Month: June 2026

In the last hours of his life, on the morning of July 16, 2025, Brett Lemieux stopped to chat with the workers building his mini-mansion. The crew had already demolished the first of three older homes Lemieux had recently purchased along East Hoover Street, a lane just two blocks long in Westfield, a wooded suburb 20 miles north of Indianapolis.After speaking with the workers and before he was found alone and dead, Lemieux — a 45-year-old remembered by his suburban neighbors as a dog-loving handyman, an enthusiastic baseball coach and a father admired for taking care of his disabled stepson — drove his Range Rover slowly toward his final parking spot, the driveway of one of his houses. Lemieux wasn’t coming out alive. His tinted windows allowed little perspective on his actions, but a goodbye letter he posted on the Facebook group Autographs 101 as he sat there soon exploded across social media. (via Bloomberg)

How the game of snooker got famous thanks to a train-wreck of a player

 The World Snooker Championship was established in 1927 but struggled to outgrow its niche audience. Luckily, in the seventies and eighties, Alex Higgins was playing. Born in Belfast, Higgins was a two-time world champion nicknamed Hurricane. Immediately after shooting, he would jerk his body and cue to the side in a frenetic motion that no one would teach. He drank heavily (including during big matches), smoked eighty cigarettes a day, and was a prodigious gambler. His rebellious, precarious lifestyle connected him to working-class fans, but wrecked his career. After winning the 1972 World Championship, Higgins revealed that he was squatting in condemned buildings. During his appearances on Pot Black, he had prostitutes brought to his dressing room and was found urinating in a sink. He was caught urinating again, this time in an arena flowerpot, after clinching his second world title. He headbutted a tournament official in 1986, and in 1990 punched another in the stomach. (via The Paris Review)

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Continue reading “A $10M sports-forgery scam ended with a grisly death”

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business called Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear weather, and fast internet connections — so astrophotographers from around the world can run their scopes and make observations completely from their computers. Out in the middle of nowhere Texas, a young astrophotographer is running one of the largest telescope ranches on Earth. Stargazers from around the world ship their gear to Bray Falls, who tends 550 telescopes (and counting) on 40 acres outside Brady, the geographic heart of Texas. Customers control the scopes from a laptop anywhere on the planet for as little as 99 dollars a month. The imagery produced by the telescopes on this ranch is impressive. (via Kottke.org)

A teenaged girl’s study on hand-dryer noise was published in an academic journal

When Nora Keegan found her ears ringing after using a hand dryer and noticed other kids holding their ears at the sound of the machines, she decided to investigate. Nora, of Calgary, was 9 years old at the time. Nearly four years later, Nora’s research on the topic has been published in a scientific journal and she is just 13 years old. “Oh, it was crazy,” Nora told “Good Morning America” about learning via email that her research had been accepted into the Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health. “I remember I was at school and I was so happy.” Nora began her science experiment in fifth grade by driving around with her parents, both doctors, looking for hand dryers in public places that children frequent, like libraries and restaurants. The family purchased a professional decibel meter for Nora’s experiment and also used a ruler and measuring tape to measure the hand dryers’ volume. (via ABC News)

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Continue reading “This Texas ranch is for remote-controlled telescopes only”

Martine Aliana Rothblatt graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with J.D. and M.B.A. degrees in 1981, then began to work in Washington in the field of communications satellite law, then in bioethics and biomedicine. She is the founder and chairwoman of the board of United Therapeutics. She was also the CEO of GeoStar and the creator of SiriusXM Satellite Radio. She was the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry in 2018. In June 2022, Rothblatt unveiled the world’s most complex 3D printed object, a human lung scaffold, comprising four thousand kilometers of capillaries and 200 million alveoli. On December 7, 2018, Rothblatt earned certification in the Guinness Book of World Records for the farthest distance traveled (56.82 kilometers) by an electric helicopter. In 2004, Rothblatt launched the Terasem Movement, a  transhumanist  school of thought focused on promoting joy, diversity, and the prospect of  technological immortality via mind uploading. (via Wikipedia)

A US Army officer was the first to detect tornados in the 1800s but was told to stop

According to the United States National Weather Service, the first tornado forecaster was one Lieutenant John Finley, a meteorologist with the Army Signal Corps. In 1878, Finely started studying the rapacious storms, his research bearing the fruit of the world’s first experimental tornado prediction on March 10, 1884, and routine tornado forecasts for 18 regions of the U.S. the same year. But in 1887, Finley’s superior General William Hazen ordered the lieutenant to cease issuing forecasts because he “believed that the harm done by such a prediction would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself.” This even despite Finley’s claim that his forecasts were accurate 95.6 to 98.6 percent of the time and the fact that he published Tornadoes, the first book dedicated entirely to tornadoes, that same year. (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “She started SiriusXM and a life-saving pharmaceutical company”

