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A Polish adventure skier has made history by becoming the first person to climb up and ski down Mount Everest without the use of additional oxygen. The ascent was Andrzej Bargiel’s third attempt at climbing Everest – the tallest mountain on earth at 29,032ft high – after dangerous conditions forced the 37-year-old to abandon earlier attempts in 2019 and 2022. More than 6,000 people have climbed the mountain, but only about 200 have done it without additional bottled oxygen. A few people have skied back down, but never a continuous downhill without supplementary oxygen. It took nearly 16 hours on Monday for Bargiel to climb through the “death zone”, which is above 8,000 meters where oxygen levels are dangerously low. At the top of the mountain the air is so thin that climbers only get about a third of the oxygen available at sea level. This can cause brain damage, fluid in the lungs, and even death. (via The Guardian)

The oldest and one of the weirdest musical instruments ever invented

Stalactites hang tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites push up with might from the floor: this is a mnemonic device you may once have learned. It would surely be called to mind by a visit to Luray Caverns in the American state of Virginia, home of the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Not long after the discovery of Luray Caverns itself in 1878, its stalactites were found to resonate through the underground space in an almost musical fashion when struck — a property Leland W. Sprinkle took to its logical conclusion in the mid-nineteen fifties. Conception was one thing, but execution quite another: it took him three years to locate just the right stalactites, shave them down to ring out at just the right frequency, and rig them up with electronically activated, keyboard-controlled mallets. This was not hard for the technically minded Sprinkle, who worked at the Pentagon as a mathematician and electronics scientist. (via Open Culture)

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Continue reading “He just climbed and then skied down Everest without oxygen”

“I first heard of Hit Man in May 1999, when I was a young journalist in Philadelphia. Paladin Press’s insurance company had just settled with the victims’ families for undisclosed millions, a decision that made international headlines. The case was unprecedented; never before had a publisher been accused of “aiding and abetting” murder through the publication of a book. Major media organizations that had rallied to Paladin’s defense — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Society of Professional Journalists — now pondered the ramifications for free speech. Lost in most of the discussion was Hit Man’s mysterious author. Only one detail about her life had come to light so far: She was a divorced mother of two living in a trailer park in Florida. I grew obsessed with her. How did this woman come to write a murder manual? What had happened in her life to bring her to that point?” Vanity Fair

She claimed to be a German princess and her trial for bigamy started a publishing boom

“In early June of 1663, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy in London’s Old Bailey. A figure of considerable public fascination, Mary had been “viewed” by an estimated five hundred visitors while in prison awaiting trial.¹ Officially, she stood accused of having wed John Carleton in London while already married to John Steadman, a shoemaker, in Canterbury. (Over the course of the trial, the possible existence of a third husband, a Dover surgeon named Day, emerged.) Unofficially, she stood accused in the court of public opinion of a far more interesting cheat: impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in order to lure the hapless Carleton — a lawyer’s clerk, eighteen years old — into marriage. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German Princess. Mary Carleton’s exploits produced a publishing boom: 1663 alone witnessed the printing of more than a dozen pamphlets about the case, a pair of autobiographical self-defenses by Mary herself, two rebuttals by John, and printed reports of the trial.” Public Domain Review

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Continue reading “Her manual for hitmen became a major First Amendment case”

From Scientific American: “Frances Glessner Lee discovered her true calling later in life. An heiress without formal schooling, she was in her 50s when she transformed her fascination with true crime and medicine into the foundation of a new field: forensic science. In the late 1920s she drew inspiration from a family friend, a medical examiner who was involved in notorious cases—including the infamous trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. For Glessner Lee, the puzzle of untangling the truth about violent deaths proved irresistible. She recognized that solving crimes demanded both rigorous methods and professional training. She helped found the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard. Her most unusual teaching tool: intricately crafted dollhouse dioramas that depicted grisly crime scenes. She pioneered new death investigation techniques, forged unlikely alliances, faced social and cultural obstacles, and helped foster what would become our lasting obsession with true crime.”

Scientists have created prototypes of human embryos from skin cells

From the BBC: “US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people’s skin cells and then fertilising it with sperm. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life. It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child. The method requires significant refinement – which could take at least a decade – before a fertility clinic could even consider using it. Experts said it was an impressive breakthrough, but there needed to be an open discussion with the public about what science was making possible. The Oregon Health and Science University research team’s technique takes the nucleus – which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body – out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions.”

