From Wired: “The first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which are still sitting there to this day: a celestial reminder that wherever humans go, we bring our shit with us. These bags, sometimes known as the “poo bags,” have been the subject of much interest and speculation since they were deposited on the moon more than 50 years ago. Human feces is packed with microbial life, which means that the moon hosted life on its surface for an unknown period of time after each landing. Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere.”
Forgotten Hollywood: The mysterious murder of an actress known as The Black Dahlia
From The Golden Globes: “On January 15, 1947, the mutilated body of a young woman was found in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles in an empty lot, severed at the waist. According to the Los Angeles Times, she was face up, a few inches from the sidewalk, just north of the middle of the block. Her blue eyes were open, her hands were over her head with her elbows bent at right angles; her knees were straight and legs spread. She was missing her intestines and was slashed across the face from ear to ear. There were cuts and bruises on the body because whole sections of skin had been removed, and the body was drained of blood. A cement bag with blood was found nearby. An autopsy showed she died of a cerebral hemorrhage because of blows to the face. The woman was identified by the FBI as Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress, whose prints were in the FBI files because she had been arrested for underage drinking in 1943.”
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Gummi bears aren’t Asian, they were invented in Germany in the 1920s
From Snack Stack: “Gummi candies had been popular across Europe for since the 1920s. It all began with one Hans Riegel, a candymaker in Bonn, whose name and hometown, abbreviated, became the basis of his company name: Haribo. Riegel came up with the gelatin-based recipe you know and love today, and drew inspiration for its physical shapes from the dancing bears that were a mainstay of circuses. Over the years, the bears’ precise size, shape, and recipe changed, and the product spread across Europe, including to Americans abroad, both tourists and military troops stationed around the continent. They, too, liked the candy and brought it home to share. By the mid-1970s, thanks to German-language teachers in U.S. high schools dispensing gummy bears in classrooms, and American servicemen bringing gummy souvenirs from overseas for their families, the demand for Gold-Bears in this country was growing.”
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NASA scientists spent a year enclosed in a simulated Martian space colony
From The Guardian: “Ask Anca Selariu what it was like living on Mars for a year, and there is no hesitation in her answer: “absolutely exhilarating”. The US navy microbiologist is one of four NASA crew members who returned to Earth earlier this month after becoming the first humans to reside on the red planet, or at least the closest thing the US space agency currently has to it. Selariu and her fellow explorers, all volunteers, spent 378 days isolated from the rest of humanity locked inside Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700 sq ft 3D-printed habitat at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was built to replicate the living conditions and challenges astronauts will ultimately face when they get to Mars, ambitiously scheduled for the late 2030s. Selariu said it was worth every sacrifice, from missed holidays with friends and family, to just being able to wander outside.”
Why the classic vampire movie Nosferatu was banned and all copies destroyed
From WGTC: “Nosferatu stands as a classic of the horror genre more than 100 years after its debut. It inspired generations of horror aficionados, influencing writers, actors, and directors, and changing the vampire mythos forever. It’s also a hack job. The film was the first script commissioned by an independent German production company called Prana, founded by a pair of oddballs with a love of the occult. Despite having begun the project with the specific intention of creating a Dracula adaptation, featuring inescapably close knockoffs of the book’s characters, events, and plot beats, Prana never bothered to secure the rights to the story. They changed “Count Dracula” to “Count Orlok,” “Jonathan Harker” to “Thomas Hutter,” and England to Germany, with some accounts claiming that the changes were made to avoid prosecution, while others saw them as small details that made the story more palatable for German audiences.”
Ukraine’s Olympic swimmers continue to train while bombs are falling all around them
From The Guardian: “A few minutes later, the air raid siren sounds and an employee at this famous venue, one of the main training bases for Ukraine’s Olympic swimmers, walks over to suggest we continue our conversation on that opposite side. We have been sitting beneath the row of huge windows that usually give a humid arena its sense of light and space. The panes are already in a bad way: some cracked, some taped over, others replaced by material of a different tint. Everyone knows what would happen if another rocket landed outside. The first time, Zheltyakov was in the middle of a training session. It was March last year and Dnipro was, once again, coming under heavy Russian attack. “Thank God, it was just a little bit of damage and feeling scared,” he says. “We went out straight away and sat in the shelter.” The shock wave from a nearby missile had rippled through the water. When the second missile struck five months later, in the early hours of 15 August, Zheltyakov was already wide awake.”
A deepfake engine rendering facial expressions in real time
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