Month: September 2025

From Wikipedia: “The Mocking of Christ is a small 13th-century panel painting by the Italian artist Cimabue. It depicts the mocking of Jesus and is one of three panels known from Cimabue’s Diptych of Devotion. The painting was discovered hanging above the hotplate in the kitchen of an elderly woman living in Compiègne, northern France. The woman was in her nineties and was selling the house, which had been built in the 1960s, and moving from the area. Ahead of the move in June 2019 the owner called in a local auctioneer to determine if any of her possessions were worth selling; the remainder were to be thrown away. The work was put up for auction in 2019 and reached a hammer price of 19.5 million Euros, which reached 24 million Euros once selling fees were included. The winning bid was placed on behalf of two anonymous collectors, and set a new world record for a pre-1500 artwork sold at auction.”

A shipwreck eluded searchers for 139 years but citizen scientists found it in two hours

From the Smithsonian: “On September 15, 1886, the F.J. King was transporting a load of iron ore across Lake Michigan when the ship encountered a storm and started leaking. The crew tried to pump out the water, but the three-masted schooner eventually became so flooded that Captain William Griffin ordered everyone to abandon ship. They clambered onto the ship’s yawl boat and headed for shore, where they were later picked up by a nearby schooner, La Petite. In the early morning hours, they watched the F.J. King sink bow-first beneath the waves. For decades, shipwreck hunters searched for the vessel without success. The F.J. King proved so elusive she even earned a reputation as a “ghost ship.” Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association, led the efforts to find the F.J. King along with his research partner Bob Jaeck. They decided to invite 20 citizen scientists and historians along for the search, to share in the excitement of looking for a missing wreck.”

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From Air Mail: “Nick’s storied surname, sterling credentials, and high-level associations put him in the upper reaches of the American establishment. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1987 and clerking on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he became a partner in the Los Angeles office of Perkins Coie. Nick founded the Rockefeller Asia Advisory Group, RockVest Development, Rockefeller Pacific Ventures, Rockefeller Resources International, and the Rockefeller International Fund. He mingled with George and Barbara Bush, had the Reagans’ private numbers at both their home in Bel Air and their ranch in Santa Barbara. He was a Davos man, naturally, appearing on an Asia-related panel there with Klaus Schwab, founder of the elite business conclave. But after he died, when Kim phoned the Rockefeller Global Family Office, in New York — a call that dozens of people should have made over the previous 40 years — she was told that Nick was “not recognized as a member of the Rockefeller family.”

Venus flytraps are only native to the Carolinas and one woman is on a crusade to save them

From Garden & Gun: “The plant should be called the Carolina spidertrap, because it’s got nothing to do with Venus and hardly, if ever, catches flies. The most common victims are wolf and lynx spiders, carpenter ants, and daddy long-legs. For reasons biologists still don’t fully understand, flytraps’ native range is limited to a roughly eighty-mile strip of the eastern Carolinas, concentrated in North Carolina. Today they are known and grown the world over, turning up in botanical gardens, in the home collections of carnivorous plant enthusiasts, and in pop culture. Like many highly specialized species, they are fighting extinction as development steadily encroaches. They once grew in stunning abundance across their small range. Today, less than one hundred distinct populations remain in North Carolina, half of them harboring fewer than five hundred plants and some with less than a dozen. Still, some hotspots exist, and the rapidly growing town of Boiling Spring Lakes is one of them.”

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From LitHub: “When Bruce Lee met Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a month after the 1968 national college basketball championship, he was still known as Lew Alcindor, the most hyped young basketball star in history. Weeks after the 1967 championship, the NCAA banned the dunk — in what became known as the “Alcindor rule” — an effort he believed was racist. One night after watching a Zatoichi flick, he was struck by the idea that the blind swordsman’s grace, control, and precision might be exactly what he needed. Instead of brute force, he thought, I will slide and roll and slip by them without fouling. In New York City, Alcindor started training in aikido. That fall Alcindor visited the Black Belt offices to meet a fellow aikido adept, Mito Uyehara, and ask him if he knew someone with whom he could continue his martial arts training. Alcindor had become especially curious about tai chi. “This guy Bruce Lee—he’s really good at it,” Mito told him. “He knows more about those things than I do.”

Wine experts can tell fake wines apart from the real thing because of the atomic bomb

From the Kitchen Sisters: “In a laboratory, deep under a mile high stretch of the Alps on the French-Italian border, Philippe Hubert, a physicist at the University of Bordeaux, tests a suspect bottle of wine.“I put the bottle close to the detector. Then I close the shielding and we start to record the gamma rays,” says Hubert. “We are looking for radioactivity in the wine. Most of the time the collectors send me bottles of wine because they want to know if it is fake or not.” What Hubert is looking for is the radioactive isotope cesium-137, which doesn’t exist in nature but was produced by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by the Cold War nuclear tests done by both the US and Russia. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor also released a lot of cesium-137. “It is in the atmosphere,” says Hubert. “And with rain this radioactivity falls on the grapes. When you make the wine this comes into the wine.”

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The current battle over regulating speech online seems new, in part because the Trump government and its allies are going to extreme lengths to police speech about the murder of Charlie Kirk (a man who trumpeted the benefits of free speech, but is now the reason why people are losing their jobs for saying negative things about him). This is a twisted situation, to be sure, a kind of right-wing pretzel logic that many Trump acolytes seem to be able to internalize without even noticing that their position contradicts itself in multiple ways. But it is only the latest bizarre spin on a struggle that has been going on almost since the internet was invented: How should we – internet users as well as technological entities like social-media platforms and political entities like governments – behave in a world where the problem is not how to protect free speech, but how to cope with an excess of speech, especially one driven by algorithms whose internal workings we have little knowledge of and even less control over.

