Category: Newsletters

A luxury ocean liner burned and capsized in New York Harbor on Feb. 9, 1942. The SS Normandie, being converted into a troopship, caught fire during welding work and took 6,000 tons of water from firefighting efforts before rolling onto its side in the Hudson River. The Navy immediately suspected sabotage. German U-boats had sunk 120 American merchant ships in the first three months after Pearl Harbor, and fears of Axis agents operating along the waterfront ran high. Naval Intelligence started looking into local dock workers. Italian and German workers controlled by organized crime networks remained silent when federal investigators asked them questions. Commander Charles Haffenden of the Office of Naval Intelligence needed help investigating the incident and protecting the waterfront. He turned to the one man who could make dock workers talk, Charles Lucky Luciano, who was serving 30 to 50 years in prison. (via Military.com)

This Finnish inventor has more patents than Edison or Nikola Tesla

The legacy of the Finnish inventor and engineer Eric Magnus Campbell Tigerstedt (1887–1925) is not very widely known, even among the Finnish public. Nevertheless, Tigerstedt’s short yet prolific life touched and crossed several cultural and national boundaries: he was born to a Swedish-speaking aristocratic family in Russia’s Grand Duchy of Finland, but he studied in Germany, worked in Denmark and died in the United States at the age of 37. During his ill-fated career, Tigerstedt managed to create around 70 novel electrical devices and methods, which received over 100 patents from all over the world. Many of his inventions were aimed at creating a functioning and commercially viable sound film technology, including various amplifiers, loudspeakers and microphones. Even inventions such as the Cryptographone and an electronic hearing aid can be seen as side products of his ultimate dream of recording and reproducing synchronised sound with film image. (via Helsinki.fi)

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A distant webcam captured the moments the couple’s hiking trip started to unravel.The pair, a boyfriend and girlfriend, were nearing the summit of Grossglockner, the tallest mountain in the Austrian Alps, when their lights appeared on its dark peak.Around midnight, the man said, his girlfriend was struck by sudden exhaustion and could not continue. He said the two made a contentious, if not uncommon, decision: He would leave her behind and continue alone to find help.Hours later, he was out of harm’s way, and the woman was dead. Rescuers found her frozen body later that morning not far from the summit, officials say.Now, nearly a year later, the authorities have accused the man of making a series of mistakes that led to his girlfriend’s death, charging him this month with gross negligent manslaughter. (via the NYT)

Paganini wasn’t buried for 36 years because the Pope thought he made a deal with the devil

There is one musician who is regarded as the greatest violinist in History. One with an intense life, as befitted the Romantic period of his time; one who was sometimes compared to a serial killer and to a vampire; one who was said to be favored by having extraordinarily long fingers and by having made a pact with the devil to achieve his virtuosity: Niccolò Paganini. In May 1840, while at the home of the president of the Senate, he suffered an internal hemorrhage and died. He was fifty-seven years old. Death occurred so quickly that there was no time to call a priest, which, combined with his status as a Mason and the rumor of a diabolical pact, led the prelate to forbid his burial in the cemetery. His body was embalmed and kept in the basement of the same house in which he died. There it remained until 1853, when it could be buried in the Gaione cemetery (Parma). Finally, in 1876, the Pope authorized his burial. (via La Brujula Verde)

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One lucky couple has beaten extraordinary odds to win £1m on the National Lottery — for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, first scooped a seven-figure jackpot playing the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker in June 2018. And now they have done it again by matching five main numbers and the bonus ball in the Lotto draw on 26 November. According to experts at Allwyn, operator of the National Lottery, the odds of winning both the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker and then five numbers and the bonus ball on Lotto are over 24-trillion-to-one. Former hairdresser Richard uses his skills at a shelter for the homeless in Cardiff, a project which received vital National Lottery funding, while also helping out friends by working as a delivery driver. Ex-nurse Faye is a volunteer cook at Cegin Hedyn community kitchen in Carmarthen, while also providing mental health counselling services. (via the BBC)

