From The Smithsonian: “In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services told his scientists to find a way to outfox the Axis enemies. In response, the scientists produced a number of dirty tricks, including explosive pancake mix, incendiary bombs strapped to live bats, truth drugs for eliciting information from prisoners of war, and a foul-smelling spray that mimicked the repulsive odor of fecal matter. But Operation Fantasia was the most desperate—and peculiar—of them all. Operation Fantasia was the brainchild of OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger, an eccentric businessman who had run an import/export business in Tokyo before the war. Operation Fantasia, he pitched the organization in 1943, would destroy Japanese morale by exposing soldiers and civilians to a Shinto portent of doom: kitsune, fox-shaped spirits with magical abilities.”
Two ranchers faked drought numbers to claim millions in crop insurance
From The Colorado Sun: “Into the spring of 2017, U.S. weather experts watching southeastern Colorado noticed something they’d never seen before. Storm clouds would gather over the thirsty sagebrush ranges surrounding tiny Colorado and Kansas towns like Springfield and Coolidge. On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit. One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of water. But on many of those days, those buckets were not tipping.”
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In a world first, a stem-cell transplant has reversed a woman’s diabetes
From Nature: “A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body. In the first trial of its kind, Deng Hongkui, a cell biologist at Peking University in Beijing, and his colleagues extracted cells from three people with type 1 diabetes and reverted them into a pluripotent state, from which they could be moulded into any cell type in the body. The study follows results from a separate group in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body.”
The London apartment complex that was home to Agatha Christie and a bevy of Russian spies
From JSTOR Daily: “International in design and compact in size, the (relatively) affordable Lawn Road Flats were a declaration of modernist values—and, as such, constituted a symbolic rejection of nationalism, conservativism, and conventions of domesticity. The units, all of which were studios and one-bedrooms, came fully furnished and were cleaned by staff on a daily basis; this made them appealing to young, and often single, intellectuals who had little time for chores. The sleek design and communal environment, in conjunction with Jack’s altruistic penchant for sheltering refugees from Nazi Europe, attracted famous residents—among them novelist Agatha Christie, architect and designer Marcel Breuer, painter László Moholy-Nagy, and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Less well known are members of a different cohort who found the Lawn Road Flats appealing in the interwar and mid war periods: spies.”
This strange-looking mushroom is a desert-dwelling parasite called Sandfood
From Earthly Mission: “In the scorching deserts of the American Southwest, an extraordinary plant defies expectations. At first glance, you might mistake it for a strange growth poking through the sand, but this peculiar organism is actually an endangered parasitic plant known as Pholisma sonorae, or more commonly, “sandfood.” Sandfood is a true oddity of the plant world. Unlike most plants, it lacks chlorophyll, which gives it a grayish or brownish hue instead of the typical green. Its appearance can be deceiving – while it often looks like a small rounded or ovate form emerging from the sand, it can take on a distinctly mushroom-like shape if enough sand blows away to reveal the top of its stem. This unique growth habit is due to its thick, fleshy stem that extends deep into the sand, sometimes reaching depths of up to two meters.”
A reindeer cyclone helps to protect the fawns in the center
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