Category: Newsletters

Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the pharmaceutical giant unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken from her tumor without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements, including the polio vaccine. It’s the second settlement in lawsuits filed by the estate that accused biomedical businesses of reaping rewards from a racist medical system that took advantage of Black patients like Lacks. The settlement ends litigation between Novartis and the estate of Lacks, a mother who died of cervical cancer at age 31. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Lacks’ cervical cells in 1951 without her knowledge, and the tissue taken from her tumor before she died became the first human cells to continuously grow and reproduce in lab dishes. HeLa cells became a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines. (via AP News)

Why did British barrister Charles Foster decide to live like an animal?

have become The Man Who Eats Worms,” Charles Foster shrugs, sorrowfully. “It’s not really a very interesting subject. It doesn’t tell you anything about how badgers experience the world.” This combination of self-deprecation and a quest for deeper purpose is what defines Foster, the 53-year-old barrister and Oxford medical tutor who decided to shed his professional human trappings and live like an animal. It also defines the book he has written about his experiences, called Being a Beast . Eating earthworms, licking slugs and scuffling around on all fours, he and his then eight-year-old son (or cub) Tom lived nocturnally for six weeks as badgers in a Welsh wood; his farmer friend dug out a sett for them in the hillside. In the East Lyn river, Foster thrashed around as an otter, catching the occasional unlucky fish in his mouth, and failing to notice a leech attached to his lip for an hour as his face numbed from the cold. (via New Statesman)

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Continue reading “Her cells created billions in value for drug companies”

A couple of months ago, a man arrived for his 50th dinner at Nisei, the one-Michelin-starred Japanese fine-dining restaurant in Russian Hill. As he sauntered up Polk Street in his signature white tennis shoes, jeans, blazer, and backpack, the entire Nisei staff was waiting outside to greet him with a round of applause. It was as if royalty had arrived. Except by all accounts, it was just a guy named Michael Grepo. Grepo, 67, is a single, former federal employee who, for the past 38 years, has been living in a rent-controlled in-law apartment in Miraloma Park. It’s the same neighborhood where he grew up in a Filipino family. He pays $1,000 a month, utilities included. He doesn’t own a car. He takes Muni to dinner. When he’s not eating out, he makes himself monastic bowls of tofu and steamed kale. But since his retirement in 2018, he has become a regular at the kind of restaurants that don’t normally have regulars. (via the SF Standard)

The European witch trials were a result of competition between Catholics and Protestants

Between 900 and 1400, Christian authorities were unwilling to so much as admit that witches existed, let alone try someone for the crime of being one. This was not for lack of demand. Belief in witches was common in medieval Europe and in 1258 Pope Alexander IV had to issue a canon to prevent prosecutions for witchcraft. By 1550, Christian authorities had reversed their position entirely. Witches now existed in droves and, to protect citizens against the perilous threat witchcraft posed to their safety and well-being, had to be prosecuted and punished wherever they were found. In the wake of this reversal, a literal witch-hunt ensued across Christendom. The great age of European witch trials would not end for another 150 years. By the time it did, no fewer than 80,000 people had been tried for witchcraft, half of them executed. We argue that this reflected non-price competition between Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom. (via Peter Leeson)

He thought they were homework but they were famous unsolved problems

In 1939, George Dantzig rushed off to his graduate statistics class at UC Berkeley. As he sat down among the other graduate students in class, his eye was caught by a set of math problems written up on the blackboard. Assuming them to be the day’s assigned homework, he copied them down and turned them in to his professor, and apologized for taking so long to do the homework. Early Sunday morning about six weeks later, Dantzig and his wife were awakened by someone banging on their front door. They were surprised to find an out-of-breath Neyman with an excited look on his face, clutching a couple of rumpled papers. He had just written an introduction to one of the papers and wanted to send it out for publication. As it turned out, the problems Dantzig had mistaken for homework were really two famous unsolved statistics problems that were now, at the suggestion of Neyman, taken up as his doctoral dissertation. (From UMD)

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.

