Author: Mathew Ingram

From the Harvard Gazette: “The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children. But despite these efforts, things got worse. It seemed that avoiding peanuts at a young age didn’t prevent peanut allergies, it actually created them.”

Crows can hold a grudge that lasts for generations

From the New York Times: “Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years. How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006, when Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing an ogre mask.”

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Continue reading “How trying to avoid peanut allergies made them worse”

I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I’m going to do my best to convince you that I’m right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line via one of the platforms that are mentioned at the very bottom of the page and let me know whether I succeeded or not!) It seems ridiculous, of course, because how could the media industry — in Canada in this case — getting $100 million from Google be a bad thing? Isn’t getting a hundred million dollars an unequivocally good thing? How can I, a journalist who has been fired, laid off, let go, and otherwise made redundant from almost every job I’ve ever had in 35 years, argue that it’s a bad idea? Isn’t the media industry a financial train wreck?

Many (perhaps all) of those statements are true. The media industry — not just in Canada or the US but almost everywhere — is in a perilous state. Advertising revenue has been in freefall for years, even some of the major mainstream publications have been doing waves of cutbacks and layoffs, and there is no end in sight. Obviously, in that kind of environment, some money for news publishers is better than nothing. But I would argue that the strings tied to the Google funding, and the broader context within which that funding is happening — including Bill C-18, which is the Canadian version of Australia’s news-payment law — make it not a good thing. In fact, I think it’s possible that the media industry could wind up worse off rather than better.

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I know the headline on this post probably sounds ridiculous to some (perhaps all) of you reading this, but I’m going to do my best to convince you that I’m right by the end of this piece (maybe some of you can drop me a line via one of the platforms that are mentioned at the very bottom of the page and let me know whether I succeeded or not!) It seems ridiculous, of course, because how could the media industry — in Canada in this case — getting $100 million from Google be a bad thing? Isn’t getting a hundred million dollars an unequivocally good thing? How can I, a journalist who has been fired, laid off, let go, and otherwise made redundant from almost every job I’ve ever had in 35 years, argue that it’s a bad idea? Isn’t the media industry a financial train wreck?

Many (perhaps all) of those statements are true. The media industry — not just in Canada or the US but almost everywhere — is in a perilous state. Advertising revenue has been in freefall for years, even some of the major mainstream publications have been doing waves of cutbacks and layoffs, and there is no end in sight. Obviously, in that kind of environment, some money for news publishers is better than nothing. But I would argue that the strings tied to the Google funding, and the broader context within which that funding is happening — including Bill C-18, which is the Canadian version of Australia’s news-payment law — make it not a good thing. In fact, I think it’s possible that the media industry could wind up worse off rather than better.

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

Continue reading “Google giving $100 million to the media isn’t a win”

From Scientific American: “Human echolocation has at times allowed people to ride bikes or play basketball despite being completely blind from a very young age. These echolocators typically perceive their environment by clicking sharply with their tongues and listening to differences in the sounds reflected off objects. Brain-imaging studies reveal that expert echolocators display responses to sound in their brain’s primary visual region, and researchers have speculated that long-term input deprivation could lead to visual regions being repurposed. “There’s been this strong tradition to think of the blind brain as different,” said Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at Durham University in England. Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people could learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training.”

Tracking a serial killer: The bodies behind the walls at 10 Rillington Place

From the LRB: “On​ 24 March 1953, 43-year-old Beresford Wallace Brown was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs tenant. The wall sounded hollow behind Beresford Brown’s hammer. He stripped off a sheet of wallpaper and spotted a hole in the wooden panel behind it: an alcove. He shone a torch in, and saw the white torso of a woman, her head covered. He and a fellow tenant went to a kiosk to call the police. The police found two more bodies stashed away behind the first one. All three women in the alcove, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in their twenties. They had died between January and March.”

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Continue reading “Scientists say anyone can learn to do echolocation”

From The Guardian: “When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother – Carolyn Correa – turned to her and said, “There’s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you’re not going to let her, right?” Vera promised she wasn’t going anywhere; she’d tell the “bad lady” to get off her. “I was a sassy kid,” she says now, 20 years on. Remembering that strange exchange still gives Vera chills. It was Correa herself that had taken Vera away, kidnapping her as a newborn, crossing over from Philadelphia to New Jersey, changing Delimar’s name to Aaliyah and raising her as her own. Vera, 26, tells me the story of her bizarre and traumatic childhood – part horror story, part fairytale, and still in many ways a mystery.”

These twins created their own secret language

From the BBC: “Twins Matthew and Michael Youlden speak 25 languages each. The 26th is Umeri, which they don’t include in their tally. If you’ve not heard of Umeri, there’s good reason for that. Michael and Matthew are the only two people who speak, read and write it, having created it themselves as children. The brothers insist Umeri isn’t an intentionally secret language. An estimated 30-50% of twins develop a shared language or particular communication pattern that is only comprehensible to them, known as cryptophasia. The term translates directly from Greek as secret speech. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, believes there are now better and more nuanced words for the phenomenon, and prefers to use “private speech”.

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

Continue reading “They said she died in a fire as a baby but she was kidnapped”