Author: Mathew Ingram

Romanian-born mathematician Stefan Mandel used simple probability and a massive ticket-buying operation to win lottery jackpots 14 times. Born into a poor Jewish family in Romania in 1931, Mandel developed a passion for mathematics at a young age but could not pursue an academic career because of financial hardship. Instead, he worked as an accountant to support his family. His monthly salary of $88 was barely enough to support his family. Mandel said that he needed a way to “get some serious money, quickly.” Having spent years studying probability theory and the work of Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, he began exploring the lottery, convinced mathematics could improve the odds. After years of research, he developed a number-picking algorithm based on a method he called “combinatorial condensation.” The strategy relied on a simple principle: identify lotteries where the jackpot exceeded the cost of buying every possible number combination. If enough tickets covering all combinations could be purchased, a profit could be guaranteed. (via VnExpress)

Every spring a team of biologists counts over 50,000 puffins on this remote Welsh island

Skomer Island, located of the coast of Pembrokeshire, is an internationally important seabird island. Every year, The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales (WTSWW) undertake their annual count to monitor the population of Puffins that return to the island every spring to breed. Puffin counting may sound like an easy job, but with over 50,000, it’s no mean feat. Every spring, the Skomer team set out on a calm, clear evening with binoculars and notepad in hand to count every single Puffin on land, in the sky and at sea. The island is broken up into seven sections, and the team must work against the clock and the elements to make sure they have accounted for every single Puffin. Timing is key – too early in the season and the bulk of birds won’t have returned, too late and they’ll be settled on eggs in their burrows. And there’s method to the Puffin madness – they use the same method today that the wardens have used since the 1980s. This means they can compare over 40 years of Puffin population data. (via Welsh Wildlife)

He had to learn how to walk again after he got a rare virus from a tick but it wasn’t Lyme

Martin Novar remembers flashes of his 65th birthday on Nov. 2, 2025. But he doesn’t remember anything else from that month. Memory is a tricky thing for Novar nowadays. When we made plans to meet at his house on Lake Owassa in Frankford Township for this story, he called three hours before the scheduled meeting, wondering where I was and offering directions. It’s not personal. He can’t remember any clients he’s had in the last year either and, after more than 20 years as an attorney, Novar was forced to give up his legal practice. He also doesn’t remember taking a hike with his dog, Raven, in the lush woodlands surrounding his Sussex County home in mid-November. He’d taken dozens of hikes like it before. Novar stayed at his partner Karen Ezra’s apartment in Brooklyn; when they spoke on the phone Thanksgiving morning, Novar was unintelligible. A lumbar puncture, also known as a spinal tap, showed that Novar was suffering from encephalitis, or inflammation in the brain. (via NJ.com)

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.

In a Bond film where he drove on cobblestones they used Coca-Cola so the car would grip

There are two main vehicular-chase set pieces in No Time to Die. There’s an off-road battle set in Scotland’s countryside that features lots of SUVs—including Land Rover’s new Defender — of which many are launched spectacularly skyward. Then there’s a chase through the medieval streets of Matera in southern Italy. The Matera chase involves Jaguar XE sedans and Triumph motorcycles for the bad guys and the old DB5 for Bond. Only, the DB5 in this chase does things no DB5 could actually do. Like powerslides, donuts with Gatling guns poking out of the headlight buckets, and lurid drifts that go on for weeks. Since the replicas weren’t built for sale to the public or to be licensed to operate on public roads, they didn’t have to meet any government’s vehicle regulations. The interior is simply a welded roll cage, a single racing seat, a large wood steering wheel, and some bottom-hinged racing pedals. “We poured Coca-Cola on the ground to get some grip,” Higgins explains in his Manx accent. “The Coke seems to work better than anything. It was incredible how well it was working.” (via Car and Driver)

The train station in Cambridge got attention from a surprising audience: mathematicians

