arrival of Starlink in 2024, falsely portrays its 2,000 people as unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography. “These statements were not only inflammatory but conveyed to the average reader that the Marubo people had descended into moral and social decline as a direct result of internet access,” the lawsuit says.
Japanese wrestler became a member of parliament and a hostage negotiator
From Grantland: “One of the best ways to appreciate the full glory of Antonio Inoki, the legendary Japanese professional wrestler, WWE Hall of Famer, and three-term member of his country’s parliament, is to Google image-search the phrase “Antonio Inoki bitch-slap.” You will see Inoki bitch-slapping the Japanese ambassador to Pakistan, a Cuban Olympian, a Japanese pop idol and member of the girl group SKE48, a man standing shirtless and in shorts in the snow, a 55-year-old female Japanese politician, the nationalistic former governor of Tokyo, a young Pakistani child, a man cradling an infant, a comedian, and scores of others. Fans, politicians, pop stars, and children from all over the world line up to receive his famed bitch-slap in the belief that it will invigorate them and transfer some of Inoki’s “burning fighting spirit.”
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From Public Seminar: “Electronic monitoring came into the criminal justice system not as a result of extensive research, but in part because a district judge in Albuquerque avidly pursued the idea in the 1970s. Judge Jack Love had read about the use of location tracking for livestock, and was further inspired by a Spiderman comic strip in which Kingpin forcibly slaps an “electronic radar device” onto Spiderman’s wrist so he can keep an eye on him. Motivated by a desire to keep people out of the brutal New Mexico prisons, Love convinced a computer salesman to design a similar device, and in 1983, a probation violator was the first to be fitted with one. States like California, for example, have done this to address prison overcrowding. Today, the number of people under electronic monitoring is actually quite small (about 200,000 at any given time) compared to the overall population under the umbrella of non-custodial corrections like parole.”
The Australian outback is being overrun by hundreds of thousands of feral camels
From National Geographic: “Jack Carmody has built a sizable YouTube following by showing his viewers what it takes to run a cattle station in the Australian outback—the rugged work of mending troughs, reinforcing fences, and shooting trespassers. Feral horses and donkeys, that is, and one particularly destructive invasive species: camels. Introduced in the 19th century to help colonists survey the country’s vast interior, the creatures are now wreaking havoc across the outback. Australia is now home to the world’s largest feral camel population, with estimates from several hundred thousand to as many as a million. Females can give birth every two years and live up to 40 years in the wild, meaning the number of camels can double every nine years. Weighing an average of 1,000 pounds, they roam in herds from fewer than 10 to several hundred, trampling ecosystems and destroying infrastructure. The creatures are voracious consumers of plants, competing with other wildlife and livestock.”
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If you’ve been following the news about Google’s I/O conference at all, you probably know that it was all about artificial intelligence — and that isn’t an exaggeration. Literally every announcement, every feature, and every app demonstration involved AI in some form or another. An autonomous AI agent called Project Astra; an AI-powered agent for writing computer code known as Jules; AI-authored “smart replies” in Gmail; an AI-powered web browsing service called Project Mariner; an AI shopping service that lets you try on clothes virtually; real-time AI-powered translation in Google Meet; an AI-powered image generator called Imagen; an AI-driven video generator called Veo; a service that blends all of these to make movies, called Flow; and of course AI in search, whether through the AI Overview at the top of a regular search, through a separate “AI Mode” search tab, or through the standalone Gemini AI app.
As Casey Newton wrote in his Platformer newsletter, Google didn’t explicitly talk about the implications of all of this AI machinery, either for its business model or for the future of the open web, but the conclusions are fairly obvious:
Snap out of this fever dream long enough and you can spot hints of the world that is coming into existence. Gmail is learning how to write in your voice, and will begin to do so later this year. The camera screen will chat with you while you are fixing your bike, telling you what to do every step of the way. NotebookLM will start generating TED talk-like videos of your PDFs for you to watch. An executive on stage says that before too long you will be able to generate a how-to video for almost any subject you like. And while the company continues to protest, it seems obvious that this new world will give you many fewer reasons to visit the open web. Google will generate the things you once searched for, and all the businesses that once relied on those searches will need a Plan B.