The Tully Monster was an ancient marine animal whose fossils have only been found in Illinois

Tullimonstrum, colloquially known as the Tully monster or sometimes Tully’s monster, is an extinct genus of soft-bodied bilaterian marine animal that lived in shallow tropical coastal waters of muddy estuaries during the Pennsylvanian, about 310 million years ago. Examples of Tullimonstrum have been found only in sediments deposited far from the palaeocoast (formally termed the Essex biota), in the Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois. This creature had a mostly cigar-shaped body, with a triangular tail fin, two long stalked eyes, and a proboscis tipped with a mouth-like appendage. Amateur collector Francis Tully found the first of these fossils in 1955 in a fossil bed known as the Mazon Creek formation. He took the strange creature to the Field Museum of Natural History, but paleontologists were stumped as to which phylum Tullimonstrum belonged to. (via Wikipedia)

Scientists say that the giraffe’s long neck evolved for sexual combat

If you’re a fan of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, you’ll recall “How The Elephant Got His Trunk,” “How The Leopard Got His Spots,” and the like. You probably also remember from basic biology the regnant evolutionary account of “How The Giraffe Got His Long Neck.” It lent itself to contrasting Lamarckian selection — in which early giraffes stretched their necks to reach higher leaves, thereby bequeathing their long neckedness to subsequent generations — with Darwinian natural selection, in which evolution favored those individual giraffes whose genetic background endowed them with longer necks, thus selecting for this trait. Although Lamarck remains in disfavor, research recently published in the journal Science strongly suggests that a different and far sexier variant of natural selection — appropriately termed sexual selection — has been operating. Time to revise the textbooks. But not completely. (via Nautilus)

He built a chessboard with a taser built in that shocks you if you make the wrong move

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

Svetlana, who was then eighty-one years old, lived in a senior citizens’ center in Spring Green, Wisconsin. When we met, she was dressed in baggy gray sweatpants and sunglasses. She was short and compact, and her once red hair had turned white and had started to thin. Scoliosis had given her a hunch, and she used a cane. She showed me her one-bedroom apartment, and the little desk by a window where her typewriter stood. Her bookshelf included the Russian-English dictionary that her father had used. Svetlana was welcoming, and spoke with the energy of someone who hadn’t told her story in a long time. After a few hours, she wanted to take a walk. We headed down a quiet street, to a garage sale, where a man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt was selling a small cast-iron bookshelf. He asked Svetlana if she wanted to buy it. She couldn’t, she said. She had only twenty-five dollars until her welfare check came. (via the New Yorker)

She discovered 35 forgotten Rembrandt etchings while cleaning out an old desk

Charlotte Meyer is a Dutch woman who made a life-changing discovery in 2020, when she decided to sort through a drawer of heirlooms that had long gone untouched. Years before, when Meyer’s grandfather died, he left her a folder of prints that had been in the family for roughly a century. When Meyer finally opened the folder, she found 35 etchings created by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, whose 17th-century paintings and prints are renowned as some of the greatest visual art to come out of the Western world. Meyer’s grandfather collected the etchings between 1900 and 1920. They were small, with some measuring only a few centimeters in length. At first, Meyer wasn’t sure if the artworks were truly by Rembrandt. She felt sheepish calling experts at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, but when the experts arrived at Meyer’s home and went through the etchings, the full weight of the find sank in. (via the Smithsonian)

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Continue reading “He found Stalin’s daughter living in a Wisconsin retirement home”

More than halfway through the crime novel he wrote, Robert Fuller describes the frustration of a detective locked in a mystery. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Now what?” he said aloud. It has been a week since someone made their way into Fuller’s assisted living apartment in Potomac, Maryland, police say, and fatally shot the 87-year-old millionaire in the head. Authorities released surveillance video Friday of a suspect walking on the facility’s grounds the morning of Feb. 14 around the time Fuller was killed. The video shows the back of a slender person wearing dark pants with long dark hair flowing over a yellowish checkered shirt. Investigators hope someone will recognize the shirt or the person’s gait, produced as if they’re favoring one foot. Detectives don’t know if the person depicted is a man or woman, was acting alone or what their motive was. (via MSN)

