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From Popular Mechanics: “After 500 years, researchers finally understand the anatomical function of a heart feature first described by Leonardo da Vinci. To find the answer, scientists used fractal theory, MRIs, and a lot of computational elbow grease to shed light on structures called trabeculae. They found this branching, snowflaky muscle layer plays a part in the risk of heart disease. “The inner surfaces of the human heart are covered by a complex network of muscular strands that is thought to be a remnant of embryonic development,” the researchers explain in a paper. “The function of these trabeculae and their architecture are unknown.” Leonardo drew pictures of the fine, lacy, snowflake-like trabeculae after examining a heart up close and dissecting it. The artist likely noticed the tree root-like branching structure, and he theorized that the trabeculae were like the systems we use now to keep sidewalks and roads from freezing: a network for blood that was kept warm by circulating in small vessels.”

This tiny snail may hold the secret to the regeneration of the human eye

From Science News: “Golden apple snails are freshwater snails from South America. Alice Accorsi became familiar with the species as a graduate student in Italy. Turns out, the snails are among the most invasive species in the world. And that got Accorsi thinking: Why are they so resilient and able to thrive in new environments? She began studying the snails’ immune systems and has now found they are not the only parts of the animals able to bounce back from adversity. These snails can completely regrow a functional eye within months of having one amputated. Scientists have known for centuries that some snails can regrow their heads, and research has revealed other animals can regenerate bodies, tails or limbs. But this finding is exciting because apple snails have camera-like eyes that are functionally similar to those of humans. Understanding how the snails re-create or repair their eyes might lead to therapies to heal people’s eye injuries or reverse diseases such as macular degeneration.”

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Continue reading “Scientists solved a mystery 500 years after da Vinci painted it”

I know what many of you may be thinking now, as you read the headline of this post. You might be remembering the photo reproduced below, in which Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (who, it must be said, has a large and rather egg-shaped head, no offense intended) is standing with Bill Maris, the head of Google Ventures, and veteran Silicon Valley investor John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers — and they are all smiling while wearing pairs of Google Glass, the thin frames with the tiny square camera on one corner (the three men were launching something called the Glass Collective, to invest in offshoots of the undoubtedly soon-to-be-ubiquitous smart glasses). Within minutes of this photo appearing, I would argue that it helped to symbolize a kind of socially inept techno-utopianism that often seems endemic to Silicon Valley (remember the Segway?), and in the process Google Glass almost instantly superseded the previous emblem of nerd-dom, the pocket protector.

Google put the full weight of its corporate branding behind the launch — in a demo presented by Brin at the Google I/O conference in June 2012, four skydivers wearing Google Glass jumped from a blimp and landed on the roof of the Moscone Center in San Francisco while livestreaming their descent. Google said the glasses would be available for pre-order for those in attendance for $1,500. Sales to the public started in 2013 and the product was discontinued in 2015, which is right up there with the shortest product runs in recent memory (the company pivoted to making an Enterprise Edition for use in factories). I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of those sold wound up on bookshelves somewhere or in personal museums — like the one I have that contains a working Palm Pilot, an original Motorola flip phone, a CueCat handheld bar-code reader, and an endless parade of the USB gadgets that get handed out at trade shows.

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Continue reading “Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point?”

From The Smithsonian: “It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of the 20th century: the Earth rising above the Moon’s bleached and desolate horizon, a breathtaking jewel of color and life more than 230,000 miles away. In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders returned from history’s first voyage around the Moon with this stunning image. But one question about the Earthrise photo has dogged historians for almost half a century: Who took it? I discovered the answer 30 years ago when I was researching my book about the Apollo astronauts, A Man on the Moon. I found myself challenging NASA’s official version of the event, and landing in the middle of a dispute between the astronauts themselves. Even after my book was published, the controversy continued for another two decades, until a NASA computer wizard confirmed my conclusion beyond all doubt.

The Burj al-Khalifa tower in Dubai is so tall that fasting during Ramadan lasts longer on the top

From the BBC: “During Ramadan, Muslims are supposed to not eat or drink between dawn and dusk. Burj Khalifa is almost one km (0.6 miles) high, which means people in higher floors can still see the sun after it has set on the ground, said Muslim cleric Ahmed Abdul Aziz al-Haddad. He said they should break their fast two minutes after those on the ground. Another Dubai cleric, Mohammed al-Qubaisi, has been quoted as saying that people living above the 80th floor should fast for an extra two minutes, while those on the 150th floor and higher should wait for three more minutes before eating or drinking. The 828m- (2,716ft-) high Burj Khalifa has 160 floors and was opened in 2010. The clerics say there are ancient precedents in Islamic law and that people living on mountains should also break their fast after those at ground level.”