Machias Seal Island sits in the Gulf of Maine, about ten miles off the coast, and roughly the same distance from New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island. It’s too small and remote to support a town, or even a village. No one lives there permanently, but you’ll always find someone at home — two lighthouse keepers from the Canadian Coast Guard who rotate through in month-long shifts. But Machias Seal Island isn’t unambiguously Canadian. Canada claims it as its own, but so does the United States. The dispute dates back to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the American Revolution. The Americans point to a clause granting the U.S. rights to any territory within twenty leagues of its coast; the Canadians cite a 1621 land grant that claimed any island within six leagues of Canadian coastline for the British crown. Machias Seal Island, somewhat inconveniently, satisfies both conditions. (via Now I Know)

Towards the end of his life inventor Nikola Tesla was obsessed with pigeons and telepathy

On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. A maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla. The 78-year-old inventor quickly volunteered to take in the homeless pigeon.”The man who recently announced the discovery of an electrical death-beam, powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a swoop, carefully spread towels on his window ledge and set down a little cup of seed,” reported The New York Times. Tesla had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. He was known to leave his windows open so the birds could come and go. Once, he was arrested for trying to lasso an injured homing pigeon in the plaza of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. From his jail cell, Tesla told the polices that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind. (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “The US and Canada both claim ownership of this tiny island”

The UK recently passed a new law that effectively bans children under the age of 16 from using most social-media platforms, a move that the UK government notes was based explicitly on Australia’s similar law, which was passed in 2024 (Britain’s law comes into effect next year). The law covers platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X but it excludes messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal. Some social app features – such as livestreaming and the ability to be contacted by strangers – will be blocked from users under the age of 18, and those features will also be blocked in related services like online gaming apps. According to the UK’s description, all of these new rules will be backed up by stronger requirements for age checks. In the preamble to the British version of the law, the government tries to answer the question “Why are these changes being made?” and this is the explanation it gives:

The government ran a national consultation from March to May 2026, one of the largest engagement exercises undertaken by this government. The results showed overwhelming public demand for action, with 9 in 10 parents backing a social media ban for under‑16s, and two-thirds of young people agreeing under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms. These changes reset the rules so that children are protected from the platforms and online features that create the most harm.

One thing you might notice about this explanation is a complete lack of any evidence that such a law a) is necessary and b) works. All we have is a statement that suggests that most parents and young people – or at least most of those who chose to respond to a request for input – wanted this law to be passed. Or if not this law specifically, then they at least wanted “action,” whatever that means. I’ll get to the part about whether such laws are necessary, but the lack of data on whether such legislation will work or not is interesting, since the British law is based on an Australian law that has been in effect for almost two years now. Surely by now there would be some evidence that it is working? If there is, the British government doesn’t supply any, which isn’t that surprising because as far as I’ve been able to determine that kind of evidence doesn’t exist.

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Continue reading “Banning teens from social media is bad and also doesn’t work”

Irv Arenberg, an 85-year-old retired ear surgeon, lives in Arizona and counts among his patients the late artist Vincent van Gogh. Arenberg was a teenager when he first encountered Van Gogh, in the guise of the 1956 biopic Lust for Life, and he became fascinated by the Dutch artist, whom he gradually got to know through undergrad art-history classes and the posters he hung in his dorm room. In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered. (via Air Mail)

An earthquake in 2011 moved parts of Japan eastward by five or six millimetres

When the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake struck off the coast of Japan in 2011, its seismic shivers did more than ripple through the planet. At least one wave traveled 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) down to the boundary between Earth’s mantle and liquid outer core, where it was reflected right back to the surface. And there, according to a new analysis of earthquake data from across Japan, it may have done something scientists have never identified before. GPS observations from the time of the earthquake showed that parts of Japan shifted eastward by up to 5 to 6 millimeters. The reflected wave, says a team led by seismologist Sunyoung Park of the University of Chicago, may be what gave Japan that eastward nudge. The Tōhoku earthquake remains one of the most closely studied natural disasters in history. Scientists are still combing through the observations it generated, searching for clues about how major earthquakes unfold and what happens in their aftermath. (via Science Alert)

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Continue reading “Van Gogh truthers think the famous painter was murdered”