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Continue reading “She pioneered the field of forensic science using dolls”

If you pay attention to the news at all, you may have seen a host of alarming headlines recently about how the number of Americans who say they read for pleasure has declined sharply over the past 20 years, from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. That conclusion comes from a study done by a number of sociologists at the University of Florida, who looked at two decades worth of responses to a benchmark survey called the American Time Use Survey, which asks 10,000 randomly selected Americans every year how they spent the day prior to when they took the survey. The Florida researchers looked at how many people said they read “for personal interest,” including books, magazines, newspapers, audiobooks, and e-readers (they also asked how many read a book with a child). It’s worth noting that — like a lot of consumer surveys — the American Time Use Survey relies on people answering the questions truthfully, and because of the way it is conducted, it also relies on people who are a) willing to pick up the phone when it’s an unknown number, and b) willing to answer a survey.

This dramatic decline in the numbers of people reading for pleasure is “deeply concerning,” according to one of the study’s co-authors, who called reading “a low-barrier, high-impact way to engage creatively and improve quality of life.” According to some neuroscientists, reading not only stimulates your brain in ways that other types of pleasure or activity don’t, but it can also lower your blood pressure, reduce stress, help with sleeping, and even help you live longer. Other experts noted that in addition to the data cited by the Florida study, different studies have shown that there has been a generational decline in students reading for fun, which some argue is a result of social-media addiction, poor literacy training, overly busy after-school scheduling by parents, or some combination of all three. For others, this decline in reading is part of a disturbing trend that they believer represents the dawn of a “post-literate” society, a return to the largely oral cultures of primitive societies, and therefore pretty much represents the end of modern civilization as we know it.

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Continue reading “So what’s so great about reading books?”

From Rolling Stone: “On March 19, 2000, Florian Reither stepped out of the 91st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center through a hollowed-out window and stood on a makeshift wooden balcony. This vertiginous performance wasn’t the act of a brazen stuntman, crazed trespasser, or suicidal employee. It was the work of the Austrian art collective known as Gelitin, which consists of Florian Reither, Ali Janka, Wolfgang Gantner, and Tobias Urban. Titled the B-Thing, the feat saw the four men, now all in their fifties, secretly construct a balcony inside the World Trade Center, temporarily attach it, and briefly stand on top of it, floating dreamily above New York City. In the 25 years since, those involved have largely avoided speaking about the event again. Outside of esoteric circles, it’s still relatively obscure. For a long time, many skeptics believed it never even happened and claimed that it was a hoax on a vast scale.”

A prop from the movie Citizen Kane that was going to be thrown out sold for $15 million

From the BBC: “A prop central to the celebrated opening scene of Citizen Kane – widely regarded as one of the best films ever made – has sold at auction for $14.75m. The wooden Rosebud sled, one of at least three known to have survived, was long thought to have been lost until it was given to director Joe Dante in 1984, saving it from destruction. It is now the second most expensive piece of memorabilia to have ever been sold – a pair of ruby slippers used in The Wizard of Oz sold for $32m in December. The version sold on Thursday had not been seen for many years until it ended up in the hands of Dante. He told Heritage auctions how he was making the film Explorers in 1984 on the same studio that was formerly owned by RKO Radio Pictures, which produced Citizen Kane. Dante said crews were on site clearing out storage areas when one worker, who knew he liked vintage films, asked if he wanted it.”

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Continue reading “They built a balcony on the WTC and started a conspiracy theory”

From Popular Mechanics: “Megan Barroso was looking forward to her Fourth of July plans in 2001. Perhaps because the 20-year-old Moorpark College student had no intention to be alone: She was going to attend a friend’s family barbecue in the suburbs northwest of Los Angeles, then watch the fireworks with friends at Silver Strand Beach. The gatherings began to blend into one another, in the way college-age social events do: The friends got milkshakes; they ended up at another party at a friend’s house in Thousand Oaks. Somebody sprinkled red glitter over everyone’s heads.Around 2:45 a.m., the group decided to head home. Barroso departed in her Pontiac Sunfire, a rental she was driving while her car was in the shop, and drove about 15 minutes before a friend called to let her know she’d accidentally left with someone else’s cellphone in her purse. Barroso turned around to bring the phone back. She never made it.”

How did an expensive Ferrari sports car wind up buried in someone’s backyard?

From Now I Know: “In early 1978, a couple of boys were hanging out in their yard in Los Angeles, digging in the dirt. Their family had just moved into the home – a rental – a few months earlier, and the kids were exploring as kids do. As they dug, they hit something oddly metallic and definitely not something that should have been buried in their yard: a 1974 Dino 246 GTS, an expensive sports car made by Ferrari. The car was wrapped in plastic, albeit imperfectly. Towels were stuffed in the exhaust pipe, as if to keep soil-dwelling bugs from getting in. There was even a carpet placed along part of the top of the car, to protect it from, well, who knows what. It looked like whoever buried the car had tried to preserve it, in hopes of recovering it later. But who, and why? And how do you bury a fancy sports car in the middle of Los Angeles without anyone noticing?”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “How glitter helped solve a brutal crime in California”