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 “Who actually took the famous Earthrise photo?”

From Veterans Breakfast Club: “You’ve heard of Japanese Kamikazes in World War II, but probably not Kaiten, the underseas version of the famous suicide attacks on Navy warships in 1944-1945. Kaiten was a top-secret manned torpedo program where the Japanese pilots would be sealed into explosive-packed steel cylinders and launched against enemy ships. The Japanese started planning suicide submarine missions in the summer of 1944, even before they began training Kamikaze pilots. By then, the Japanese had lost all hope for victory. They had suffered defeat in battle after battle, on land, at sea, in the air. Their best pilots were dead. Their fleet was decimated. In the end, Kaiten proved to be a disaster-within-a-disaster, a foolhardy experiment within a misguided war. More Kaiten pilots and crew members died in training and on missions than the number of sailors they managed to kill on the American side.”

Cars in movies are missing something obvious but you may not have noticed

From Now I Know: “The picture above comes from the 2016 movie La La Land, which didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. But the Best Picture Oscar isn’t the only thing missing from La La Land. If you look carefully, you might see it — or, more accurately not see it, because it isn’t there. Look behind Mia Dolan (played by Emma Stone), and you’ll not see it. What you will see is a clear shot of a car passing her through the back seat window. That’s because of what’s not there: her headrest. If you’re making a movie, the odds of a car crash are very, very low — so the headrest serves no safety purpose but leads to a lot of small problems when it comes to filmmaking. First, directors want a picturesque background behind their actors, and if you have someone in the back seat, you often want to be able to see them. Also removing the headrest makes filming easier — it gives the cast and crew more room to maneuver in the car.”

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 “During World War II Japan used kamikaze submarines”

From LitHub: “One of the most disturbing sporting events in history took place on January 1, 1946, when the US military staged an all-star football game on a field in Nagasaki, Japan—less than five months after an atomic bomb killed over 70,000 in that city, nearly all of them civilians. The game, dubbed “The Atomic Bowl,” was played on the same day that college football bowl games were being played in the US. Today, nearly 80 years to the day after the bombings, the first vivid letters about the game and its aftermath, along with several previously unpublished images, have emerged from an unexpected source: William W. Watt, a revered English literature professor and poet whose work was for many years published in The New Yorker among other magazines. A top officer wrote a press release promising that the game would have a Marine band and Japanese girl cheerleaders. But they would have to play touch, not tackle, football because shards from the atomic blast still littered the field.”

How the invention of the marine chronometer in the 18th century changed the world forever

From Science Direct: “Until the eighteenth century, accurate offshore navigation was an impossible dream. There was no method or technology to determine longitude precisely in the open sea. The longitude puzzle was finally solved with the marine chronometer, one of the most important inventions of the era of the Industrial Revolution on a par with the steam engine. Solving the longitude puzzle] allowed not only safer but also more direct (and hence faster) passage across the oceans, resulting in greater intercontinental trade and the creation of new markets. These developments in turn caused massive shifts in population, significantly expanding the influence of some cultures while suppressing or even eradicating others. We used global data on climate, ship routes, urbanization and colonial history to investigate how the adoption of the marine chronometer reshaped transoceanic sea routes and the impact of these changes on the distribution of cities, population and European colonies across the globe.”

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Continue reading “Five months after Nagasaki the US staged a football game there”

OpenAI recently released a new version of its ChatGPT artificial-intelligence engine, called GPT-5. Normally, I wouldn’t choose to write about the latest iteration of a product that is in its fifth generation, especially since GPT-5 doesn’t seem radically different in most important ways from GPT-4. In fact, some critics have described it as an overdue, over-hyped and underwhelming update — nothing like the “almost human” artificial general intelligence that OpenAI has said for some time it is on the brink of developing. As far as I can tell, one of the main benefits of GPT-5 is that it replaces (or at least hides) the somewhat bewildering menu of AI engines that users can choose from: GPT-4o, GPT-o3, GPT-04-mini, GPT-04-mini-high, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1-mini, and so on. The new engine includes all of these prior modes, or models, and now it chooses which one (or which ones) to use based on the complexity and nature of the query. But what I found fascinating about the launch of GPT-5 was how angry a lot of devoted ChatGPT users seemed to be about the new version — or rather, what they were angry about.