A colonel in the Mexican revolution was born female but lived as man for 70 years

Amelio Robles Ávila was a colonel during the Mexican Revolution. Assigned female at birth, Robles lived openly as a man from age 24 until his death at age 95. From a young age, Robles showed an interest in activities that were considered masculine, learning to tame horses and handling weapons, and becoming an excellent marksman and rider. Robles gained the respect of peers and superiors as a capable military leader, and was eventually given his own command. According to historians, Robles adopted a male identity not as a survival strategy but because of a strong desire to be a man. Robles’s male identity was accepted by family, society, and the Mexican government. According to a former neighbor, if anyone called Robles a woman or Doña (an honorific for women, similar to English Lady), he would threaten them with a pistol. (via Wikipedia)

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Continue reading “He wrote a murder mystery and now his death has become one”

Around 2,000 strange tunnels have been found around central Europe. These aren’t like the well-known catacombs of Paris or Rome. Known as the erdstall, these passages are extremely narrow, never more than two feet wide nor high enough for an adult to walk in, and sometimes the passages become seemingly impossibly narrow, with some as small as 16 inches in diameter. Determining their age and purpose is made difficult by the fact that almost no archaeological evidence has been found inside any of them. A ploughshare was found in one, millstones in a couple others, but apart from that the erdstall are eerily empty. Carbon analyses of coal and pottery fragments found within point to construction dates of around 900 to 1200 AD, but no written records from the Middle Ages mention the erdstall’s existence. (via Weird Medieval Guys)

A Great Dane was awarded a medal in World War II for peeing on an explosive device

Animals have played pivotal roles on the front lines of many battles. Horses, elephants, and even dolphins have been employed for their strength, intelligence, and adaptability. During World War II, one brave animal stood out as a hero for using an unlikely defense tactic against the enemy: her urine. Juliana was the name of a Great Dane who had even greater instincts. In April 1941, amid the ongoing German bombing campaign known as the Blitz, explosives rained down across the U.K. When a bomb fell through the roof of the house where Juliana lived with her owner, the fast-acting pooch made her way over to the incendiary device and extinguished its flame by urinating on it. Juliana’s bravery earned her a medal from the Blue Cross. (via History Facts)

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Continue reading “There are thousands of secret tunnels throughout Europe”

“You know that island between Mozambique and Madagascar that you visited,” she said. “Was it called Anjouan? Well, there’s been a coup.” Actually, there had been 24 coups in as many years, the pace accelerating after 1997 and culminating with two in 2001. On an island no bigger than the Isle of Wight, this means that a significant proportion of the adult population has indulged in some storming of the presidential palace, albeit usually short-lived. To be honest, any able-bodied person with some pluck and peripheral vision stands a good chance: the Maoist revolutionary, Ali Soilih, took over in 1975 armed with little more than the spokes from a bicycle wheel; the French mercenary, Bob Denard, succeeded 20 years later with a dozen soldiers all aged over 60. When I left to sail to Anjouan, an ex-Foreign Legion man warned me that, despite being an unarmed lone traveller, I would be viewed as an invasion force. (via The Guardian)

Evolutionary scientists say the human chin is a biological accident

Absent from other primates — and even Denisovans and Neanderthals — the bony, protruding chin is a uniquely human characteristic. As such, it’s tempting to indulge in another uniquely human trait and come up with a reason it was honed by natural selection. Supporting the lower jaw to facilitate chewing or acting as a secondary sexual characteristic to advertise maturity to mates, are two such stories. To investigate theories of the evolution of the chin, researchers examined gene sequences involved in the development of the head and jaw for evidence of evolution. Specifically, the team looked at whether sequences involved in producing the chin itself were subject to direct selection, whether they arose neutrally due to genetic drift, or whether they were merely a byproduct of evolution acting upon other traits (a spandrel). They found that the evidence pointed toward the chin being an accident. (via Nautilus)

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Continue reading “This tiny island had a coup almost every year for 24 years”

