Trung Phan writes: “Hello Kitty has been around since 1974 and, as recently as 2013, was selling $8 billion worth of merchandise annually. Hello Kitty merchandise has made $89B in lifetime sales, which is roughly equal to the combined all-time sales for Batman, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and James Bond. The company behind Hello Kitty is a Japanese firm called Sanrio, which has a very interesting story. Its founder Shintaro Tsuji was obsessed with Walt Disney. And he built a merchandise and licensing machine in an attempt to match the global influence of his idol. Hello Kitty entered the picture in 1974. Sanrio designer Yuko Shimizu dreamed up a cat-like character that would become Sanrio’s answer to Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (one of Tsuji’s main inspirations).

Alabama kidnapping is stranger than fiction

Charles Gaines writes about a case involving a wealthy Birmingham businessman who is awoken from his sleep by an audacious pair of criminals — and their two kids — who claim to have acquired the house he is sleeping in, and he subsequently gets taken for the most terrifying and bewildering ride of his life. “Every night when he goes to bed, Elton B. Stephens Jr. pulls up an app on his phone called SnoreLab that records his snoring and breathing overnight, along with any other sounds made nearby—such as those of the Kafkaesque nightmare he finds himself waking to this morning, a nightmare for which nothing in his blithe seventy-five years has prepared him. (Note: Despite the fact that it seems like someone had to have made it up, the dialogue in this article, up to when Elton leaves the house, is taken directly from the SnoreLab recording, though some of it has been edited for clarity and/or reordered.)”

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Continue reading “Hello Kitty is one of the most profitable franchises of all time”

The first Star Wars movies were filmed in a number of exotic locations: The lush and dense California Redwoods served as the forest moon of Endor, Hoth scenes were filmed on the frozen tundra of Norway’s Hardangerjokulen Glacier, and the set of the Lars Homestead was famously built in Tunisia, North Africa surrounded by sands and sun. This is where the war in the stars almost came too close to home, thanks to a border dispute, a crazed dictator, and a group of junk-trading Jawas. While a miniature was used for full shots of the Jawa’s mobile droid and salvage shop making its way through the desert, for scenes that required actor participation a large background prop of the lower tread and ramps of the sandcrawler was built. This tank-like treaded structure immediately drew the ire of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi, who demanded that Tunisia cease it’s military buildup near the Libyan border. Lucas immediately complied with the demands and moved the filming to a more discreet location.

AI described how to create 40,000 new chemical weapons in just six hours

It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. “The biggest thing that jumped out at first was that a lot of the generated compounds were predicted to be actually more toxic than VX. And the reason that’s surprising is because VX is basically one of the most potent compounds known,” one of the scientists said.

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.

Continue reading “The real-life war that the movie ‘Star Wars’ almost caused”

Xuehu Wei, who is a doctoral student in the research team around Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, compared the brain scans of 94 native speakers of two very different languages and showed that the language we grow up with modulates the wiring in the brain. Two groups of native speakers of German and Arabic respectively were scanned in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The high-resolution images not only show the anatomy of the brain, but also allow us to derive the connectivity between the brain areas using a technique called diffusion-weighted imaging. The data showed that the axonal white matter connections of the language network adapt to the processing demands and difficulties of the mother tongue. “Arabic native speakers showed a stronger connectivity between the left and right hemispheres than German native speakers,” explained Alfred Anwander, last author of the study.

Scientists discover RNA component buried in the dust of an asteroid

A sample extracted from an asteroid far from Earth has confirmed that RNA nucleobases can be found in space rocks. Analysis of dust ferried home from asteroid Ryugu has been found to contain uracil – one of the four nucleobases that make up RNA – in addition to niacin, a form of the vitamin B3, which plays an important role in metabolism. This adds to a growing body of evidence that the building blocks for life form in space, and may have been at least partially delivered to Earth by asteroid bombardment early in our planet’s history. “Scientists have previously found nucleobases and vitamins in certain carbon-rich meteorites, but there was always the question of contamination by exposure to the Earth’s environment,” says astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University in Japan. “Since the Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected two samples directly from asteroid Ryugu and delivered them to Earth in sealed capsules, contamination can be ruled out.”

Continue reading “The language we speak shapes the connectivity in our brains”

In the 1800s, counterfeiting became extremely common, and the one person acknowledged as America’s greatest counterfeiter was Benjamin Boyd. Boyd used to work for a Chicago syndicate run by James “Big Jim” Kinealy. However, Abraham Lincoln’s legislation to arrest counterfeiters resulted in Boyd being sentenced to prison in 1876. With Big Jim’s top man gone, his business was in a wrecked state. He had to do something to get Boyd freed from prison. Out of the blue, a bizarre plan arose: steal Abraham Lincoln’s body, bury it in the Indiana dunes, and then ask for $200,000 for ransom along with the pardon and freedom of Benjamin Boyd. To execute this plan, Kinealy hired a bartender, Terrence Mullen, and a counterfeiter, Jack Hughes. The two decided to pull off the heist on election night when no one was in town. There was also very minimal security at Lincoln’s grave, which meant the chances for the plan to go wrong were significantly less.