As my former tech-blogging compatriot M.G. Siegler pointed out in his analysis of the launch in his Spyglass newsletter, it has become almost a rite of passage for technology products and services to ship a new release that makes everyone mad. One of the earliest cases I was tangentially involved with, as was M.G., was the launch of a little Facebook feature called the news feed in 2006. The thing that eventually became the beating heart of the company, helping to propel it to a multibillion-dollar market value and billions of users around the world, was initially so reviled by users (many of whom seemed to see it as an invasion of privacy) that it was seen as a massive mis-step — one that was arguably made worse by the tone-deaf note that Mark Zuckerberg wrote to users, an apology that wasn’t really an apology. So it’s not uncommon at all for users to hate the latest update from a service that they have grown accustomed to.

But there was something different about the GPT-5 backlash. It wasn’t just users who were upset that the user interface had changed, or that features weren’t where they expected them to be, or that there were new commands or menus, etc. As Casey Newton pointed out in his Platformers newsletter, users who expressed themselves in Reddit threads like r/ChatGPT and elsewhere seemed upset because the new version of the company’s large-language model seemed to have a different personality, if I can use that term — and OpenAI at least initially wouldn’t let them revert to GPT-4 (it later changed its mind on that, after a Change.org petition and some angry blog posts). Some described the loss of the previous version as being like losing a friend, while others said that the new model seemed smart, but that there was a “coldness” about its responses.

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Continue reading “People fall in love with all kinds of things including AI chatbots”

From ProPublica: “Jill Dopf Viles — self-taught genetic detective — passed away recently at the age of 50. She became convinced she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from certain parts of the body. Jill had been told for years that she didn’t have either of these, never mind both. After my first book, “The Sports Gene,” came out in 2013, I was on Good Morning America talking about genetics, and Jill happened to be within earshot of her TV. She sent me an email and followed up by sending me a batch of family photos and a bound packet outlining her theory: that she and Canadian sprinter Priscilla Lopes-Schliep — Olympic bronze medalist in the 100-meter hurdles — shared a genetic mutation. On the face of it, this seemed ridiculous. One could hardly find a picture of two more different women.”

Was Shakespeare stoned when he wrote some of his most famous plays?

From LitHub: “William Shakespeare was in danger of being canceled. He was a big fan of ­mind-altering ­drugs — especially cannabis. But the Church of England looked down on live theater because of its “unwholesome” moral content and was keeping an eye out for plays to shut down; plus, city officials had to approve plays before they could be performed within the city limits. So, if Shakespeare had dared to admit publicly that he smoked cannabis, it might have ended his career. That’s right, Shakespeare was a stoner. They found the evidence in his backyard. Some anthropologists got permission from a museum to borrow ­twenty-four clay pipe fragments that had been dug up in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare used to live. Using state-of-the-art forensic technology, the anthropologists discovered cannabis residue on eight of ­them — including several from Shakespeare’s backyard ­garden — that dated back to the late 1500s/early 1600s, around the time he actually lived there.”

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 “She diagnosed her own genetic disorder and changed science”

From Wired: “Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure. This island nation in Oceania is made up of nine coral islands and atolls inhabited by just over 11,000 people. The country’s average altitude is just 2 meters above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, flooding, and storm surges, all exacerbated by the climate crisis. A study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team revealed that, in 2023, the sea level in Tuvalu was 15 centimeters higher than the average recorded over the previous three decades. If this trend continues, it’s projected that most of the territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the high-tide level by 2050.”

Kiki the paralyzed sheep has learned how to drive herself around on a motorized cart

From Boing Boing: “Kiki, who was born paralyzed after her mom caught Cash Valley virus from a mosquito, was brought as a young lamb to Don’t Forget Us, Pet Us, a nonprofit sanctuary located in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts that provides lifelong care for farm animals with disabilities. From the start, the folks caring for her noticed how attentive, curious, and sweet Kiki was, and they’ve worked to provide her with the tools and love she needs to thrive, despite her disabilities. When she was young, the sanctuary saw how quickly Kiki learned to control the toys’ dials and levers by using her lips and teeth to move them and wondered if Kiki would be able to transfer the skills to drive a motorized cart. Sure enough, she easily learned to use her head to push the joystick on her motorized cart to move it in various directions, and now she’s an old pro, scooting around the sanctuary property at her leisure.”

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 “The entire country of Tuvalu is planning to move to Australia”