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From the BBC: “A manuscript once considered an unofficial copy of Magna Carta is now believed to be a genuine version and one of the world’s most valuable documents, according to UK academics. Harvard Law School paid $27.50 for it in 1946 and for years it has remained tucked away in its library, its true identity unknown. But two medieval history professors have concluded it is an extraordinarily rare and lost original Magna Carta from 1300, in the reign of King Edward I, that could be worth millions. According to Harvard’s library accession register, the document was acquired in 1946 and was described in an auction catalogue as a “copy made in 1327… somewhat rubbed and damp-stained”. Magna Carta is a charter first issued by King John in 1215 that guaranteed the liberties and rights of his subjects and also placed the Crown under the authority of the law. Considered a key step in the evolution of human rights against oppressive rulers, it has influenced constitutions around the world.”
One of the greatest competitors in sports just retired but you’ve probably never heard of him
From the Washington Post: “Recently the news came that the sumo wrestler known as Hakuho had officially retired, after 17 years in the sport’s top division. You probably haven’t heard of this 6-foot-4-inch, 350-pound Mongolian. But you should have, because few human beings have so thoroughly mastered their craft the way Hakuho did.It is hard to overstate what he accomplished. Hakuho was the Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic of sumo, all in one man. He was a Yokozuna — the sport’s top rank — for 14 years; there have been only 73 ever. After winning his first tournament in 2006, he claimed the Emperor’s Cup in 45 of the 80 tournaments in which he competed. He was the runner-up in 18 more. For comparison, Kakuryu Rikisaburo, the other Yokozuna in the ring toward the end of Hakuho’s career, won a mere six tournaments — in part because he had the misfortune of overlapping with Hakuho. Hakuho won 13 more tournaments than the second-winningest wrestler ever, Taiho Koki.”
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From Toronto Life: “Elaine Hoffman, a 71-year-old grandmother, sat in her suburban Indiana home and turned on her computer. A banner ad caught her attention: its claim seemed unbelievable — that she could make money with the click of a mouse. Hoffman knew her way around investments. She had a math degree and had worked as a financial planner before a liver transplant forced her to retire early. By keeping abreast of the markets and investing in stocks and bonds, she’d built enough of a nest egg to ensure that she and her husband would be comfortable for the rest of their lives. Still, she was curious about the ad. When the video ended, a phone number appeared on her screen. Hoffman dialled it and was soon speaking to a man who worked for an operation called Glenridge Capital. He explained tha Glenridge was an investment service that offered clients a way into the lucrative world of binary options trading.”
Mark Twain’s books may have been comedies but his life was a tragedy
From The Atlantic: “Ron Chernow’s new book Mark Twain forces us to a conclusion about its subject: he was clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. He was also struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man. The Twain of the printed page is irreverent and quotable, but the private Twain is petulant, self-pitying, narcissistic, and afflicted with tragedy and misery of his own making and of God’s. Mark Twain is funny. Mark Twain is funny the way the Book of Job is funny.”
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From Toronto Life: “To fellow tourists he met around the world, Jeffery Shuman was a semi-retired developer with a bright smile, an even tan and a fat wallet. In truth, he was a legendary bank robber on the run from the Toronto police and the US Marshals. He had robbed 20 banks over a five-year stretch in and around Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary, starting in 2010. He was an equal-opportunity criminal, cycling strategically through major institutions including Toronto-Dominion Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, HSBC and Scotiabank. For a while, police thought he might be a long-haul truck driver. He appeared to strike at random, robbing a few banks and then stopping for months, sometimes a year, before starting up again. He was patient and methodical. He also moved with the discipline and efficiency of someone who knew his way around a weapon. One theory was that he had high-level military or police training, which was a chilling thought to detectives. Was he one of them?”
