On finalizing his acquisition of Twitter last October, one of the first things that Elon Musk did was announce that users would need to pay twenty dollars a month if they wanted to access premium “Twitter Blue” features. Twitter Blue launched in 2021, under Twitter’s previous management, at a price of five dollars per month; it offered subscribers the ability to edit tweets for thirty seconds after sending them, among other features including a bookmarking function and a tool for reading long Twitter threads. Musk suggested that his price hike would be worth it because Twitter Blue would also now give users a coveted blue checkmark showing that they had been verified. Musk said that those who already had blue checks would have ninety days to start paying for Twitter Blue before they lost their verified status. Some verified celebrities were not amused by this plan and said so, including on Twitter. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” the author Stephen King tweeted. “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

A few days later, Musk lowered the cost of verification to the low low price of eight dollars a month. He argued that Twitter’s original verification system was elitist, since only some members of the media and celebrities had blue checks. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he wrote on November 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.” But, as with so much else Musk has touched, the rollout of the new feature quickly turned into a train wreck. Some users who were already verified showed their contempt for the new plan by changing their account details and pretending to be someone else. The comedian Sarah Silverman pretended to be Musk by copying his profile picture and display name, then tweeted satirical comments. (“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day.”) The actress Valerie Bertinelli also changed her profile name to Musk’s, then tweeted support for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterms. (Musk had called on “independent-minded voters” to back Republicans.)

Musk responded on Twitter that any account engaging in impersonation without specifying that it was a parody would be permanently suspended, and that changing an account name would result in the “temporary loss” of the user’s checkmark. The train wreck wasn’t over, however. Twitter’s own official account announced that in order to prevent impersonation, it would offer a separate “official” badge that would be added to “government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures.” A few minutes later, Musk announced that he had killed the feature, although the new, white checkmarks that came with it remained attached to some accounts. Meanwhile, over the next few days, the impersonations continued: as Engadget noted, an account posing as Nintendo posted a picture of Mario with his middle finger raised, while an account claiming to be LeBron James said that he was looking to get traded. Most infamous, perhaps, was the time that a verified account claiming to belong to the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly tweeted: “Insulin is free now.” The account of the real Eli Lilly apologized; its insulin was not in fact free now. The fake tweet and ensuing chaos erased around fifteen billion dollars from the company’s market cap.

Xuehu Wei, who is a doctoral student in the research team around Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, compared the brain scans of 94 native speakers of two very different languages and showed that the language we grow up with modulates the wiring in the brain. Two groups of native speakers of German and Arabic respectively were scanned in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The high-resolution images not only show the anatomy of the brain, but also allow us to derive the connectivity between the brain areas using a technique called diffusion-weighted imaging. The data showed that the axonal white matter connections of the language network adapt to the processing demands and difficulties of the mother tongue. “Arabic native speakers showed a stronger connectivity between the left and right hemispheres than German native speakers,” explained Alfred Anwander, last author of the study.

Scientists discover RNA component buried in the dust of an asteroid

A sample extracted from an asteroid far from Earth has confirmed that RNA nucleobases can be found in space rocks. Analysis of dust ferried home from asteroid Ryugu has been found to contain uracil – one of the four nucleobases that make up RNA – in addition to niacin, a form of the vitamin B3, which plays an important role in metabolism. This adds to a growing body of evidence that the building blocks for life form in space, and may have been at least partially delivered to Earth by asteroid bombardment early in our planet’s history. “Scientists have previously found nucleobases and vitamins in certain carbon-rich meteorites, but there was always the question of contamination by exposure to the Earth’s environment,” says astrochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University in Japan. “Since the Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected two samples directly from asteroid Ryugu and delivered them to Earth in sealed capsules, contamination can be ruled out.”

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Barnum Brown was marked for greatness from a young age. Born on a Kansas farm on February 12, 1873, the third child of Clara and William Brown went weeks without a name. Nearby Topeka was plastered with advertisements for P.T. Barnum’s traveling circus at this time, as were cities throughout the Midwest. The colorful posters still loomed large in 6-year-old Frank Brown’s mind when his baby brother arrived. As his parents argued about what to name their new son, Frank offered a suggestion: “Let’s call him Barnum.” Young Barnum’s life bore no resemblance to that of the enterprising circus showman, but he would live up to his name. He showed little interest in farming the family’s property and preferred combing the grounds around his home for fossils. His father ran a modest strip-mining operation on their coal-rich property, and the plows and scrapers unearthed ancient treasures. Corals and seashells littered the landscape. Barnum collected enough fossils to stuff every drawer in the house.