There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago. The 32-year-old musician was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he was 29 years old, which affects the nerves that supply the body’s muscles. People with ALS eventually lose the ability to control their muscles, including those that allow them to move, speak, and breathe. Darling’s last stage performance was over two years ago. By that point, he had already lost the ability to stand and play his instruments and was struggling to sing or speak. But recently, he was able to re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. (via MIT Tech Review)

A woman lived undetected inside the sign on top of a Michigan store for more than a year

A woman who had been living in a sign of a Michigan grocery store for about a year was captured on police body cam footage telling police it was a “safe spot” for her to live. The saga began about a month ago when a contractor working on the roof of the Family Fare store in Midland noticed an extension cord running into a door on the back of the sign. When he opened the door, he was greeted by the 34-year-old woman. Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department told The Associated Press that the woman had made herself quite comfortable in the sign’s approximate 40-square feet. “There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk,” he said. “Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you’d have in your home.” Police did not name the woman, but said she was cooperative and agreed to leave. She was not charged with any crimes. the woman told officers she’d been living in the sign for about a year, but officers never learned how she was accessing the roof every day. (via Global News)

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 “ALS stole his voice but AI let him sing again one more time”

In the delicate jargon of the fertility industry, a woman who carries a child for someone else is said to be going on a “journey.” Kayla Elliott began hers in February, 2024. Elliott already had four children, but she was intrigued by the prospect of bearing another. She’d loved the natural rush of pregnancy and as a surrogate, she could earn money for her family.Within days, Elliott received a brief message from Mark Surrogacy, an agency in Los Angeles, who wanted to know if she was interested in working with a Chinese couple. She was sent a dating-style profile with a photo of a paunchy sixty-four-year-old, Guojun Xuan, with his arm draped around a woman identified as his wife, Silvia, who was thirty-six and had short-cropped black hair. They lived in Arcadia, an affluent city in L.A. County, and shared a daughter who, they said, longed for a sibling. Then another surrogate, who lived in Pennsylvania, shared something she’d heard about the couple: they already had thirteen children. (via the New Yorker)

In the 1800s the Iron Riders all-Black infantry corps bicycled almost 2,000 miles

In 1897, the all-Black 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps embarked on an epic ride of more than 1,900 miles from Fort Missoula, Montana, to St. Louis, Missouri, as part of an experiment by the U.S. Army to determine the effectiveness of moving troops by bicycle. Called “The Great Experiment” in national newspapers, the journey took 41 days to complete. The route was chosen specifically to experience as many different conditions, climates and landscape formations as possible. The 25th Infantry was one of six racially segregated units formed by the Army after the Civil War. Soldiers in these units were required to continuously prove themselves to their white counterparts because of the perception that Black soldiers were inferior in courage and ability. Members of the Bicycle Corps demonstrated the opposite was true. (via Missouri State Parks)

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Continue reading “Mysterious Chinese couple have dozens of surrogate kids”

In the run-up to this year’s Winter Olympics, and even as the Games have got underway, a scandal has been brewing: allegedly, some competitive ski jumpers may have artificially enlarged their crotch area by injecting their genitals with engorging chemicals or stuffing their underwear to create bigger bulges. The apparent reason: to alter their suit measurements and, reportedly, to gain a boost in jumps.The allegations, dubbed “Penisgate,” have caught not only the Internet’s attention but also the World Anti-Doping Agency’s eye. It raises an important science question: How does a slight increase in a jumper’s suit surface area change their jumping distance? Let’s start with the crotch. According to rules issued by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), the body that regulates ski jumping, “crotch height” measurements for an athlete’s suit are taken by laser. So, in theory, if an athlete’s crotch is a little larger, they would get a slightly roomier suit than they might otherwise. (via Scientific American)