New research helps solve the mystery of why more women wake up during surgery

Often casually compared to falling into a deep sleep, going under is in fact wildly different from your everyday nocturnal slumber. Not only does a person lose the ability to feel pain, form memories, or move—they can’t simply be nudged back into conscious awareness. But occasionally, people do wake unexpectedly — in about 1 out of every 1,000 to 2,000 surgeries, patients emerge from the fog of anesthesia into the harsh light of the operating room while still under the knife. One question that has dogged researchers over the past several decades is whether women are more likely to find themselves in these unfortunate circumstances. A number of recent studies, including a 2023 meta-analysis, suggest that the answer is yes. Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences helps untangle some of the mystery. In a series of experiments in mice and in humans, the researchers found that females do wake more easily from anesthesia and that testosterone plays an important role in how quickly and deeply we go under, and how easily we wake up. (via Nautilus)

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On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film’s oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production’s “No Animals Were Harmed” certification — Cameron performed CPR on the rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted “Beanie” as his pet. One can understand why a director like Cameron would go to extremes to protect his film’s reputation. But why did a man running one of the most tortuous shoots in Hollywood history, who was reportedly saying things to crewmembers like, “Firing [you] is too merciful” … Why did that guy open his home to a mere rat? “Beanie and I bonded over the whole thing,” he says. “I saved his life. We were brothers. He used to sit on my desk while I was writing Terminator 2, and he lived to a ripe old age. (via The Hollywood Reporter)

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist thinks he can get water from the air

In October 2025, Omar Yaghi was one of three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying metal-­organic frameworks, or MOFs — metal ions tethered to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis for a new project that sounds like science fiction, or a miracle: conjuring water out of thin air. When he first started working with MOFs, Yaghi thought they might be able to absorb climate-damaging carbon dioxide — or maybe hold hydrogen molecules, solving the thorny problem of storing that climate-friendly but hard-to-contain fuel. But then, in 2014, Yaghi’s team of researchers at UC Berkeley had an epiphany. The tiny pores in MOFs could be designed so the material would pull water molecules from the air around them, like a sponge — and then, with just a little heat, give back that water as if squeezed dry. Just one gram of a water-absorbing MOF has an internal surface area of roughly 7,000 square meters. (via MIT)

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In 1863, Angelo Mariani marketed a patent medicine called Vin Tonique Mariani à la Coca de Perou. Based on Bordeaux wine infused with three varietals of coca leaves in the bottle, le Vin Tonique Mariani was immediately applauded as a an ideal stomach stimulant, an analgesic on the air passages and vocal chords, appetite suppressant, anti-depressant, and treatment against anemia. In 1884, pharmacist John S Pemberton launched Pemberton’s French Coca Wine in Atlanta, Georgia. Another overnight success would have been in the making, if it hadn’t contained wine. The Klu Klux Klan forcefully lobbied for prohibition in Atlanta. The law was enacted in 1885. Pemberton was pressed to reformulate his product, replacing wine with cola extract and soda. Coca-Cola was born. The high cocaine content of Pemberton’s product forced Mariani to increase his dosage to 7.2 mg per ounce for US export. (via the EUVS)

The Pilgrims came to North America to harvest pine trees for the masts of British ships

Great Britain first came to America because it ran out of trees. The British needed big, thick, strong pines to make the masts for the Royal Navy, and they couldn’t get those from forests in Europe, so they sent Pilgrims to America basically to chop down trees to send back to Britain. The common mythology is that the Pilgrims were religious separatists, but they were really lumber merchants sent here to find timber for the Crown. But the colonists rebelled, and they lashed a king’s forest surveyor in a tavern in Weare, N.H. That became known as the Pine Tree Riot, which inspired the Boston Tea Party a year later. Flash forward to World War I, and the Allies desperately needed a pliable, tough, stringy wood to build airplanes. So the military mobilized a huge labor force of hundreds of thousands of military men who convened converged on the Oregon and Washington State coast to harvest Sitka spruce, which they called airplane spruce. And it turned the tide of the war, really. (via Scientific American)

