Month: December 2025

A distant webcam captured the moments the couple’s hiking trip started to unravel.The pair, a boyfriend and girlfriend, were nearing the summit of Grossglockner, the tallest mountain in the Austrian Alps, when their lights appeared on its dark peak.Around midnight, the man said, his girlfriend was struck by sudden exhaustion and could not continue. He said the two made a contentious, if not uncommon, decision: He would leave her behind and continue alone to find help.Hours later, he was out of harm’s way, and the woman was dead. Rescuers found her frozen body later that morning not far from the summit, officials say.Now, nearly a year later, the authorities have accused the man of making a series of mistakes that led to his girlfriend’s death, charging him this month with gross negligent manslaughter. (via the NYT)

Paganini wasn’t buried for 36 years because the Pope thought he made a deal with the devil

There is one musician who is regarded as the greatest violinist in History. One with an intense life, as befitted the Romantic period of his time; one who was sometimes compared to a serial killer and to a vampire; one who was said to be favored by having extraordinarily long fingers and by having made a pact with the devil to achieve his virtuosity: Niccolò Paganini. In May 1840, while at the home of the president of the Senate, he suffered an internal hemorrhage and died. He was fifty-seven years old. Death occurred so quickly that there was no time to call a priest, which, combined with his status as a Mason and the rumor of a diabolical pact, led the prelate to forbid his burial in the cemetery. His body was embalmed and kept in the basement of the same house in which he died. There it remained until 1853, when it could be buried in the Gaione cemetery (Parma). Finally, in 1876, the Pope authorized his burial. (via La Brujula Verde)

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One lucky couple has beaten extraordinary odds to win £1m on the National Lottery — for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, first scooped a seven-figure jackpot playing the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker in June 2018. And now they have done it again by matching five main numbers and the bonus ball in the Lotto draw on 26 November. According to experts at Allwyn, operator of the National Lottery, the odds of winning both the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker and then five numbers and the bonus ball on Lotto are over 24-trillion-to-one. Former hairdresser Richard uses his skills at a shelter for the homeless in Cardiff, a project which received vital National Lottery funding, while also helping out friends by working as a delivery driver. Ex-nurse Faye is a volunteer cook at Cegin Hedyn community kitchen in Carmarthen, while also providing mental health counselling services. (via the BBC)

New research helps solve the mystery of why more women wake up during surgery

Often casually compared to falling into a deep sleep, going under is in fact wildly different from your everyday nocturnal slumber. Not only does a person lose the ability to feel pain, form memories, or move—they can’t simply be nudged back into conscious awareness. But occasionally, people do wake unexpectedly — in about 1 out of every 1,000 to 2,000 surgeries, patients emerge from the fog of anesthesia into the harsh light of the operating room while still under the knife. One question that has dogged researchers over the past several decades is whether women are more likely to find themselves in these unfortunate circumstances. A number of recent studies, including a 2023 meta-analysis, suggest that the answer is yes. Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences helps untangle some of the mystery. In a series of experiments in mice and in humans, the researchers found that females do wake more easily from anesthesia and that testosterone plays an important role in how quickly and deeply we go under, and how easily we wake up. (via Nautilus)

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On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film’s oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production’s “No Animals Were Harmed” certification — Cameron performed CPR on the rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted “Beanie” as his pet. One can understand why a director like Cameron would go to extremes to protect his film’s reputation. But why did a man running one of the most tortuous shoots in Hollywood history, who was reportedly saying things to crewmembers like, “Firing [you] is too merciful” … Why did that guy open his home to a mere rat? “Beanie and I bonded over the whole thing,” he says. “I saved his life. We were brothers. He used to sit on my desk while I was writing Terminator 2, and he lived to a ripe old age. (via The Hollywood Reporter)

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist thinks he can get water from the air

In October 2025, Omar Yaghi was one of three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying metal-­organic frameworks, or MOFs — metal ions tethered to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis for a new project that sounds like science fiction, or a miracle: conjuring water out of thin air. When he first started working with MOFs, Yaghi thought they might be able to absorb climate-damaging carbon dioxide — or maybe hold hydrogen molecules, solving the thorny problem of storing that climate-friendly but hard-to-contain fuel. But then, in 2014, Yaghi’s team of researchers at UC Berkeley had an epiphany. The tiny pores in MOFs could be designed so the material would pull water molecules from the air around them, like a sponge — and then, with just a little heat, give back that water as if squeezed dry. Just one gram of a water-absorbing MOF has an internal surface area of roughly 7,000 square meters. (via MIT)

