Author: Mathew Ingram

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Seven types of viruses that have lain frozen in the Siberian permafrost for thousands of years have been revived. The youngest of these viruses were frozen for 27,000 years, while the oldest was on ice for 48,500 years old – making it the most ancient virus resuscitated so far. “48,500 years is a world record,” says Jean-Michel Claverie at Aix-Marseille University in France, who did the work with his colleagues. Scientists are thawing out these ancient viruses in order to assess their impacts on public health. As the permafrost melts in the Northern Hemisphere, the thawing ice releases tons of trapped chemicals and microbes.

French man wins the right to not have to be ‘fun’ at work

France’s highest court has ruled that a man fired by a Paris-based consulting firm for allegedly failing to be “fun” enough at work was wrongfully dismissed. The man, referred to in court documents as Mr. T, was fired from Cubik Partners in 2015 after refusing to take part in seminars and weekend social events that his lawyers argued, according to court documents, included “excessive alcoholism” and “promiscuity.” Mr. T had argued that the culture in the company involved “humiliating and intrusive practices” including mock sexual acts and crude nicknames. In its judgment this month, the Court of Cassation ruled that the man was entitled to “freedom of expression” and that refusing to participate in social activities was a “fundamental freedom.”

Continue reading “A 48,500-year-old virus has been revived from Siberian permafrost”

This is a partial list of some common misconceptions that I enjoy — there’s a much longer list here.

• The common image of Santa Claus (Father Christmas) as a jolly old man in red robes was not created by The Coca-Cola Company as an advertising gimmick. Santa Claus had already taken this form in American popular culture and advertising by the late 19th century, long before Coca-Cola used his image in the 1930s

• The Chinese word for “crisis” (危机) is not composed of the symbols for “danger” and “opportunity”; the first does represent danger, but the second instead means “inflection point” (the original meaning of the word “crisis”).[79][80] The myth was perpetuated mainly by a campaign speech from John F. Kennedy

• The word “crap” did not originate as a back-formation of British plumber Thomas Crapper’s aptronymous surname, nor does his name originate from the word “crap”. The surname “Crapper” is a variant of “Cropper”, which originally referred to someone who harvested crops. The word “crap” ultimately comes from Medieval Latin crappa

Continue reading “Some of the things you think you know are wrong”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The Jurassic Park movies made it pretty obvious that bringing ancient creatures back to life was a very bad idea, but one company is trying to do it anyway. Sara Ord works at a “de-extinction” company called Colossal Biosciences, where they are trying to bring back everything from an extinct dog-like marsupial called a thylacine, or “Tasmanian tiger,” to a full-blown woolly mammoth. But Colossal isn’t using DNA from a fly trapped in amber, the way they did in the movies – Ord and her team are trying to use gene editing to gradually change the DNA of one creature to make it more like the other. So one project consists of trying to turn Asian elephants into something resembling a woolly mammoth, by adding genes for cold resistance and thick red hair.

Not that long ago, people ate ground-up mummies as medicine

For several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely used medicines containing human bones, blood and fat for everything from headaches to epilepsy. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts. “The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says one researcher. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol.

Continue reading “This company is trying to recreate extinct animals”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

In the winter of 2002, a young American named Ryan Neil joined an unusual pilgrimage: he and several others flew to Tokyo, to begin a tour of Japan’s finest collections of bonsai trees. The next-youngest adult in the group was fifty-seven. Like many Americans of his generation, Neil had discovered bonsai through the “Karate Kid” films. The karate instructor, Mr. Miyagi, practices the art of bonsai, and in Neil’s young mind it came to represent a romantic ideal: the pursuit of perfection through calm discipline. He decided he wanted to apprentice to a bonsai master in order to learn the secrets of the art – but it turned out to be harder than he could have ever imagined.

Inside the world’s most top secret museum

It is the only place a visitor can see the gun found with Osama bin Laden when he was killed, next to Saddam Hussein’s leather jacket. Welcome to the CIA’s secret in-house museum. Located inside the US intelligence agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the collection has just been renovated to mark the agency’s 75th anniversary. Among the 600 artefacts on display are the kinds of cold war spy gadgets you might expect – a ‘dead drop rat’ in which messages could be hidden, a covert camera inside a cigarette packet, a pigeon with its own spy-camera and even an exploding martini glass. But there are also details on some of the CIA’s more famous and even recent operations.

Continue reading “Inside the beautiful, brutal world of bonsai”

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Just before noon on Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Diller, then 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima. The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm, and the teenager watched a bolt of lightning strike the right wing. She remembers the aircraft nose-diving. As she plunged, the three-seat bench into which she was belted spun like the winged seed of a maple tree toward the jungle canopy. She blacked out, only to regain consciousness alone, under the bench seat, in a torn minidress — on Christmas morning. She had fallen some 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. It took her 11 days to walk out of the jungle.