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Australia recently became the first country in the world to ban kids under 16 from using social media — the result of a law that was passed last year but didn’t take effect until this month — but it is unlikely to be the last. Malaysia recently announced that it will also ban social media for users under 16 starting next year — the country’s Online Safety Act takes effect January 1, and the communications minister said the government is looking to Australia for guidance on implementing it. Denmark has said it is also moving toward a ban for users under 15, with parental consent allowed from age 13, and Norway is raising the minimum age from 13 to 15. The European Parliament recently voted by an overwhelming majority to set an EU-wide minimum age of 16 for social media, video-sharing platforms, and AI companions, and France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece are all testing a European age-verification app.

The rationale behind these laws is fairly straightforward: legislators in these countries are convinced that the use of social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok have caused an epidemic of mental health, self-esteem and body-image problems among young people, and in particular teenaged girls — problems that in some cases have led to deaths. This has been fueled by a series of unfortunate incidents, including a 16-year-old boy whose social-media account contained a number of videos discussing death and suicide and who stepped in front of a train in New York, and a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Australia who suffered from bullying on social media and then hanged herself in February 2022. Such incidents have led to a lot of fear-mongering articles by the mainstream media, portraying smartphone use and social media activity as a poison or a virus that creates emotional harm and in some cases mental illness in vulnerable teens.

Is there any scientific evidence that this is the case? The short answer is no. So then why do so many people believe there is? Because the media keeps telling them there is. Before Australia instituted its teenaged social-media ban, I had my suspicions about what might have helped to trigger that country’s law but in one of the recent news stories I found confirmation: the person who first proposed the ban and drove it forward was Peter Malinauskas, the Premier of South Australia, who said he started doing so after he read The Anxious Generation, a book by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His wife “put the book down on her lap and turned to me and said you’ve really got to do something about this,” he said. “And then I stopped and thought about it and thought maybe we actually can.” So he decided to try to introduce state-level legislation hoping it could win federal support too.

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.

Researchers have recorded, for the first time, images of moths drinking a moose’s tears. The intriguing interaction between the nocturnal insects and majestic mammals went down deep in the woods of Vermont, captured by trail cameras set in the state’s Green Mountain National Forest as part of a broader survey of moose across New England. Researchers in Vermont published the findings and the striking photographs in a recent issue of Ecosphere. Insects belonging to the order Lepidoptera—which includes moths and butterflies—are no strangers to tear drinking, or “lachryphagy.” Lepidopterans have been observed bellying up to the tear ducts of birds, reptiles, wild mammals, and domestic animals from Asia and Africa to parts of South America. (via Nautilus)

Her life changed when she found a rare Nintendo game in a thrift store

None of this would’ve happened had Jennifer Thompson not gone thrifting. This was in April 2013, and she was browsing clothes and $1 DVDs at the Steele Creek Goodwill in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, when she noticed it behind the glass counter. The video game title sparked a memory, a Yahoo article about the rarest games in the world. Jennifer drove across the street to McDonald’s, just to use the restaurant’s Wi-Fi to make sure she hadn’t been wrong. She then crossed the street again and purchased the game for $8 from the $30 she had in her bank account, praying the clerk wouldn’t recognize what it was and stop her. When she took it for validation to a used video game store in Charlotte, the young man behind the counter rustled open the plastic bag and coughed the words “Oh my god.” He offered her all the money in the register for it. She turned him down. (via ESPN)

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The mission demanded the utmost secrecy. A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down. Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration. It hasn’t been seen since. And that was 1965. (via the NYT)