Why did the US government amass a billion pounds of cheese?

The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. Decades of propping up the dairy industry—by buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheese—had backfired, hard. The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible,” a USDA official was quoted as saying. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.” Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. But the surplus was growing so fast that 30 million pounds barely made a dent. By 1984, the U.S. storage facilities contained 1.2 billion pounds, or roughly five pounds of cheese for every American.

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Continue reading “The secret plot to hold Abraham Lincoln’s dead body for ransom”

About two weeks after his 18th birthday, Dallas Seavey became the youngest competitor to ever finish the Iditarod; at 25, he became the youngest to win it. But his fifth victory, in 2021, carried an asterisk: He triumphed on a truncated 848-mile course, shortened to prevent the potential spread of Covid. To the sport’s critics, however, no amount of victories can erase their perception of Dallas’s wrongdoings. As he and his father came to dominate the Iditarod, they also became ensnared in a long-running debate about the very nature of dog sledding. Are huskies at their happiest running hundreds of miles a week, as mushers maintain? Or, as animal rights activists insist, are they victims of callous human ambition, sometimes required to endure unfathomable hardship? The conflict has embroiled both the Iditarod and the Seaveys in a fight that could change the sport forever—and, if some have their way, maybe even lead to its demise.

Traveling with the King of Caterpillars

David Wagner specializes in caterpillars, or, it might be more accurate to say, is consumed by them. (They are, he suggested to me, the reason he is no longer married.) Probably he knows more about the caterpillars of the U.S. than anyone else in the country, and possibly he knows more about caterpillars in general than anyone else on the planet. Wagner’s “Caterpillars of Eastern North America,” published in 2005, runs to nearly five hundred pages. It relates the life histories of roughly that many species and is considered the definitive field guide on the subject. There are roughly sixty-five hundred species of mammals, nine thousand species of amphibians, and eleven thousand species of birds. But the planet’s real diversity lies mostly beneath our regard. The largest family of beetles, the Curculionidae, contains some sixty thousand described species; another beetle family comprises twenty thousand species. It is estimated that in one family of parasitic wasps, the Ichneumonidae, there are nearly a hundred thousand species, which is more than there are of vertebrates of all kinds.

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.

Continue reading “The world’s best dogsledder, and the future of the Iditarod”

An engineer in Wisconsin claims to have improved grief’s design. Aerodynamic, he says, showing off his sketches, barely grief at all! Applying physics like salve to a wound, he remembers what Torricelli said about vacuums, what Carnot said about absolute terror. He grabs a pencil and revises one more time. There’s money to be made in this, his father would assure, chopping chicken-necks through the afternoon. Flightless birds! The engineer pores over schematics, grimaces at draft after draft. His last sketch: confused. Joints unlabeled. A room inside a room inside a room.

J. Estanislao Lopez (2022)

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit created by the entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, launched a new feature called the National Emergency Library. Restrictions linked to the spread of COVID-19 had made it difficult or impossible for people to buy books or visit libraries in person, and so the Archive removed limits on the digital borrowing of the books in its database—of which there were more than three million, most of them in turn borrowed from physical libraries and scanned—and made them all publicly available, for free. The project was supported by a number of universities, researchers, and librarians. But some of the authors and publishers who owned the copyright to these books saw it not as a public service, but as theft.

In June 2020, Four publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit. The Internet Archive shut down the project, and went back to its previous policy of “Controlled Digital Lending,” which only allowed one person to borrow a free digital copy of a book at any given time. But this didn’t stop the lawsuit—because the publishers argued that any digital lending by the Archive constituted illegal infringement of the publishers’ copyright.

Last week, Judge John G. Koeltl, of the Southern District of New York, came down in favor of the publishers and dismissed every aspect of the Archive’s defense, including the claim that its lending program is protected by the “fair use” exception in copyright law. Koeltl wrote that the concept of fair use protects transformative versions of copyrighted works—a copy of a famous photo used in an artistic collage, for example—and that the Archive’s copies of books don’t qualify; the Archive made the case that its lending program  is transformative because the practice “facilitates new and expanding interactions between library books and the web,” the judge noted, but he ruled that just because the Archive might be “making an invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts” did not make the use transformative.

