From National Geographic: “For centuries, farmers have known that their livestock not only gather in large herds but also tend to face the same way when grazing. Experience and folk wisdom offer several possible reasons for this mutual alignment. They stand perpendicularly to the sun’s rays in the cool morning to absorb heat through their large flanks, or they stand in the direction of strong winds to avoid being unduly buffeted. But cows and sheep don’t just line up during chilly spells or high wind. Their motivations have been a mystery until now. Sabine Begali spied on aligned herds of cows and deer using satellite images from Google Earth. The images revealed behaviour that had been going unnoticed for millennia, right under the noses of herdsmen – their herds were lining up in a north-south line like a living compass needle.”
This artist creates sculptures that are smaller than the width of a human hair
From New Atlas: “A sculpture so tiny that it cannot be seen by the naked eye is claimed to be the smallest sculpture of the human form ever created. Measuring 20 x 80 x 100 microns, artist Jonty Hurwitz’s tiny human statue is part of a new series of equally diminutive new sculptures that are at a scale so miniscule that each of the figures is equal in size to the amount your fingernails grow in around about 6 hours, and can only be viewed using a scanning electron microscope. Sculpted with an advanced new nano 3D printing technology coupled with a technique called multiphoton lithography, these works of art are created using a laser and a block of light-sensitive polymer.”
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Tony Hawk wanted to track down a mysterious skateboarder from 1979
From North Carolina Rabbit Hole: “A former colleague from my TV days sent me this picture of a young girl skateboarding underneath an umbrella on a rainy day. She saw it after skateboarding legend Tony Hawk posted it to his Instagram page. According to his caption, Tony really wanted to know who it was: “New fav mystery skater unlocked: from Fayetteville Observer (NC), 1973. Style, grace, confidence, and… goofy footed, in the rain!! I hope she’s still around.” There were two initial clues: The date and the newspaper. I did some searches on the Observer’s website. The image showed up in a monthly roundup of old ‘70s photos that a staff photographer had pulled from the paper’s archive in 2019. But no location. No name. No back story.”
Hanoi’s plan to get rid of rats actually wound up creating more
From Now I Know: “There simply weren’t enough rat-catchers. So authorities decided to enlist everyone to help, by instituting a rat-killing bounty. If you killed a rat, the government would pay you a cent — a decent amount of money for the work, at the time. Officials didn’t want people hauling dead rats into their offices, though, so they told people to just bring in the rats’ tails. But after a few weeks the rat population didn’t seem to be negatively impacted by the efforts. And then something curious began to happen: there were reports of people seeing tailless rats roaming throughout Hanoi. Some of the people who were turning in rat tails had intentionally let the former owners of those tails survive, in hopes that they would breed more rats.”
Mysterious craters have started appearing in the permafrost in Siberia
From Nautilus: “In the northern reaches of Russia, enigmatic craters have begun appearing in broad expanses of windswept tundra. These craters can reach 230 feet across and plunge more than 100 feet deep into dark frozen soils known as permafrost. The first crater was discovered by a helicopter pilot in 2014 on the Yamal Peninsula, a finger of frozen land extending into the Arctic Ocean. Reindeer herders stumbled upon another 16 craters after that. As the number of craters identified grew, so did the hypotheses about how the craters came to be. Some speculated that missiles, meteorites, or even UFOs were responsible. But when researchers dug into the mystery, they found high levels of methane in the atmosphere around the craters.”
How close jumbo jets come to the beach in St. Maarten
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