Author: Mathew Ingram

Qin Jianping had only intended to stop off in Haikou, capital of China’s Hainan province, for a few days. He drove to a seaside plaza to take an evening stroll along a seawall. He remembers slipping in the darkness, losing his balance, and suddenly falling over the edge into the sea. After plunging into the deep, dark, icy water, Qin quickly fought his way to the surface. He felt disoriented but could still hear the buskers playing for tourists taking a late-night stroll. In those first few minutes, he was confident someone would soon spot him and call for help. But then the waves began slowly dragging him further from shore. It would be another six days before he reached land again. To survive in open water, the 41-year-old entrepreneur says he clung to buoys, ate raw crabs, and attempted to keep warm using his own urine, all the while enduring an onslaught of jellyfish. On the day he was finally rescued by two fishermen, the Chinese authorities and his family had already begun to believe he was dead. (via Sixth Tone)

How many books is too many to have in your apartment? His landlord said 10,000 is

For a young Jewish scholar named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge. Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside. This past winter, he received a notice from building management. “You are maintaining the Premises in a severely overcluttered condition; permitting the over-accumulation of books in the Premises; creating a fire hazard by over-accumulating combustible books.” (via the NYT)

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Continue reading “A Chinese businessman survived six days in open water”

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old.The journey this truck has made over the previous 10 hours, by road and rail from northern France, was undertaken in great secrecy, due to the importance and value of the cargo within (reported to be insured for over a billion dollars). The Bayeux Tapestry is perhaps the most celebrated artwork to have survived from the Middle Ages. It is remarkable purely as an object: a narrative piece some 225 feet long. (via National Geographic)

She went from cleaning a space toilet to planning a Mars exploration mission

Cleaning a space toilet while on work experience was Claire Parfitt’s first introduction to a career away from Earth’s orbit. But she never imagined her time at the National Space Centre in Leicester, when she was 14, would one day see her lead a team exploring future Mars missions. Parfitt, originally from Nottingham, now works for the European Space Agency’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. The 42-year-old joined the space industry after securing a physics degree and a PhD in spacecraft power systems engineering. She has since worked on missions such as the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, which will explore the surface of Mars. She has also worked on the SMILE mission – officially known as the Solar wind, Magnetospheric, Ionic Link Explorer mission – which uses four science instruments to study how Earth responds to the solar wind from the Sun. (via the BBC)

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Continue reading “Inside the secret plan to move the famous Bayeux tapestry”

We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman. Her early novels and plays raised eyebrows due to their racy nature and she wrote some rather naughty gossip columns. She was also interested in technology. In the summer of 1931, she was involved in a series of experimental glider flights. Gliders had existed in some form for around 75 years but Cartland funded a project to develop long-distance gliders that could be towed into flight by aircraft. Previously, a glider had to be launched manually from a high place or more commonly, towed along a runway by a mechanical winch. The first major flight of the “Barbara Cartland” glider was on the 20th June 1931. A bag of letters was flown from near Maidstone to a destination near Reading. The journey took just over an hour. Its tow aircraft was flown by Flt Lt Ewen Wanless with Cartland as a passenger. This was possibly the first use of “glider mail”. (via Playing Pasts)

Northern Canada has an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake

Turns out that Canada is home to the only known location of the most recursive island in the world. Say hello to Yathkyed Lake, Nunavut. As the name suggests, a ‘recursive’ island or lake is like a nesting doll of nature. There is only one (discovered) island in a lake on an island in a lake on island in a lake and that is located in one of the most remote parts of Canada – Yathkyed Lake, which is north of the Manitoba border and right in the heart of Nunavut. Ironically, the lake is just south of the geographical centre of Canada, if you find the mid-point of the East-West and North-South extremities of the country. Unfortunately, knowing that the world’s most recursive lake exists in Canada is about as far as you can get. Notwithstanding the incredibly difficult terrain and lack of infrastructure, Yathkyed Lake appears to be owned by a Canadian mining company, so it’s not even open to the public. (via Curiocity)

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Continue reading “This famous romance writer was also an aviation pioneer”