Gran Abuelo in Chile could be the world’s oldest living tree

In a secluded valley in southern Chile, a lone alerce tree stands above the canopy of an ancient forest. Green shoots sprout from the crevices in its thick, dark trunks, huddled like the pipes of a great cathedral organ, and water streams down its lichen-streaked bark on to the forest floor from bulbous knots in the wood. “It was like a waterfall of green, a great presence before me,” remembers the climate scientist Jonathan Barichivich, 41, of the first time he encountered the Gran Abuelo, or “great-grandfather”, tree as a child. “I never thought about how old the Gran Abuelo could be,” he said. However, Barichivich’s recent groundbreaking study has shown the 100ft giant could be the world’s oldest living tree, at more than 5,400 years old.

Continue reading “She fell nearly two miles, got up and walked away”

 Sairam Gudiseva, a student at White Station High School in Tennessee decided to have some fun with his paper on quantum physics, so he wrote it in such a way as to include the lyrics of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” down the left margin. Did he get a good mark on the paper? Unknown

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear. Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” It was unearthed in Lachish, a Canaanite city state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah. Efforts to obtain an age for the comb from carbon dating proved futile, but researchers believe it was made around 1700 BCE.

How Ukraine blew up a key Russian bridge

Last month, a truck laden with explosives drove across the Kerch bridge, a critical artery connecting Russia with its troops fighting in southern Ukraine. A train traveled alongside. The truck detonated at a critically vulnerable spot — about halfway between a pair of reinforced concrete piers, maximizing damage to the roadway. The explosion was large enough to rupture fuel tanks in the passing train, setting it on fire. The detonation was also well placed to pull an even larger portion of the roadway off its joints and into the sea. The attack, which killed four people, was a critical moment in the war.

Continue reading “Oldest known sentence discovered, on a lice comb”

Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.
      Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity. 

— from I Have Folded My Sorrows by Bob Kaufman

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear. Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” It was unearthed in Lachish, a Canaanite city state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah. Efforts to obtain an age for the comb from carbon dating proved futile, but researchers believe it was made around 1700 BCE.

How Ukraine blew up a key Russian bridge

Last month, a truck laden with explosives drove across the Kerch bridge, a critical artery connecting Russia with its troops fighting in southern Ukraine. A train traveled alongside. The truck detonated at a critically vulnerable spot — about halfway between a pair of reinforced concrete piers, maximizing damage to the roadway. The explosion was large enough to rupture fuel tanks in the passing train, setting it on fire. The detonation was also well placed to pull an even larger portion of the roadway off its joints and into the sea. The attack, which killed four people, was a critical moment in the war.

Continue reading “Oldest known sentence discovered, on a lice comb”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

In June of 2018, artist Gina Adams took the stage at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She talked nervously about being selected as summer artist-in-residence for the department of studio art, then greeted the audience in Anishinaabemowin, and talked about her Ojibwe grandfather. The following year, the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver posted five positions, and Adams was hired for one of them. She was described as “a contemporary Indigenous hybrid artist of Ojibwa Anishinaabe and Lakota descent.” In March of 2021, however, a Twitter account called NoMoreRed­Face posted a tweet that read: “Would you FAKE a residential school survivor backstory to sell $35,000 quilts and land a tenure track professorship in Aboriginal art?” The tweet then named Gina Adams, saying that “research suggests” she did just that.

How China’s imperial palace, the Forbidden City, became a public museum

When Zhu Di, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, ordered a grand palace built in Beijing in 1406, he probably didn’t envision vast crowds of commoners lining up to enter every weekend. The palace, which became known as the Forbidden City, was the exclusive residence of 28 emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties. It became a museum in 1925, and the story of how it got there is filled with intrigue and disaster — at one point, administrators decided to make an inventory of all the priceless artifacts in the palace’s collection, but many couldn’t be found. Hearing the news, many of the eunuchs who used to be employed in the city panicked, since they often smuggled treasures from the palace and sold them to antique dealers in the city. In order to cover their tracks, they set the palace on fire.

Continue reading “An investigation into the rise of what some call “Pretendians””

“The earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.” – Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BC

Note: Although I mostly posted this because I think it’s funny, I feel compelled to point out that there is no evidence a tablet like this ever existed or says what it claims to say, according to the folks at Quote Investigator: “This popular tale of a tablet listing eerily familiar societal criticisms has been in circulation for more than one-hundred years, and many versions of the supposed inscription have been described. The earliest instance known to QI of this prototypical claim was printed in the August 1908 issue of a periodical for bicyclists called “Bassett’s Scrap Book”. Despite that, however, it appears to be one of the oldest memes I have ever come across, which has to count for something!