Cambridge North Station is clad in aluminum panels with a geometrical cutout design. The architecture firm, Atkins, originally claimed that the pattern was derived from Cambridge alumnus John Conway’s “Game of Life,” but eagle-eyed mathematicians soon realized that was incorrect. The design is in fact based on a mathematical rule studied by Stephen Wolfram, an Oxford alumnus, much to the dismay of rival university Cambridge. Though the firm’s website still references Conway, a Senior Architectural Designer at Atkins has since confirmed that it was, in fact, Wolfram’s Rule 30 that they used in the design. The mathematical façade transforms the building’s appearance from night to day —for the technically-minded, the pattern shown conforms to Wolfram’s rule 135 in the day, while at night the interior lights invert the pattern to rule 30. (via Arch Daily)

Look at this super-cute little blue octopus that was just discovered

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

A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies are searching for 34-year-old Arthur Cofield. According to authorities with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Cofield was discovered missing from the minimum-security camp next to the Federal Corrections Institution in Jessup on Tuesday afternoon. At the time of his escape, Cofield was serving a sentence of over 11 years for identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud. Federal prosecutors announced new charges against Cofield in a December 2020 press release. At the time, the Atlanta man was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery in Butts County and faced an attempted murder charge in Fulton County. (via CBS)

A Soviet moon rover was silent for 40 years and then started sending signals again

For nearly 40 years, Lunokhod 1 was neither destroyed nor forgotten in the usual sense. The Soviet rover had simply become impossible to locate with enough precision to remain scientifically useful. In 2010, that changed when researchers identified its exact position and recovered a laser signal that brought it back into active lunar research. The rover itself never resumed operation. What returned was its reflector, still capable of sending light back to Earth after decades of silence. Lunokhod 1 reached the Moon aboard the Soviet Luna 17 mission on November 17, 1970, becoming the first remote-controlled rover to operate on another world. Designed for a shorter lifespan, it remained active through 11 lunar day-night cycles before communications ceased in 1971. (via Daily Galaxy)

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Continue reading “He ran an $11M fraud scheme from prison and just escaped”

A Kitchener, Ont., teen has won the best project award for innovation at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote PPG from First Principles was the name of the project by Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student at Cameron Height Collegiate Institute in Kitchener. The judges at the Edmonton competition say the 17-year-old’s work fixes a 35-year-old problem in blood oxygen sensors, which has led to higher mortality in Black patients. She noticed on systems that monitored vital signs and detected oxygen, there can be a demographic bias, so on lighter skin patients, the error is lower than it is on darker skin patients. “There is a mathematical instability in current cardiac models and to be able to resolve that, you need to add a missing term,” she said. “I solved the mathematical instability and using that I was able to start to remove this demographic bias.” (via the CBC)

In 1920 doctors said eating canned salmon made prisoners in New York into human magnets

Dr. John B. Ransom, in a report sent to the Superintendent of Prisons, declared that thirty-two convicts of Clinton prison at Dannemora had been turned into human magnets as the result of a peculiar poisoning that had been baffling medical scientists for the last week or more. Dr. Ransom is the prison physician, and he called to his assistance in determining the mysterious ailment of the prisoners. They found that whenever any of the men touched steel sparks would fly and their finger tips would violently vibrate the filaments of electric bulbs. They traced the trouble to what is termed the deadly botulinus germ, which they believe came from canned salmon served to the men about two weeks ago. While knowing that this germ generates electricity, they are unable to understand how it turns the victims into human electrodes. (via the New York Times)

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Continue reading “A teenager fixed a 35-year-old problem with oxygen sensors”