As longtime Torment Nexus readers probably know, I have a minor obsession with the topic of artificial intelligence engines and consciousness — in part because such discussions inevitably reveal how little we know about human consciousness, let alone the machine kind. What is consciousness? Where does it reside? How does it emerge? How do we know that Atlantic writer Ted Chiang is conscious, let alone anyone else? And so on. If this isn’t your jam, I completely understand, and if you stop reading and move on, I will not be offended at all (but come back later!) I know that some people feel AI consciousness is a dead end, and that large-language models like Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT are just “stochastic parrots” or souped-up autocomplete tools that stole all their intelligence from others, and that talking about them being conscious or becoming conscious is like wondering if your toaster misses you when you are at work — and that those who discuss it, like Richard Dawkins did, have lost their minds or are the victims of “AI derangement syndrome.” I get that. I am not one of those people.

I’m not saying I believe that AI engines like Claude or ChatGPT are conscious or even that I think they will become conscious! But at the same time, I’m not saying they aren’t or won’t. David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University and a prominent researcher in the field of AI consciousness,  told New York magazine recently that the odds have gotten significantly higher that an AI could be conscious — in 2023 he said the probability was around 10 per cent. “I don’t know if I’d say that these systems are conscious yet,” Chalmers said, but “people who are confident that they’re not conscious maybe shouldn’t be. We just don’t understand consciousness well enough, and we don’t understand these systems well enough.” Chalmers and Yoshua Bengio — who worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun on the development of neural networks — have written a paper that concludes that based on various criteria current AI engines are not conscious but future ones could be.

In the world of consciousness research, as I understand it, there are a (large) number of different models of how consciousness might work in human beings — or anywhere else, for that matter — and how we might find evidence of it working, or at least see the signs of it in operation. One of the most popular is called Global Workspace Theory or GWT, and it was developed by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars in the 1980s. In a nutshell (and I am paraphrasing and condensing significantly here) this theory of consciousness suggests that the human brain operates a little like a theater where a play is being performed. Backstage, in the dark, there is a huge amount of unconscious work happening — things like regulating your breathing, recognizing visual input, retrieving memories, and so on. The stage is a kind of global workspace, where if a piece of data is important enough, it is shoved into the spotlight so that the rest of the brain can have access to it, and this is the foundation of consciousness.

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Continue reading “Anthropic discovers that Claude has a “secret thinking area””

The judge, Norbert Hofer, was a specialist. At the Innsbruck Regional Court, in western Austria, he oversaw a jurisdiction designated for mountain, avalanche, climbing, cable-car, and ski accidents. Cases handled by this department rarely draw much public attention, but the trial of Thomas Plamberger, in February, was different. He was charged with homicide by gross negligence in the death of his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, during an attempt to climb Grossglockner, Austria’s tallest mountain. Hofer was an alpinist himself and a mountain-rescue volunteer. He led groups of young people on summer hikes. The case against Plamberger was nearly unprecedented. Hundreds of unfortunates — hikers, climbers, skiers, snowboarders — die in the Austrian Alps each year, but these fatalities rarely result in criminal charges. Gurtner, thirty-three, had frozen to death a few dozen yards from the Grossglockner summit after Plamberger, then thirty-six, parted ways with her at around 2 a.m. on a winter night. (via the New Yorker)

In Italy they store their cheese in a bank vault because people keep stealing it

Northern Italy. In the dead of night, a group of thieves creeps toward a locked vault. Were they looking for jewels or priceless artwork? Gold bullion? No — Parmesan. And they almost managed it. Around 400 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano were loaded onto their getaway vehicle before police apprehended the thieves. Credito Emiliano SpA is a local bank in the Emilia-Romagna region, the only place where Parmigiano Reggiano can be produced. Local Parmesan-makers, who have been subjected to multiple organized large-scale thefts over the years, have turned to the bank to store and protect their cheese. Such is the cheese’s worth that the bank also permits the wheels of cheese to be used by producers as collateral against loans. The cheese is in a purpose-built, climate-controlled storage facility that can hold 300,000 wheels (which are worth $950–$1,900 each) known as the “Fort Knox of cheese.” (via Longreads)

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Continue reading “Did a climber leave his girlfriend to die on the mountain?”