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In 1863, Angelo Mariani marketed a patent medicine called Vin Tonique Mariani à la Coca de Perou. Based on Bordeaux wine infused with three varietals of coca leaves in the bottle, le Vin Tonique Mariani was immediately applauded as a an ideal stomach stimulant, an analgesic on the air passages and vocal chords, appetite suppressant, anti-depressant, and treatment against anemia. In 1884, pharmacist John S Pemberton launched Pemberton’s French Coca Wine in Atlanta, Georgia. Another overnight success would have been in the making, if it hadn’t contained wine. The Klu Klux Klan forcefully lobbied for prohibition in Atlanta. The law was enacted in 1885. Pemberton was pressed to reformulate his product, replacing wine with cola extract and soda. Coca-Cola was born. The high cocaine content of Pemberton’s product forced Mariani to increase his dosage to 7.2 mg per ounce for US export. (via the EUVS)

The Pilgrims came to North America to harvest pine trees for the masts of British ships

Great Britain first came to America because it ran out of trees. The British needed big, thick, strong pines to make the masts for the Royal Navy, and they couldn’t get those from forests in Europe, so they sent Pilgrims to America basically to chop down trees to send back to Britain. The common mythology is that the Pilgrims were religious separatists, but they were really lumber merchants sent here to find timber for the Crown. But the colonists rebelled, and they lashed a king’s forest surveyor in a tavern in Weare, N.H. That became known as the Pine Tree Riot, which inspired the Boston Tea Party a year later. Flash forward to World War I, and the Allies desperately needed a pliable, tough, stringy wood to build airplanes. So the military mobilized a huge labor force of hundreds of thousands of military men who convened converged on the Oregon and Washington State coast to harvest Sitka spruce, which they called airplane spruce. And it turned the tide of the war, really. (via Scientific American)

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Australia recently became the first country in the world to ban kids under 16 from using social media — the result of a law that was passed last year but didn’t take effect until this month — but it is unlikely to be the last. Malaysia recently announced that it will also ban social media for users under 16 starting next year — the country’s Online Safety Act takes effect January 1, and the communications minister said the government is looking to Australia for guidance on implementing it. Denmark has said it is also moving toward a ban for users under 15, with parental consent allowed from age 13, and Norway is raising the minimum age from 13 to 15. The European Parliament recently voted by an overwhelming majority to set an EU-wide minimum age of 16 for social media, video-sharing platforms, and AI companions, and France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece are all testing a European age-verification app.

The rationale behind these laws is fairly straightforward: legislators in these countries are convinced that the use of social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok have caused an epidemic of mental health, self-esteem and body-image problems among young people, and in particular teenaged girls — problems that in some cases have led to deaths. This has been fueled by a series of unfortunate incidents, including a 16-year-old boy whose social-media account contained a number of videos discussing death and suicide and who stepped in front of a train in New York, and a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Australia who suffered from bullying on social media and then hanged herself in February 2022. Such incidents have led to a lot of fear-mongering articles by the mainstream media, portraying smartphone use and social media activity as a poison or a virus that creates emotional harm and in some cases mental illness in vulnerable teens.

Is there any scientific evidence that this is the case? The short answer is no. So then why do so many people believe there is? Because the media keeps telling them there is. Before Australia instituted its teenaged social-media ban, I had my suspicions about what might have helped to trigger that country’s law but in one of the recent news stories I found confirmation: the person who first proposed the ban and drove it forward was Peter Malinauskas, the Premier of South Australia, who said he started doing so after he read The Anxious Generation, a book by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His wife “put the book down on her lap and turned to me and said you’ve really got to do something about this,” he said. “And then I stopped and thought about it and thought maybe we actually can.” So he decided to try to introduce state-level legislation hoping it could win federal support too.

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Researchers have recorded, for the first time, images of moths drinking a moose’s tears. The intriguing interaction between the nocturnal insects and majestic mammals went down deep in the woods of Vermont, captured by trail cameras set in the state’s Green Mountain National Forest as part of a broader survey of moose across New England. Researchers in Vermont published the findings and the striking photographs in a recent issue of Ecosphere. Insects belonging to the order Lepidoptera—which includes moths and butterflies—are no strangers to tear drinking, or “lachryphagy.” Lepidopterans have been observed bellying up to the tear ducts of birds, reptiles, wild mammals, and domestic animals from Asia and Africa to parts of South America. (via Nautilus)

Her life changed when she found a rare Nintendo game in a thrift store

None of this would’ve happened had Jennifer Thompson not gone thrifting. This was in April 2013, and she was browsing clothes and $1 DVDs at the Steele Creek Goodwill in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, when she noticed it behind the glass counter. The video game title sparked a memory, a Yahoo article about the rarest games in the world. Jennifer drove across the street to McDonald’s, just to use the restaurant’s Wi-Fi to make sure she hadn’t been wrong. She then crossed the street again and purchased the game for $8 from the $30 she had in her bank account, praying the clerk wouldn’t recognize what it was and stop her. When she took it for validation to a used video game store in Charlotte, the young man behind the counter rustled open the plastic bag and coughed the words “Oh my god.” He offered her all the money in the register for it. She turned him down. (via ESPN)

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