Continue reading “When is a library not a library? When it’s online, apparently”

On finalizing his acquisition of Twitter last October, one of the first things that Elon Musk did was announce that users would need to pay twenty dollars a month if they wanted to access premium “Twitter Blue” features. Twitter Blue launched in 2021, under Twitter’s previous management, at a price of five dollars per month; it offered subscribers the ability to edit tweets for thirty seconds after sending them, among other features including a bookmarking function and a tool for reading long Twitter threads. Musk suggested that his price hike would be worth it because Twitter Blue would also now give users a coveted blue checkmark showing that they had been verified. Musk said that those who already had blue checks would have ninety days to start paying for Twitter Blue before they lost their verified status. Some verified celebrities were not amused by this plan and said so, including on Twitter. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” the author Stephen King tweeted. “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

A few days later, Musk lowered the cost of verification to the low low price of eight dollars a month. He argued that Twitter’s original verification system was elitist, since only some members of the media and celebrities had blue checks. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he wrote on November 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.” But, as with so much else Musk has touched, the rollout of the new feature quickly turned into a train wreck. Some users who were already verified showed their contempt for the new plan by changing their account details and pretending to be someone else. The comedian Sarah Silverman pretended to be Musk by copying his profile picture and display name, then tweeted satirical comments. (“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day.”) The actress Valerie Bertinelli also changed her profile name to Musk’s, then tweeted support for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterms. (Musk had called on “independent-minded voters” to back Republicans.)

Musk responded on Twitter that any account engaging in impersonation without specifying that it was a parody would be permanently suspended, and that changing an account name would result in the “temporary loss” of the user’s checkmark. The train wreck wasn’t over, however. Twitter’s own official account announced that in order to prevent impersonation, it would offer a separate “official” badge that would be added to “government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures.” A few minutes later, Musk announced that he had killed the feature, although the new, white checkmarks that came with it remained attached to some accounts. Meanwhile, over the next few days, the impersonations continued: as Engadget noted, an account posing as Nintendo posted a picture of Mario with his middle finger raised, while an account claiming to be LeBron James said that he was looking to get traded. Most infamous, perhaps, was the time that a verified account claiming to belong to the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly tweeted: “Insulin is free now.” The account of the real Eli Lilly apologized; its insulin was not in fact free now. The fake tweet and ensuing chaos erased around fifteen billion dollars from the company’s market cap.

Continue reading “Checkmarks, doge, and poop star in yet another Twitter circus”

Xuehu Wei, who is a doctoral student in the research team around Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, compared the brain scans of 94 native speakers of two very different languages and showed that the language we grow up with modulates the wiring in the brain. Two groups of native speakers of German and Arabic respectively were scanned in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The high-resolution images not only show the anatomy of the brain, but also allow us to derive the connectivity between the brain areas using a technique called diffusion-weighted imaging. The data showed that the axonal white matter connections of the language network adapt to the processing demands and difficulties of the mother tongue. “Arabic native speakers showed a stronger connectivity between the left and right hemispheres than German native speakers,” explained Alfred Anwander, last author of the study.

Scientists discover RNA component buried in the dust of an asteroid

A sample extracted from an asteroid far from Earth has confirmed that RNA nucleobases can be found in space rocks. Analysis of dust ferried home from asteroid Ryugu has been found to contain uracil – one of the four nucleobases that make up RNA – in addition to niacin, a form of the vitamin B3, which plays an important role in metabolism. This adds to a growing body of evidence that the building blocks for life form in space, and may have been at least partially delivered to Earth by asteroid bombardment early in our planet’s history. “Scientists have previously found nucleobases and vitamins in certain carbon-rich meteorites, but there was always the question of contamination by exposure to the Earth’s environment,” says astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University in Japan. “Since the Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected two samples directly from asteroid Ryugu and delivered them to Earth in sealed capsules, contamination can be ruled out.”

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.

Continue reading “The language we speak shapes the connectivity in our brains”

Barnum Brown was marked for greatness from a young age. Born on a Kansas farm on February 12, 1873, the third child of Clara and William Brown went weeks without a name. Nearby Topeka was plastered with advertisements for P.T. Barnum’s traveling circus at this time, as were cities throughout the Midwest. The colorful posters still loomed large in 6-year-old Frank Brown’s mind when his baby brother arrived. As his parents argued about what to name their new son, Frank offered a suggestion: “Let’s call him Barnum.” Young Barnum’s life bore no resemblance to that of the enterprising circus showman, but he would live up to his name. He showed little interest in farming the family’s property and preferred combing the grounds around his home for fossils. His father ran a modest strip-mining operation on their coal-rich property, and the plows and scrapers unearthed ancient treasures. Corals and seashells littered the landscape. Barnum collected enough fossils to stuff every drawer in the house.

The true story of the president who couldn’t hear music

When Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated for his first presidential term in 1869, thousands of people showed up to celebrate. It was one of the grandest and swankiest parties held in generations, and naturally included lots of music, mostly parade-marching tunes that set the tone of the event. Yet one person who did not enjoy the sound of the beat was the incoming president himself. There’s a famous line attributed to the acclaimed Civil War general: “I know of only two tunes: one of them is Yankee Doodle Dandy, and the other isn’t.” Underneath the joke was a real neurological condition that Grant had, although he never knew it. This disorder also would also afflict at least two other future presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft. It is known as “congenital amusia,” or an inability to hear music and understand it as — well — music. To those with the condition, music typically sounds cacophonous, like noise.

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.

Continue reading “Barnum Brown, the man who discovered T. Rex”