The waves were more than two metres high, tossing the sailing boat around like a walnut shell. Below deck on the Bavaria C50 yacht, just 15m (50ft) long, a Ukrainian diving crew waited nervously. The skipper had seen much worse and before the war he had sometimes enjoyed taking his clients into mild storms. But now he was concerned. “This isn’t diving weather. Are you sure?” he yelled. They were not. One by one the divers voted to abort their mission and return to port. Then the lone woman among them, in her thirties, stood up. I’ll call her Freya. “Let me go alone, I’ll finish quickly,” she said. Freya’s buddy went into the water first and rigged the bomb, a makeshift device fashioned from a diver’s breathing tank. “This will be fun,” Freya called to him. Then she plunged. Freya — whose name, like those of her fellow saboteurs, has been withheld for security reasons — was born in Kyiv in the mid-1980s and raised mainly by her mother. By the time she finished high school she spoke some English and Spanish, and she chose a university course that would allow her to travel. (via The Times)

Scientists say they have found a way to make quantum time run backwards

Scientists have developed a new way to control quantum systems that can make their behavior appear more consistent with time moving backward rather than forward. The research, published in Physical Review X, introduces quantum control protocols that reshape a system’s “arrow of time,” the concept that time naturally moves in only one direction. The approach could eventually support new methods for extracting energy from quantum systems and preparing quantum states. A quantum system, such as a group of qubits, follows the rules of quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Using the newly developed control protocols, researchers can suppress the usual emergence of the arrow of time or even reverse its apparent direction, making quantum processes look as though they are unfolding backward. As a demonstration of the technique, the team also created a measurement engine that can harvest energy from the act of making quantum measurements. (via Science Daily)

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Continue reading “How a former erotic model blew up the Nord Stream pipeline”

From mulled wine at Christmas to hot cross buns at Easter, nutmeg has become an essential spice in Europe. But its widespread adoption — including in the traditional Dutch breakfast pastry of ontbijtkoek — comes on the back of a sordid history of colonial exploitation. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn. The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621. The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the  perkenier  system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk). (via JSTOR Daily)

He restores and installs free-to-use pay phones in Vermont using VoIP

Remember pay phones? Those relics of telecom’s distant past were once everywhere — on many busy street corners, in bars and restaurants, even built into airliners’ seatbacks. Now, an engineer in Vermont is aiming to give the old-fashioned device some present-day relevance. Patrick Schlott, 32, is an electrical engineer by training who works at the South Burlington, Vt.–based  eVTOL  maker Beta Technologies. Inspired in part by the free-phone projects  Futel  and PhilTel, he’s restored and installed free-to-use pay phones at over half a dozen locations across Vermont. With Schlott’s phones, users can make coinless calls anywhere in the United States or Canada—with each phone routing its calls through local internet connections via a simple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateway. Schlott recently spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the rugged charm of old tech and the joys of reverse engineering. (via Spectrum IEEE)

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Continue reading “The violent history behind the humble spice called nutmeg”

Swarms of cyborg insects controlled remotely via electrical implants can now operate underwater, thanks to tiny diving suits supplying them with oxygen – which could one day enable them to explore Mars. Hirotaka Sato at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues first demonstrated in 2021 that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled with electrodes embedded in sensory organs known as cerci. In 2024, they demonstrated that a swarm of 20 of these cyborg insects could coordinate. Cockroaches breathe through pores called spiracles on their abdomen. But Sato and his team were unhappy with the insects’ inability to search flooded areas, which aren’t uncommon in disaster zones, so they have developed a diving suit to allow them to operate underwater. The researchers 3D printed a watertight resin suit, which protects the abdominal spiracles from water. Tiny hoses run forwards from the suit to connect directly to the thorax. (via New Scientist)

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of the bus

Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Anyone can see that the wheel needed to be invented, and that some further innovations were required to build carriages large enough for a substantial group of people to travel in them simultaneously. Once big carriages were invented, however, we might assume that people automatically started running them on regular timetables between fixed locations. The practice is so universal today, and its advantages so obvious, that it does not seem to require active innovation. Surprisingly, however, this is not true. The world had thousands of wheeled vehicles for millennia before it had a single bus. We know exactly who invented buses, when he did so, and how quickly his invention spread across the world. Wheels started being used for transport some time after 3,500 BC. For a very long time, however, wheels were not a world-changing technology. Early carts were precarious, and roads were too bad for them to be very useful. (via Works In Progress)

