From The Guardian: “Millions of Britons were forced to drink subpar cups of tea last November due to the record-breaking low pressure caused by Storm Ciarán. The low pressure caused the boiling point of water to drop below the 100C temperature some experts recommend to extract the full flavour from tea leaves. The study by meteorologists at the University of Reading, published in the journal Weather, reported that the water was boiling at 98C on the morning of the storm. For water to boil, the atmospheric pressure must match the vapour pressure of the liquid. On that date, the barometer fell to 956.0 millibars, the lowest pressure recorded since a reading of 952.1 millibars in February 1989. Before that the previous reading as low was more than 200 years ago, when a measurement of 946 millibars was taken in December 1821.”
Battery X was a top-secret test involving female anti-aircraft crews during World War II
From JSTOR Daily: “During World War II, women were actively involved in Washington DC’s air defense system. Their work was hush-hush and the nation’s capital never came under attack, so their work has largely been forgotten. The Antiaircraft Artillery Volunteers worked as plotters for the Army’s Coast Artillery Antiaircraft Command. They provided real time 3-D visualizations of the region’s air traffic. More than three hundred women volunteered for this work at Bolling Field, located across the Potomac from DC. The second group were some of the “militarized civilians” of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, which was formed in May 1942. They served in a test of mixed female/male anti-aircraft gun crews around Washington, the only known American test of mixed-sex military units during the war. The Pentagon didn’t declassify it until 1968.”
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Logging companies are driving an uncontacted indigenous tribe out of the forests in Peru
From The Guardian: “Rare images of the Mashco Piro, an uncontacted Indigenous tribe in the remote Amazon, have been released by Survival International, showing dozens of the people on the banks of a river close to where logging companies have concessions. The reclusive tribe has been sighted coming out of the rainforest more frequently in recent weeks in search of food, apparently moving away from the growing presence of loggers, said the local Indigenous rights group Fenamad. More than 50 Mashco Piro people appeared in recent days near a village of the Yine people called Monte Salvado. Another group of 17 appeared by the nearby village of Puerto Nuevo, said the NGO. The Mashco Piro, who inhabit an area located between two natural reserves in Madre de Dios, have seldom appeared as a rule and do not communicate much with the Yine or anyone.
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The disappearing arborglyphs carved by shepherds in the American West
From Atlas Obscura: “Throughout the mountains of the American West, carvings hidden on the trunks of aspen trees tell the stories of the sheepherders who made them as they passed through with their flocks. Most of the men who etched these arborglyphs into the living trees were Basques who, starting with the Gold Rush of the 1840s, had immigrated from the Basque Country that straddles the Pyrenees Mountains. Our experience of documenting arborglyphs has deepened over time. At first, we simply tried to decipher what was on the tree. It can be hard to tell what is scarred bark and what is a carving. Gradually, we got better at deciphering the carvings and now hope to spot the oldest and most ornate. We also came to appreciate the different styles and themes, like in signatures and writing. One herder carves his name, the date and his hometown; another delves into politics; and another carves a hoped-for female companion.”
Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin paid $45 million for a full-size stegosaurus skeleton
From the WSJ: “Kenneth Griffin paid $44.6 million for a nearly complete Stegosaurus skeleton at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, the most ever paid for a fossil at auction. The 150 million-year-old dinosaur, nicknamed Apex, was only expected to sell for up to $6 million. Its sale surpassed the $32 million paid four years ago by Abu Dhabi for a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton widely known as Stan. The sale also soared past the $8.4 million paid in 1997 for another T.rex nicknamed Sue, now on view at Chicago’s Field Museum. Griffin, the 55-year-old founder and chief executive of Citadel, said he aims to lend Apex to a museum in the US. Griffin has a history of splurging on trophy pieces. In 2021, Griffin said he outbid a group of cryptocurrency investors to win a $43.2 million first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution in part so he could be certain it stayed in the country. He later lent it to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.”
Scientists have finally figured out how some anesthetics work on the brain
From Neuroscience News: “There are many drugs that anesthesiologists can use to induce unconsciousness in patients. Exactly how these drugs cause the brain to lose consciousness has been a longstanding question, but MIT neuroscientists have now answered that question for one commonly used anesthesia drug. Using a novel technique for analyzing neuron activity, the researchers discovered that the drug propofol induces unconsciousness by disrupting the brain’s normal balance between stability and excitability. The drug causes brain activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness. “The brain has to operate on this knife’s edge between excitability and chaos. It’s got to be excitable enough for its neurons to influence one another, but if it gets too excitable, it spins off into chaos. Propofol seems to disrupt the mechanisms that keep the brain in that narrow operating range,” says Earl K. Miller.
Rare solar halo effect appears on a ski hill in Sweden
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters 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, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com