A Swedish man survived for two months inside a snow-covered car

Peter Skyllberg, 44 years old at the time, became trapped in his car on December 19, 2011, near the city of Umeå . Temperatures outside dropped to around -30°C (-22°F) and heavy snow had almost totally encased the vehicle, seemingly preventing him from getting out. He was reportedly discovered on February 17, 2012 – 60 days after he went missing – when two people on snowmobiles passed the buried car, thinking it was abandoned. When they cleared the window and looked inside, they saw something moving. A local police officer said the man was in a sleeping bag and “could talk a little, but he was very bad.” He added that the man appeared to have survived by drinking handfuls of melted snow, but there was no evidence of any food. (via IFLScience)

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Clisson et Eugénie, also known in English as Clisson and Eugénie, is a romantic novella, written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon wrote Clisson et Eugénie in 1795, and it is widely acknowledged as being a fictionalised account of the doomed romance of a soldier and his lover, which paralleled Bonaparte’s own relationship with Eugénie Désirée Clary. Clisson, a heroic revolutionary French soldier, but tired of war, meets and falls for Eugénie at a public bath. Retiring from the military, Clisson and Eugénie marry and raise several children within an idyllic countryside retreat, but war returns and Clisson feels compelled to serve his country. Unfortunately, Clisson is injured in battle and Berville, a comrade sent to reassure Eugénie, seduces her instead, and she stops sending Clisson letters. Heartbroken at the end of his marriage, Clisson then sends off one final letter to his unfaithful wife and her new lover before deliberately engineering his death at the front of an armed charge toward the enemy. (via Wikipedia)

Crocodiles in Florida are thriving in the water around a nuclear generating station

Back in the 1970s, the future was not looking bright for the American crocodile, a hulking but shy reptile that once made its home throughout the mangrove and estuarine regions of South Florida. Due to over-hunting and habitat destruction, the species’ numbers had dwindled to fewer than 300 individuals in the state. In 1975, Florida’s American crocodiles were listed as endangered. But just two years later, something unexpected happened. Employees at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, located around 25 miles south of Miami, spotted a crocodile nest among the plant’s man-made network of cooling canals. Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL), the company that operates the plant, set up a program to monitor and protect the crocodiles that had settled in this unusual habitat. And ever since, the plant’s resident croc population has been booming. According to Marcus Lim of the Associated Press, FPL wildlife specialists collected 73 crocodile hatchlings just last week, and are expecting dozens more to emerge into the world over the remainder of the summer. (via the Smithsonian)

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It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy. The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes. His method is simple. First, he sets up shell companies that breed snails in empty office blocks. Then he claims that the office block is legally, against all indications to the contrary, a farm, and therefore exempt from paying taxes. “They’re sexy things,” chuckles Ball in a broad Blackburn accent, describing the speed with which two snails can incestuously multiply into dozens of specimens. Snails love group sex and cannibalism, he warns. (via The Guardian)

Researchers detect magic forms of quantum entanglement at the Large Hadron Collider

Seventeen years after the machine switched on, particle physicists are realizing that they can use the collider to explore how information flows through quantum systems — a question at the foundations of quantum computing. The two possible spins of the quarks correspond to the 0 and 1 states of a qubit, a unit of quantum information. One buzzy result came this spring, when the CMS experiment measured the “magic” of a pair of top quarks. In quantum information theory, magic is a property of entangled qubits that makes their state difficult to simulate on a classical computer. For quantum computers to run algorithms faster than classical computers, they must be fed a supply of magic states. Quantum computers can run certain algorithms exponentially faster than regular computers. This speedup is possible because of entanglement, which links the 0 and 1 states of different qubits, creating a network of possibilities. The quantum computer can manipulate all the possible states at once. (via Quanta magazine)

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It began with a rumour. Years after the war ended, stories started circulating about a Polish doctor who had supposedly saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers by inventing a false epidemic. Newspapers repeated it. A documentary crew went looking for it. A myth formed around the idea that one man and one clever medical trick had preserved a large Jewish population from certain death. The truth is more nuanced, grounded in the very specific nature of life in occupied Poland, in the habits of the German authorities, and in the slow and sometimes uncomfortable way historical memory evolves. Eugene Lazowski did save people. Many of them. But not in the precise way the legend later claimed. What he did manage was extraordinary in its own right. It simply deserves to be told as it really happened. He learned that patients injected with a harmless strain of Proteus bacteria would test positive for typhus. (via Utterly Interesting)