Berlin-based Italian photographer Paride Ambrogi recently combined two of his loves, photography and pasta, in a brilliant, possibly tasty way. Ambrogi made the Ravihole Camera, a working pinhole camera made entirely from fresh pasta dough. Ambrogi made the Ravihole as part of a workshop on fresh-filled pasta in Hamburg, Germany. Alongside the pasta workshop, Ambrogi and his fellow Italian friends who live in Berlin installed a small exhibition dedicated to pasta culture, where Ambrogi brought the Ravihole to share. Ambrogi admits his initial idea for the exhibition was to take black-and-white photos of a friend during the Christmas holidays while making pizzoccheri, a traditional pasta from Valtellina in northern Italy. However, Ambrogi and his friend “drank too many glasses of wine,” and it never happened. So after returning to Berlin after the holidays, Ambrogi had to come up with another idea. (via PetaPixel)

A New York firefighter came back to life after 10 years in a coma-like state

On the morning of December 29, 1995, the roof of a building in which Donald Herbert was fighting a fire collapsed, pinning him down and starving his brain of oxygen for over six minutes. He was rescued from the collapsed structure, but suffered cardiac arrest and was taken to a hospital where he lapsed into a coma. A year later, he regained consciousness for the first time but had speech and vision problems and could not eat or walk without help. Herbert could barely remember anything and he had no longer recognized his relatives and friends. He remained in a minimally conscious state for over nine years until, on April 30, 2005, he awoke and asked where his wife was. He was then able to speak to his friends and family for over 14 continuous hours. He asked how old he was, and how long he had been gone, expressing surprise when he learned that he had been unresponsive for almost ten years. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “Italian photographer made a pinhole camera out of pasta”

When Denis Alimov passed through the arrivals hall of El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá on the morning of February 24, 2026, he had the outward appearance of a middle-aged Russian tourist escaping Moscow’s harsh winter: a salt-and-pepper goatee, a light travel bag, a connecting flight from Istanbul, and a reservation at a Cartagena beach resort. Within minutes, Colombian migration officers had him in handcuffs. The Interpol Red Notice — activated as he flew in at the request of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York — had been waiting at the gate. Alimov stood accused of orchestrating the attempted assassination of two prominent Chechen dissidents based in Europe, having offered a bounty of $1.5 million on each of their heads — payable whether the target arrived in Russia dead or merely, in the deadpan vocabulary of Russian intelligence, “legally deported.” The FBI had been tracking Alimov for over a year — in part, by reading the Google Translate-assisted exchanges between him and one of his would-be foreign assassins. (via The Insider)

Police responded to reports of gunfire and found the shooter was a dog

Police responding to reports of a shotgun blast at a convenience store sounds like the opening of countless American crime movies, but when cops in Nebraska responded to a recent such call they found an unusual culprit: a dog. Local TV station KNOP News 2 reported that police in the town of Scottsbluff were called out to a local store recently after reports of a blast involving a shotgun. Upon arrival they found a truck with blast damage in one of its doors and a woman who had been struck in the arm by a pellet from a shotgun. However, investigation showed a canine cause behind the shooting when it was revealed the blast happened as the vehicle had pulled up to the store as a dog had been moving from one side of its back seat to another. Somehow, the dog had triggered the shotgun – which had a live round chambered – to fire, damaging the vehicle and striking a female passerby. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “Russian hitman busted because he used Google Translate”

In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s feared and rule-bound criminal underworld. She must have defeated many male gangsters. How, I asked her, did she do it? “First the legs,” she said, hands clasped, maintaining the calm demeanour of a village priest. Nishimura’s relaxed attitude to violence is what first caught the attention of yakuza members in 1986, when she was a 19-year-old runaway and former juvenile-prison inmate living in Gifu, a city near Nagoya. She was getting more deeply involved in serious crime, too, running sex workers and extorting local businesses, as well as selling – and taking – large quantities of methamphetamines. Yakuza life nonetheless appealed. It offered respect, protection and, above all, the opportunity to make big money. (via The Guardian)

This is what happened when a software engineer decided to randomize his entire life