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

If you’re a hard-core nerd, you probably already know this, but for those who don’t, it’s a fascinating story: In 1941, Hedy Lamarr, a famous silent-film star, patented the spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping technology that became the underpinnings of cellular telecommunications and WiFi. She got the idea by combining her knowledge of radio-guided torpedoes (which she learned about from her husband, a German arms dealer) with an art project that a musician friend was working on, using player-piano rolls. Lamarr put the two together and came up with a way of sending secure radio signals by skipping from channel to channel in a pre-programmed sequence that could be secretly encoded (like a player-piano roll). Much more than just a pretty face!

Jim Henson’s twisted commercials for a Washington coffee company

Muppet creator Jim Henson is known for his family-friendly puppet TV shows, but before he created the Muppets or joined Sesame Street, he used a very Kermit-like puppet to create some hilariously dark TV spots for a Baltimore/Washington-based company called Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.” Within those eight seconds, a coffee enthusiast named Wilkins (who bears a resemblance to Kermit the frog) manages to shoot, stab, bludgeon or otherwise do grave bodily harm to a coffee holdout named Wontkins. Henson provided the voices of both characters.

Continue reading “The silent-film star who laid the foundation for cellular networks”

The Cleo I device, the first really compact nuclear weapon, was delivered to Nevada Test Site for the Teapot Tesla test (7 kilotons), 1955, in two large suitcases. The guy carrying them — and eating lunch on one of them — is known only as “summer intern Tommy.” According to two books on the nuclear tests (“From Berkeley to Berlin” and “Nuclear Weapons Technology 101 for Policy Wonks”), the Cleo was split into two parts, each placed into a reinforced Samsonite suitcase.

Walt Arnold, a mechanical engineer responsible for putting the device together in Nevada, was assisted by a young man named Tommy, an electrical-engineering student from San Jose State University hired as a summer intern. Arnold ordered Tommy to manhandle two hefty suitcases out of the Laboratory’s assembly building and put them into the back of a ‘woody’ station wagon.

Then he gave the intern an Army-issue .45-caliber pistol and told him to guard the suitcases. The intern sat in the back of the vehicle with the Cleo, and a priceless photograph shows Tommy eating a sandwich while using one of the suitcases as a lunch table.

Note: This was originally published at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Ever since Elon Musk completed his problem-plagued $45 billion takeover of Twitter last month, there has been a steady stream of users, including a number of journalists, signing up for Mastodon, an open-source alternative to Twitter. Unlike Twitter, which is now 100-percent owned and controlled by Musk, no one controls Mastodon—or rather, everyone controls their own version of it. There are thousands of servers running the software, and each one chooses which servers it “federates” or exchanges information with. Don’t like the users who belong to a specific server? Just block them.

Unfortunately for some of the journalists who have joined the service, this mass blocking or “defederation” approach is now being applied to them. A server that caters specifically to journalists was set up recently by Adam Davidson, creator of NPR’s Planet Money podcast. At last count, the server, called journa.host, had about 1,300 users, including some prominent names in the US journalism community (Full disclosure: I have an account on Davidson’s server). Earlier this week, a Mastodon user pointed out that about 45 “instances” are blocking all content from members of journa.host (as of mid-November, that number is about 75).

Among the reasons given for blocking users from Davidson’s server are that it is allegedly populated by “click-bait/tabloid journalists” who “can be expected to collect, search through, and misinterpret anything you say with the goal to share this publicly to an as big audience as possible, enabling hate and harassment to any one as long as it gives them clicks.” Others who have blocked the server say that its members are likely to be “surveillance capitalists,” or “mainstream propagandists.”

Continue reading “Mastodon and journalism: An uneasy marriage?”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Egyptian mummies, long an object of modern fascination, seem to link us with the ancient past by preserving distinct human form. But this was not the true reason for the intricate process, according to a new British exhibition. The technique was instead a way of transforming dead dignitaries into a shape that the gods would accept. So, rather than ensuring the survival of individual features, mummification aimed to make the occupant of a tomb match a divine formula. “The idea that we inherited from the Victorians, that it was all done to keep a dead body just as it was in life, is not right,” said Campbell Price, a leading Egyptologist whose book will accompany the exhibition. “It is flawed, and we now believe it was intended to steer them towards divinity.”

We’ve hit an information-scaling threshhold

The internet has massively increased the complexity of our information environment, but hasn’t yet produced the tools to make sense of it. Old forms of social sensemaking—institutions, universities, democracy, tradition—all seem to be DDOS’d by the new information environment. They can’t keep up! We fractally fragment understandings, then algorithmically amplify the confusion to maximize engagement. The most effective coordination mechanisms left seem to be memes and conspiracy theories. Paul Tillich posits that when social sensemaking fails to keep up with reality, we experience it as a kind of mass neurosis. Everybody has a crisis of meaning at the same time. Life stops making sense. Anyone living through 2016 onward knows that feeling. The Permaweird.

Continue reading “Most of our past theories about Egyptian mummies are wrong”