He built an exoskeleton and an artificial stomach so he could blend in with a herd of goats

Building an exoskeleton of a goat and a prosthetic stomach to digest grass before attempting to cross the Alps on all fours must rank as one of the weirder research projects funded by the Wellcome Trust. But London designer Thomas Thwaites has turned his bizarre mission to bridge the boundary between Homo sapiens and other species by becoming “GoatMan” into an enlightening and funny book. Informed by advice from a Danish shaman, neuroscientists, prosthetists, animal behaviourists and Swiss goat herders, it explores what connects and separates us from other animals. Thwaites found the physical challenges of becoming a creature that moved on all fours almost insurmountable. Primates are “weird”, Thwaites says, for putting almost all their weight on their back legs; he required prosthetics to put 60% of his weight on his “front legs”. His pelvis was also 135 degrees out of alignment. “I was sort of shocked at how bad a goat I was,” he says, “and I was really trying.” (via The Guardian)

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If you spend much time wandering around what we used to call the social web — and by that I mean primarily the large social apps and platforms like Facebook and Instagram and X and Snapchat and even TikTok — you might find yourself sympathizing with the great Yogi Berra, who once said of a certain place that “No one goes there any more, it’s too crowded.” It would be hard to argue that social networks are empty, and yet it often seems as though no one is there any more, or at least no one we recognize and/or want to spend time around. There are lots of posts, and videos, and photos — so many posts — and yet there is a feeling that (to use another famous quote, this one from Gertrude Stein) there’s no there there. Is it just because suspect some of those people are actually AI bots simulating human activity? Possibly. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well.

What we do know with some level of certainty is that the decline of social networking broadly speaking is a real, observable phenomenon as well as a hunch. The Financial Times recently reported that a study it commissioned shows that social media use peaked in 2022 and has since gone into more or less steady decline. The study was an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries that was carried out by a digital-audience insights company called GWI. The study’s authors took pains to point out that this was not just an unwinding of a screen-time or social-media bump that took place during COVID lockdowns — usage has reportedly “traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade plus.”

Across the developed world, adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. Notably, the decline is most pronounced among the erstwhile heaviest users — teens and 20-somethings. Additional data from GWI trace the shift. The shares of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people have fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Meanwhile, reflexively opening the apps to fill up spare time has risen, reflecting a broader pernicious shift from mindful to mindless browsing.

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.

In 1838, 29-year-old Illinois state representative Abraham Lincoln went on a pseudo blind date set up by a friend. The date wasn’t entirely blind — Lincoln had seen the sister some years before, and said she seemed to be “intelligent and agreeable.” But things quickly went from great to uncomfortable when Mary Owens did not look as Abe had remembered her. “I knew she was oversize, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff,” he wrote. “When I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features — for her skin was too full of fat to permit of its contracting into wrinkles — but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general.” Despite this initial impression, Lincoln seems to have changed his mind later, because he proposed marriage — and Owens refused. Twice. (via Mental Floss)

If you have an allergy to pork scientists say you are probably also allergic to cats

A pork allergy is an adverse immune response after consuming pork and its byproducts. It is also called pork-cat syndrome because most pork allergies are related to cat allergies. The reason that some cat-sensitized individuals are susceptible to pork allergies is that some individuals are not only allergic to the cat dander, but are also allergic to a protein found in cats called albumin.  Albumin is also found in meat from pigs and other animals. Other causes of pork allergy are unknown. Undercooked pork or dried pork products tend to cause more reactions than well-cooked pork. Symptoms include urticaria (hives), pork allergy rash, and inflammation of the skin; gastrointestinal symptoms including nausea, vomiting, and stomach cramps; runny or stuffy nose; mild fever; wheezing and difficulty breathing; and in rare cases, anaphylaxis. (via NY Allergy)

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