A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise than a tradition. After 15 years, he has learned that driving a giant banana attracts attention. Especially from cops. Braithwaite figures he spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America. Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana. Often officers wanted photographs. Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation. The whole thing began in a gas station in 2008. Braithwaite, a hot-rod enthusiast, had become bored attending car shows. Then he watched an episode of the show “Top Gear” featuring bizarre custom-built vehicles, including a street-legal garden shed and a drivable couch. For the next month, his brain worked overtime. (via Cowboy State Weekly)
Her work was cited by Stephen Hawking and she turned down a $1M job offer
At just 12 years old, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski began making a Zenith CH 601 XL single-engine aircraft from a kit. The project took nearly two years to complete, with Pasterski doing much of the work herself. By the age of 14, she was already flying the plane all alone — years before she was legally old enough to get behind the wheel of a car. During her time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy she became a semifinalist for the US team at the International Physics Olympiad. She also interned at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Blue Origin. Pasterski completed her physics degree in just three years, graduating in 2014 with a perfect 5.0 GPA. After MIT, she joined Harvard University for a PhD under theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger. NASA reportedly approached her with a job offer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also wanted her to join Blue Origin, his private space company. Brown University is widely reported to have offered her an assistant professorship worth about $1.1 million. (via The Economic Times)
Pigeons can detect the difference between breast cancer tissue and regular tissue
With some training and selective food reinforcement, pigeons do just as well as humans in categorizing digitized slides and mammograms of benign and malignant human breast tissue, said Richard Levenson, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UC Davis Health System and lead author of the study. “The pigeons were able to generalize what they had learned, so that when we showed them a completely new set of normal and cancerous digitized slides, they correctly identified them,” Levenson said. Their accuracy, like that of humans, was modestly affected by the presence or absence of color in the images, as well as by degrees of image compression. The pigeons also learned to correctly identify cancer-relevant microcalcifications on mammograms, but they had a tougher time classifying suspicious masses on mammograms — a task that is extremely difficult, even for skilled human observers. (via the U of California)
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.
Mussolini’s granddaughter Alessandra won Italy’s version of Celebrity Big Brother
The granddaughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has won the latest season of Italy’s version of Celebrity Big Brother. Alessandra Mussolini, 63, won Grande Fratello VIP and the $116,000 prize on the night of Tuesday, May 19. The former actress, singer and European Parliament member spent 63 days playing the game, which she won after receiving 55.95% of the audience vote, reported Italian newspaper Il Messaggero. Alessandra beat out Antonella Elia, an actress and television personality, for the grand prize. “I enjoyed everything to the fullest, just as I am. I regret nothing,” said Alessandra after her victory. Alessandra is the daughter of the dictator’s youngest child, Romano Mussolini, and Maria Scicolone, the sister of an Italian actress. She has previously shown support for her grandfather — a totalitarian dictator who ruled over Italy for two decades — and reportedly once said she was “fascist and proud of it.” In 1992, Alessandra ran for parliament as a member of Italy’s neo-fascist party. (via People)
This spider pretends it has been infected by a zombie virus so it won’t get eaten
When Alexander Bentley poked a mass covered in what appeared to be a deadly parasitic fungus during a group tour in August 2025, he was shocked to see that the spider beneath it was still alive. The herpetologist, based in Ecuador, often leads group tours through a stretch of the Amazon rainforest and is no stranger to cordyceps, the parasitic fungi featured in the post-apocalyptic franchise The Last of Us. Known as “zombie fungus,” it grows inside insects and arachnids, then manipulates the host to disperse its spores in a way that makes the victim behave like a zombie. This spider had grown two tendril-like structures, known as tubercles, on the back of the abdomen, in yellow and white — usually a sign that the cordyceps have successfully killed its host. It turned out to be a completely new species of arachnid that seems to mimic fungus like cordyceps, possibly to lure prey or ward off predators. (via CBC)
Audio on: Calling a Mickey Mouse performer to accuse her of stealing her identity
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com