Max Hawkins had started to feel trapped by his optimized life. Every weekday, he woke up at exactly 7 a.m. and grabbed a single-­origin pour-­over. He got on his bike and rode 15 minutes and 37 seconds along the best possible route to Google, where he was a software engineer. He spent eight hours working, then met friends for a beer at a craft brewery or a hang in Mission Dolores Park. But despite his great job and charmed life, something felt off.One afternoon at work, while reading an academic paper, he located the source of his ennui. The study, which tracked the movements of 100,000 anonymized mobile-phone users over six months, had found that human mobility is surprisingly predictable: Our days default to simple, repeatable patterns.  The engineer part of Max’s brain thought the research was pretty cool, but he also found it unsettling. “There was something very programmed about the way I was living,” he told me. If his movements were that predictable, where did that leave his free will? (via The Atlantic)

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Continue reading “The rise and fall of the world’s only female yakuza gangster”

In 1963, a Turkish resident who simply wanted to expand his house ended up making an unexpected and monumental discovery. While knocking down a wall in his basement, he found a mysterious room—then another, and another. Without realizing it, he had uncovered the entrance to Derinkuyu: an underground city capable of housing up to 20,000 people beneath Cappadocia. The part that extends below ground level is, on average, between six and 10 times deeper than the height of the above-ground buildings of the ancient city that used to be there. Derinkuyu means “deep well,” and the name is no exaggeration. Scientists say Derinkuyu’s origins may date back to around the eighth century B.C. The result is a vast underground complex with rooms, stables, cellars, tombs, schools and even churches with refectories. Some of these spaces continued to be used until the 19th century before Derinkuyu fell into oblivion. (via History.com)

In the early 1900s Britain was obsessed with this game featuring a giant ball

A search of the patents registered in the second half of the 19^th century by Moses G Crane of Massachusetts reveals a man who was never short of ideas. Crane had three sons who played football at Harvard, but he was not a fan of the sport. Apparently he believed that “to the average person without a college education it is incomprehensible, dull, cruel”, and he was particularly irritated at how hard it was to follow the progress of a small brown ball. And so Crane donned his thinking cap. “If the ball were only made large,” he said, “yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators.” In 1894 he found someone who could make his monster ball, at a cost – for materials alone – of some $175, about $4,500 in today’s money, and after several months of experimentation his son Edwin produced some rules. And so the sport of Pushball was born. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “He was renovating his basement and found an underground city”

There is one time of day when Dawn Faizey Webster can feel normal. It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix, the ever-considerate streaming service, asks its viewers “Are you still watching?” If you don’t respond by pressing a button on the remote, it assumes you’ve nodded off and pauses the stream. Dawn can’t press buttons. She can’t move her fingers or toes or her arms or legs. She can’t swallow. She can’t speak. She hasn’t been able to do any of those things since Tony Blair was prime minister. When Netflix suspects she has fallen asleep and the “still watching” message appears, she can only hope to attract a carer’s attention through the baby monitor in her room. Dawn, 53, has been locked in since suffering a stroke in her brainstem in the summer of 2003. (via The Times)

Who are the mysterious saboteurs behind a five-day Berlin power blackout?

Sebastian Brandt, chief technician of the Immanuel hospital in the leafy, affluent Wannsee district of Berlin, guessed something was wrong as soon as he opened the window of his home and smelled diesel. It was 3 January, a freezing Saturday morning, and luckily the hospital opposite had relatively few patients on this post-holiday weekend. As he looked out, the diesel fumes told him that the emergency generator – a huge, deafening, decades-old machine in the basement – had kicked in. That meant the hospital was no longer getting power from the grid. And that meant Brandt was not going to have a quiet weekend. What Brandt didn’t know was that his hospital was cut off because a couple of hours earlier, at about 6am, approximately 12km away, someone had set fire to five high-voltage cables fixed to the underside of a bridge over the Teltow canal, a long waterway that cuts through the southern part of the German capital. (via The Guardian)

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Continue reading “What it’s like to suffer from locked-in syndrome”