A prolific inventor who called himself the “Black Edison,” Garrett Morgan created early versions of the traffic light and gas mask. He began his career as a sewing-machine mechanic before patenting an improved sewing machine design and a hair-straightening product, among other inventions. His breathing device, known as a safety hood, later provided the blueprint for World War I gas masks. In 1923, Morgan invented a safer traffic light. Born in Paris, Kentucky, on March 4, 1877, Garrett Augustus Morgan was the seventh of 11 children. His mother, Elizabeth Reed, was of Indian and African descent and the daughter of a Baptist minister. His father, Sydney, a formerly enslaved man freed in 1863, was the son of a Confederate colonel. One of Morgan’s first inventions involved the sewing machine. After learning the inner workings of the machines and how to fix them at his factory jobs, Morgan obtained a patent for an improved sewing machine and opened his own repair business. (via Biography.com)

In the 1960s the US set off a nuclear explosion in space as part of a project called Starfish Prime

Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Defense Atomic Support Agency. It was launched from Johnston Atoll on July 9, 1962, and was the largest nuclear test conducted in outer space, and one of five conducted by the US in space. A Thor rocket carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead (designed at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and a Mk. 2 reentry vehicle was launched from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, about 900 miles (1,450 km) west-southwest of Hawaii. The explosion took place at an altitude of 250 miles (400 km), above a point 19 miles (31 km) southwest of Johnston Atoll. It had a yield of 1.4 Mt. The Starfish test was one of five high-altitude tests grouped together as Operation Fishbowl within the larger Operation Dominic, a series of tests in 1962 begun in response to the Soviet announcement that they would end a three-year moratorium on testing. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He invented an early gas mask and a prototype traffic light”

Humans have put dogs’ remarkable sense of smell to use by training them to sniff out explosives and narcotics. Their powerful noses can also detect viruses, bacteria, and signs of cancer in a person’s body or bodily fluids. Like many other diseases, cancers leave specific traces, or odor signatures, in a person’s body and bodily secretions. Cancer cells, or healthy cells affected by cancer, produce and release these odor signatures. They detect these odors in substances called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Depending on the type of cancer, dogs are able to detect VOCs in a person’s skin, breath, urine, feces, and sweat. Dogs can detect these odor signatures and, with training, alert people to their presence. People refer to dogs that undergo training to detect certain diseases as medical detection dogs. Trained dogs can detect some substances in very low concentrations, as low as parts per trillion, which makes their noses sensitive enough to detect cancer markers in a person’s breath, urine, and blood. (via Medical News Today)

Why does a plate of honey-drizzled bananas show up on this street corner every day?

Two men sat in a car on Abbey Road in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, on the night of February 1, 2025, waiting to catch a ghost. Luke Roberts and Jai Brewer call themselves the “banana hunters,” and they had come to watch a particular street corner opposite a church. For more than a year (some neighbors said two), a plate holding 15 to 20 peeled, honey-drizzled bananas had been turning up there overnight on the first or second of every month. No one had ever seen who left it. The stakeout ended at sunrise without a sighting. Somehow, bananas appeared anyway. The plate sits there in the same condition every month: peeled, whole, untouched by squirrels or foxes or magpies, which is its own quiet riddle. A local volunteer who picks up litter has tried gentle interventions, hoping to discourage the practice without confrontation. It hasn’t worked. On March 2, 2025, the plate moved a few streets over to Albert Road near Broadgate Road, as if whoever is doing this is keeping an internal calendar. (via Boing Boing)

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Continue reading “Your dog might be able to smell whether you have cancer”

Former WWE wrestler Jon Heidenreich says he is very happy with the life he’s living 20 years removed from his TV run. A few months back, a photo went viral on social media showing Heidenreich working at a Walmart in New Orleans. The picture was shared by a co-worker who was excited to learn that Heidenreich was once a wrestling champion. This has led to Heidenreich taking bookings for appearances and signings again, along with getting booked for an interview on Insight with Chris Van Vliet. Heidenreich said the co-worker who posted the picture was actually from Walmart’s renovation team that travels around. When Heidenreich learned he was from Ohio, he asked if the man had ever heard of Ohio Valley Wrestling. They started talking about wrestling and the co-worker ordered an old Heidenreich action figure for him to sign. Heidenreich, 56, explained that his job at Walmart is working overnights putting out freight. He likes his job and couldn’t ask for a better life than he’s lived. (via f4wonline)

They blasted soil with gamma rays but it continued to emit CO2 for six years

Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop. They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing. Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil. Now, Fontaine and his colleagues have reported that their soil samples continued to consume oxygen and spew carbon dioxide for six years. (via Quanta)

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Continue reading “Former pro wrestler says he is happy working at Walmart”