These high-school students built an airplane in shop class and then they flew it

A remarkable high school aerospace program in Sandpoint, Idaho, reached a milestone that few youth aviation initiatives ever achieve — FAA airworthiness certification for not one, but two student-built aircraft. Now those planes have taken flight, piloted by a former student who helped build one of them. When the Federal Aviation Administration inspector signed off on airworthiness certificates for a Van’s RV-12 and a Zenith STOL CH 750, it validated years of Saturday morning labor by middle and high school students who’d gathered in rented hangars at Sandpoint Airport. But getting the FAA’s approval stamp was only half the story. The real vindication came when Eric Gray, a former ACES (Aerospace Center of Excellence Sandpoint) student who’d worked on the Zenith during his own high school years, climbed into the cockpit as the qualified test pilot for both aircraft. It’s the kind of full-circle moment that validates not just the technical competency of the program, but its deeper mission, to create a pipeline from teenage curiosity to aerospace careers.(via KitPlanes)

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Continue reading “Why did Olympic ski jumpers try to make their penises larger?”

Hidden inside a historic 19th century house on East Fourth Street in Manhattan is a secret sanctuary. Ever since the Merchant’s House Museum opened its doors to the public in 1936, visitors have lined up to get a taste of “old New York.” The Treadwell family lived there from 1835 until 1933. Their residence is frozen in time, from a ruby-red front parlor complete with its original piano to the kitchen with its cast-iron coal-burning stove. But when visitors head upstairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, there’s something strategically hidden within the walls of Manhattan’s first landmarked building: a link to the Underground Railroad. When you remove the heavy bottom drawer in a chest of drawers, you can see a rectangular opening cut into the floorboards, which leads to an enclosed space and a ladder that leads down to the ground floor. (via NY1)

No one knows who wrote the massive hand-illustrated book known as the Devil’s Bible

The Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil’s Bible, is famous for two reasons: it is believed to be the world’s largest preserved medieval manuscript, at over three feet tall and weighing over 160 pounds (Codex Gigas means “giant book”) and it also contains a large, full-page portrait of the Devil. The Codex Gigas was originally created for a Bohemian monastery, but was brought to Sweden as spoils of war in the 17th century. Among other things, the manuscript contains a complete Bible, historical texts, magic formulas and spells. A work of this kind would have typically been the work of several scribes whose contributions would be obvious through differences in their handwriting. Not so for the Codex Gigas, whose 620 pages show exactly one handwriting style. For a single person to complete a such a large book would have taken over 20 years. (via the NLS)

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Continue reading “NY home contains a hidden door to the Underground Railroad”

If you watched the Super Bowl last weekend and are either located in the United States or have access to the American commercials, you might have seen a heartwarming ad for a new feature of Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras, called Search Party. The ad shows people putting up posters about their missing pets. A little girl’s new puppy seems to be missing, so her dad turns to the Ring Neighborhood app and Search Party makes hundreds of doorbell cameras in the neighborhood come to life. The footage from them is used to identify the missing dog in a matter of minutes. We should be grateful that we have technologies that can help us in such situations, right? Well, no. In effect, what Amazon showed us was a massive, panopticon-style video-surveillance network. Does this sound heartwarming? Not really. Especially when it’s combined with other disturbing things that are going on in the United States surveillance-wise.

Privacy expert Chris Gilliard told 404 Media that the ad was “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.” Senator Ed Markey posted on X that the Search Party feature “definitely isn’t about dogs — it’s about mass surveillance.” Coincidentally, Ring recently announced a new feature called Familiar Faces, which it says uses AI to recognize people who have appeared on your Ring doorbell camera multiple times. It can recognize them up to 13 feet away from the camera, and it works along with Ring’s 24/7 Continuous Recording feature. It also notes that the feature is “not available in: Texas, Illinois, Portland (OR), or Quebec (Canada) due to legislation.”

Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels told The Verge that Search Party is only designed to match images of dogs and is “not capable of processing human biometrics” – or at least not yet, anyway. She added that the facial recognition feature (which isn’t enabled by default) is separate from Search Party, and operates on the individual account level, with no communal sharing. Asked whether the Search Party feature could be used to recognize human beings rather than just dogs, she demurred, and also evaded the question when asked whether Ring’s facial-recognition software could be used to track individuals, or be used by police agencies or ICE. Using an existing feature, Ring users can currently share footage from their cameras voluntarily with local law enforcement agencies through a feature called Community Requests.

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Continue reading “Building the Panopticon: The doorbell camera version”