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Continue reading “A swarm of remote-controlled cockroaches that can swim”

I scanned the room, and my eyes locked on three women whose eyes were already locked on me. The three women were Midwestern and white, and I am Southern and Black. I intended to tell them some information that I had only recently learned in detail — that our grandfathers had been together in the 1910s as children at the Lafon Orphan Asylum for Colored Boys in New Orleans. They were brothers: George and Edward DeGrange. In photos, they bear the resemblance of siblings, but they grew to be a few shades apart in skin tone. This slight contrast would make a world of difference as they aged out of the orphanage into the reality of segregation. Edward boarded a train to Chicago. Upon arrival, he presented himself as white. He eventually married and had children in Chicago — white children — who had children. George, too dark to pass even if he had wanted to, chose to stay behind in New Orleans. (via the New York Times)

A Norwegian watchmaker found a perfectly preserved 18th-century shipwreck

Espen Saastad makes watches for a living. He also runs a small underwater survey and salvage operation, which is how he found himself looking at an 18th-century merchant ship sitting almost perfectly upright on the floor of the Skagerrak strait, about 1,900 feet (600 meters) below the surface, with much of its cargo still inside. The ship had rested there for roughly 275 years. Large amounts of Chinese porcelain remained within the hull, along with rows of cargo that had barely moved. A fishing net had shifted objects in a few places, but most of the wreck appeared undisturbed. Archaeologists still do not know where the vessel began its journey or where it was headed. The Norwegian Maritime Museum announced the discovery in June 2026, describing it as the best-preserved cargo of its kind ever found in Northern Europe. (via Discover)

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Continue reading “Two brothers: One grew up white and one grew up Black”

I’ve been writing a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and I wanted to break that cycle by writing about something that’s been bugging me for a little while now: namely, the controversy over Microsoft’s claim that it has developed a new and improved version of a quantum microprocessor based on the theoretical “Majorana” particle. What is said particle, you ask? I am not a quantum physicist by any means (I don’t even play one on TV) but I believe it is technically known as a fermion — a class of sub-atomic particles that obey certain rules. Protons and electrons are types of fermion, and so are quarks and weirder things like leptons (but not bosons). The main feature of a Majorana particle is that it acts as its own anti-particle. In regular physics, every particle has an anti-particle with the same mass but the opposite charge (except for photons, which are their own anti-particle because their magnetic charge is zero and the opposite of zero is still zero). When a particle and its anti-particle meet, they annihilate each other.

In case you were wondering (as I was), the Majorana particle is named after a brilliant Italian physicist named Ettore Majorana, who was born in 1906 and did ground-breaking work on theoretical physics; Enrico Fermi compared him to Isaac Newton. He correctly predicted the existence of the neutron, which won its discoverer the Nobel Prize, but in 1938, he disappeared mysteriously. Majorana was a public supporter of Italian fascism and a member of the National Fascist Party, but at the time he disappeared the Italian government had started requiring all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist regime in order to keep their jobs. It’s possible he didn’t want to do this and went into hiding but there is no record of anything written by him after his disappearance, and some colleagues suspect he committed suicide.

How does any of this relate to Microsoft’s quantum processor? Great question. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the particle’s behavior I am completely out of my depth, so I’m going to defer to Wikipedia’s description of how Majorana particles could emerge, and also how they can (theoretically) be used in quantum computing:

In superconducting materials, a quasiparticle can emerge as a Majorana fermion, more commonly referred to as a Bogoliubov quasiparticle in condensed matter physics. Its existence becomes possible because a quasiparticle in a superconductor is its own antiparticle. Majorana fermions can be bound to a defect at zero energy, and then the combined objects are called Majorana bound states. This name is more appropriate than Majorana fermion because the statistics of these objects is no longer fermionic. Instead, they are an example of non-abelian anyons: interchanging them changes the state of the system in a way that depends only on the order in which the exchange was performed. The non-abelian statistics that they possess allows them to be used as a building block for a topological quantum computer.

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Continue reading “Is there a new quantum processor or is Microsoft lying?”

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”