I’m bringing all this up not just because of the Charlie Kirk situation, which is quite obviously a case of “Free speech for me but not for thee,” but because YouTube just announced that it is going to reinstate the accounts that it banned for spreading disinformation, whether about the dangers of COVID-19, the results of the 2020 election, or about the riots on January 6th. One of the accounts that was banned, of course, belonged to the current president of the United States, whose account was blocked because he posted comments that were perceived as inciting violence (his account was restored in 2023). YouTube’s decision also comes at the same time as it is fighting a lawsuit launched by Trump over the ban on his account, and the company has no doubt been following other lawsuits in which Meta, X, ABC and Paramount all paid huge sums of money even though there was arguably no legal basis whatsoever for Trump’s claims.

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From Ironic Sans: “George Nissen didn’t invent the first ever trampoline, but he popularized trampolines for sports and recreation from the 1950s through the 1980s, and came up with new designs. One story tells how George and his son Ron tried to get a trampoline up to the top of one of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. At some point in its history, the very top of the Great Pyramid of Khufu was taken off, and left the top of the pyramid with a flat surface. In 1977, since Ron and George were going to be in Egypt for a trampoline event anyway, they wondered if they could get one up to the top of the pyramid. They carried a mini-trampoline to the top of the pyramid, where 63 year old George Nissen did flips. But that wasn’t the dream. The dream was a full-size trampoline. Inspired by how the pyramid had been built one stone at a time, they came up with a way to bring a full size trampoline to the top of the pyramid in pieces.”

She didn’t know what it was like to see the world in three dimensions until one day she did

From NPR: “Dr. Oliver Sacks, famous author and neuroscientist, was at a party a few years ago and he was introduced to another neuroscientist named Susan Barry. They got talking and she said that she had been born cross-eyed, so she had never been able to see with both eyes at the same time – no stereoscopic vision. Sacks asked if she could imagine what it’s like to see the world with two eyes, and she said yes. Three months later she wrote him a letter and said she was wrong, and described how she had started training her brain to see in three dimensions and it had suddenly worked. After three weeks, one morning she got into her car. She glanced down at the steering wheel and the steering wheel was floating in front of the dashboard. “It was in its own three-dimensional space,” she wrote. “I had never had that type of perception before and I didn’t believe it, cause I knew that this was impossible. So I tried to put it out of my mind.”

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From The Guardian: “For years, scientists have known that several species spontaneously align their bodies with the earth’s magnetic field when engaging in certain behaviours. A team of 12 scientists from universities in Germany and the Czech Republic came together in a unique study that observed 37 breeds of dog over a two-year period. Exactly 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations later, the team reach one incredible finding: “dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the north–south axis.” Dogs join cattle, roe deer, red deer, hunting red foxes, red foxes, coyotes and grey wolves as yet another mammal to have a mechanism of “magnetoreception.” Although their behaviour was only evident under calm conditions, it was a breakthrough in demonstrating changes in dog behaviour in response to the Earth’s magnetic field.”

Scientists still aren’t sure exactly how the world’s most popular pain reliever works

From Scientific American: “You’re unlikely to open a medicine cabinet in the U.S. without seeing a bottle of Tylenol, the brand name of a pain reliever and fever reducer also sold generically as acetaminophen. A health care trade association estimates that 52 million consumers use a product containing acetaminophen  every week in the U.S. The drug is in the news after Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, implied that acetaminophen that is taken when a person is pregnant can cause autism in that person’s offspring. His statements run counter to the most conclusive scientific evidence to date. The drug is safe and effective when used as directed, but there is something surprising about it: no one is certain how acetaminophen works to relieve pain and fever. There are at least two theories about the mechanism of the drug, which was first  synthesized in the late 1800s, but debate continues.”

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.

From TechSpot: “In a freak series of seemingly random events, a Switch owner’s pet fish accessed his eShop account and added funds to it using his credit card. The crime was caught on video during an unsupervised live stream. Hundreds of viewers watched as the little fish stole their owner’s identity while he was gone. The entire heist started as an experiment to see if fish could complete Pokémon Scarlet and Violet unassisted. To do it, Japanese YouTuber “Mutekimaru Channel” set up a webcam focused on his fish bowl. Motion-tracking software monitored the fish as they swam across an overlaid grid populated with controller inputs. If a fish paused or changed direction, the correlating controller input registered in the game. Mutekimaru had done this experiment before. In 2020, his fish successfully completed the test, finishing Pokémon Sapphire in about 3,195 hours — something an actively playing human could do in around 30. However, this time around, things did not go as quite as planned.”

Why the Russians decapitated Major Tom after his last space mission

From Nautilus: “It was a little before 7 in the morning in western Russia when Major Tom reentered the atmosphere. Though he had no window to see the approaching Earth, the return had been announced earlier that day, when the braking engines were activated for six minutes, and his recovery capsule separated from the rest of the spacecraft. After having endured 30 days in space, it was about time to come back. As soon as the capsule reached the atmosphere, the heating and the G forces began. Major Tom was thrown against the roof of his compartment while the air slowed the capsule and the outside temperature rose to about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). At 7:11 a.m. on Sunday, May 19, 2013, the Bion-M1 spacecraft finally landed in the green field of a Russian farm. Alexander Andreev-Andrievskiy would arrive 10 minutes later. The 30-year-old biologist had been awake all night worrying. “I was very anxious,” he told me. “I did not know if the mice were doing well.”

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.