This impossible new color is so rare that only five people have seen it
From Scientific American: “There are only so many colors that the typical human eye can see; estimates put the number just below 10 million. But now, for the first time, scientists say they’ve broken out of that familiar spectrum and into a new world of color. In a paper published on Friday in Science Advances, researchers detail how they used a precise laser setup to stimulate the retinas of five participants, making them the first humans to see a color beyond our visual range: an impossibly saturated bluish green. The researchers used lasers to precisely deliver tiny doses of light to select cone cells in the human eye. First, they mapped a portion of the retina to identify each cone cell as either an S, M or L cone. Then, using the laser, they delivered light only to M cone cells. As the laser shone into his retina, he perceived a tiny square of light, roughly the size of a thumbnail viewed at arm’s distance. In that square, he glimpsed the Emerald City: a color the researchers have named “olo.”
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As many of you may have noticed, some of these Torment Nexus newsletters involve the presentation of a bunch of evidence in the form of links, followed by a well-thought-out conclusion (some may be more well-thought than others, but I let’s not quibble). I want to say up front that this is not one of those newsletters! It’s more of a thinking-out-loud type of thing, and I hope you will come with me on this journey to an unknown and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion 🙂 As some of you know, I am interested in the evolution and social repercussions of what we refer to as AI — which in many cases may just be a form of auto-complete with a large database, or various kinds of machine learning, etc. etc. And I know that many people (perhaps even some of you) see this whole field as anathema, whether because it is controlled by oligarchs, or because it uses too many resources for too little result, or because it is the beginning of a trend that will end with the enslavement of humanity — or possibly all of the above!
I will freely acknowledge all of those existing or potential problems (except perhaps the enslavement thing — that seems unlikely at best). But as a freelance nerd with a lot of time on my hands, I think some interesting questions that emerge from all of this. I’ve written about some of them already, including how AI forces us to think about the nature of consciousness — which isn’t anywhere close to being settled, not by a long shot — and how we might act if we come to the conclusion that an AI is sentient in some sense of that term (and how we might know whether it is or not). But apart from these, there are some interesting real-world questions that come up as well, including: How are people actually using AI? And are those uses ultimately beneficial in a broader sense, or are they going to lead to some kind of universal dumbing-down of Western society? Not to jump to the end too quickly, but I don’t think there’s an overall answer to these questions — in other words, the devil (or angel) is in the details.
I’ve already written about one real-world use case, which is the AI therapy market, in which people who are suffering mental or emotional challenges use chatbots of various kinds as therapists — either because they can’t get a human therapist (even critics of this trend will admit that there is a shortage of trained therapists), because human therapists are too expensive, or because they feel more comfortable talking to a chatbot about whatever they are struggling with, or all of the above. You can read the whole thing if you like, but the conclusion I arrived at was that — for me, at least — the potential for people to actually be helped by this process outweighs any potential negative outcomes. Here’s how I put it:
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From ABC News: “Residents of a neighborhood in the Bay Area community of Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, claim they have found multiple dead birds in their yards on their street. Security cameras even recorded one fowl’s fatality, showing it falling to its death from a power line after a loud pop was captured in the footage. Richmond resident Maximillian Bolling said he witnessed several birds succumb to a horrible death after perching on power lines. “So when they land and it happens, they just quickly explode and it’s really violent,” Bolling told ABC San Francisco station KGO-TV. Bolling said he and his neighbors have now counted at least 13 birds that have met a baffling demise. As the casualties have mounted, locals have speculated on everything from the birds being electrocuted by power lines to a phantom serial bird killer.”
Scientists surprised to discover that sponges move – not very quickly, but they do
From Nautilus: “On a frigid August day, 2,000 feet beneath the frozen surface of the North Atlantic, a remotely operated camera captured a faint pale smudge snaking across the seafloor. The footage seemed unremarkable — mostly brown and gray seafloor, dark but for the illumination from the camera. But the biologists aboard a research icebreaker above were shocked: The smear in the upper left of the screen was the trace of a sea sponge on the move. Sea sponges are not supposed to move. At least scientists didn’t think they were. But there, off the coast of Greenland, along the seamounts of Langseth Ridge, they were very much moving—slowly. Why, you might wonder, would anyone care about a bevy of brainless organisms crawling along the dark ocean bottom? Sea sponges are in fact central engineers of ocean ecosystems; for over 600 million years they’ve been shaping the very nature of Earth’s seafloors. And the discovery of their unexpected mobility redefined these animals as movers and shakers of the deep.”
