From the Harvard Gazette: “The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. In 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children. But despite these efforts, things got worse. It seemed that avoiding peanuts at a young age didn’t prevent peanut allergies, it actually created them.”
Crows can hold a grudge that lasts for generations
From the New York Times: “Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years. How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006, when Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing an ogre mask.”
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The strange life of the forgotten founder of the band Fleetwood Mac
From Louder Sound: “His work with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Fleetwood Mac has inspired musicians as diverse as Carlos Santana, Gary Moore and Noel Gallagher. Then, just as rock music was becoming big business, Green turned his back on it all, tortured by guilt over the money he was making and his thought processes damaged by hallucinogenic drugs. During a creative burst that lasted a little over five years, Green became the guitar hero’s guitar hero. Even in the decade of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Green carved out his own niche. Tracks such as the timeless Oh Well, Man Of The World and Need Your Love So Bad established him as a singular songwriter, a blues purist who ended up creating his own style of blues.”
Young people in China have forgotten how to draw Chinese characters
From Global China Pulse: “During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. Peking University is usually considered the Harvard of China. This was my first encounter with an increasingly widespread phenomenon in China known as ‘character amnesia’. Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters.”
The Hindenburg carried a specially-made aluminum piano
From Airships.net: “To meet the strict weight limits of a lighter-than-air dirigible, the Zeppelin company commissioned the renowned piano making firm of Julius Blüthner to create a lightweight aluminum alloy piano, and the Julius Blüthner Pianofortefabrik created a small grand piano that weighed only 162 kg (356 lbs). The frame, rim, fallboard, and top lid were made of duralumin, and the legs, back bracing, and lyre were made of hollow duralumin tubing. Associated Press reporter Louis P. Lochner, who was a passenger on Hindenburg’s maiden voyage to the United States, commented that the piano had a “particularly large and full tone” despite its aluminum construction.
When astronaut Scott Kelly smuggled an ape costume aboard the space station
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