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From the New York Times: “Jeannette Ralston was at the Lion’s Den bar in San Jose, Calif., when she told her friends that she would be “back in 10 minutes.”She never returned. The next morning, on Feb. 1, 1977, police officers found the 24-year-old woman strangled with the long sleeve of a red women’s dress shirt and squeezed into the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in a parking lot a few minutes away from the bar. Almost 50 years later, the authorities believe that they know who strangled her. Willie Eugene Sims, 69, of Jefferson, Ohio, was arraigned on Friday on a charge of murder in San Jose. The investigation into the killing of Ms. Ralston, a mother and resident of San Mateo, Calif., went cold after no credible leads were initially developed. The police found a carton of Eve cigarettes, a popular brand for women in the 1970s, and the shirt that she was strangled with. They also had a sketch drawn of an unidentified man that her friends saw her leave the bar with the night before she was found.”
This robot is made from natural materials and biodegrades when you are finished with it
From Scientific American: “Picture a robot. What do you see? A rugged, steel-clad machine built to transcend living beings’ organic fragility? Unfortunately, this very quality now threatens to drown the planet in extremely durable e-waste. What if, instead, our increasingly prevalent machines were designed to decay and disappear — like life does? For a study in Science Advances, researchers crafted a robotic arm, and a joysticklike controller to operate it, from pork gelatin and plant cellulose — materials sturdy enough to function yet delicate enough to degrade in backyard compost. They started with cellulose layers derived from cotton pulp, then added glycerol for flexibility and dried the layers for strength. To build sensors, the researchers used a conductive gelatin extracted from pork, in which the flow of ions changes when the material is stretched, bent or pressed. They then folded the flat films and sensors into 3D structures.”
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From the New York Times: “In August 2021, a mysterious package from Sarasota, Fla., showed up in Nicole Archer’s mailbox in Manhattan.Dr. Archer hurried upstairs to her cramped Chelsea apartment with the thick envelope in hand and tore it open at her dining table, revealing a legal document she had wondered about for months.She knew that a beloved college professor had bequeathed her something in her will. She was expecting a modest gift — enough money for a fancy dinner, perhaps, or one of the beaded bracelets the professor liked to make by hand.But when Dr. Archer, 49, saw the number on the last page — $100,000 — she thought there must be a misplaced decimal point.“I truly, honestly believed that I read it wrong,” she said. “I remember following the number with my finger, making sure I understood how many zeros it was.”At about the same time, 30 other people across the country received similar letters, sent at the behest of a professor whose class they had taken years earlier.”
Physicists managed to turn lead into gold but only for a fraction of a second
From Scientific American: “The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost. The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run. Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold. But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means. CERN researchers achieved the feat by aiming beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. The ions occasionally glance past each other, rather than hit head on. When this happens, the intense field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold.”
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From the BBC: “Islanders in the Outer Hebrides say their lives are being disrupted by a mysterious low frequency humming sound that can be heard day and night. Lauren-Grace Kirtley, who has set up a Facebook page dedicated to the “Hebridean Hum”, said about 200 people on Lewis have reported hearing the noise. Dr Kirtley said the sound had prevented her from sleeping properly for several weeks, adding: “It’s impossible to ignore – it is like somebody shouting in your face constantly for attention.” Marcus-Hazel McGowan, who has been using amateur radio techniques to try and find the source, added: “It’s just trying to narrow it down and hoping nobody loses their mind completely over it.” The local council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, said it had received reports relating to low frequency sounds from a small number of islanders.”
Four years after he died, lab-grown parts of a composer’s brain are making new music
From Forbes: “Legendary avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier died in 2021 — but that hasn’t stopped him from making new music. Credit an artificial “brain,” grown from his own cells, that emits sound-triggering electrical signals. This in-vitro structure lives at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. There, through Aug. 3, visitors can wander through “Revivification,” an immersive installation that merges sound and biotechnology to imagine a compelling way creativity could, potentially, live on long after artists die. The provocative installation features tiny 3D organoids, sealed and displayed on a raised pedestal, that resemble a developing human brain. Their neural activity sends signals that activate electromechanical mallets to strike 20 curved, wall-mounted brass plates, sending ambient sound rippling through the gallery.”
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