The true story of the president who couldn’t hear music

When Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated for his first presidential term in 1869, thousands of people showed up to celebrate. It was one of the grandest and swankiest parties held in generations, and naturally included lots of music, mostly parade-marching tunes that set the tone of the event. Yet one person who did not enjoy the sound of the beat was the incoming president himself. There’s a famous line attributed to the acclaimed Civil War general: “I know of only two tunes: one of them is Yankee Doodle Dandy, and the other isn’t.” Underneath the joke was a real neurological condition that Grant had, although he never knew it. This disorder also would also afflict at least two other future presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft. It is known as “congenital amusia,” or an inability to hear music and understand it as — well — music. To those with the condition, music typically sounds cacophonous, like noise.

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In 1832, Europe was in the throes of a cholera epidemic. A Scottish doctor named Thomas Latta knew cholera patients’ blood lacked water and salt, so he’d tried pumping a briny solution directly into the veins of an elderly patient. At first there was no response, but then the woman started to grow stronger. Nearly 140 years after Latta’s experiments, work on the disease would lead to one of the 20th century’s most consequential medical discoveries: oral rehydration solution (ORS). This cheap, simple solution of sugar, salts, and water mixed in the right proportions and delivered orally has saved the lives of more than 70 million, mostly children, since its introduction in the 1970s. It has helped slash the number of children under five dying of diarrhoeal diseases from around 4.8 million in 1980 to about 500,000 today. All of this from a drink that in its most basic form can be made by anyone with access to kitchen salt, sugar, and water.

Last time a president was arrested it was for going too fast in his horse-drawn buggy

The last time a US President was arrested, it involved a speeding horse and buggy, the thunder of hooves near the White House and a repeat offender who happened to be the president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant, who had an eye for spirited horses and an apparent yen to test their mettle, was arrested in 1872 for speeding on a street in Washington, where he had been driving a two-horse carriage. It was the second time in two days that the policeman had stopped the president; the first time, the officer had issued him a warning. The Grant episode apparently wasn’t reported in the press at the time, but it came to light in 1908 when The Sunday Star newspaper in Washington published an interview with the then-retired officer who pulled the 18th president of the United States over.

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It was March 1827 and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance? The parade of mourners continued after Beethoven’s death at age 56, even after doctors performed a gruesome craniotomy, looking at the folds in Beethoven’s brain and removing his ear bones in a vain attempt to understand why the revered composer lost his hearing. Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single strand of hair was left on his head. Ever since, a cottage industry has aimed to understand Beethoven’s illnesses and the cause of his death. Now, an analysis of strands of his hair has upended long held beliefs about his health. The report provides an explanation for his debilitating ailments and even his death, while raising new questions about his origins and hinting at a dark family secret.

What were Neanderthals really like—and why did they go extinct?

When limestone quarry workers in Germany’s Neander Valley discoveredfossilized bones in 1856, they thought they’d uncovered the remains of a bear. In fact, they’d stumbled upon something that would change history: evidence of an extinct species of ancient human predecessors who walked the Earth between at least 400,000 and 40,000 years ago. Researchers soon realized that they had already encountered these human relatives in earlier fossils that had been found, and misidentified, throughout the early 19th century. The discovery galvanized scientists eager to explore new theories of evolution, sparking a worldwide fossil hunt and tantalizing the public with the possibility of a mysterious sister species that once dominated Europe. Now known as Neanderthals—so named by geologist William King—Homo neanderthalensis are humans’ closest known relatives.

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In 1747, the young poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim was sitting in his study in the small German town of Halberstadt, surrounded by stacks of letters from his friends and associates, and had an epiphany. He realized that despite having corresponded with so many people, he had never actually met most of them in person. And this got him thinking: what if there was a way to visualize all the people he had formed relationships with through letter writing? And thus, the poet’s Temple of Friendship was born. Gleim set out to collect painted portraits of all his friends and relatives, creating an extensive personal portrait gallery that soon filled all the walls of his apartment. He referred to this portrait gallery as his Tempel der Freundschaft (“Temple of Friendship”). He carefully thought about the arrangement of his portrait gallery: his own portrait was always at the center of the gallery, while other portraits were positioned around it.

Jean Denis and the “Transfusion Affair”

Beginning in the spring of 1667, public opinion in Paris was rocked by a remarkable affair involving domesticated animals: the first practical experiments to transfuse animal blood into humans for therapeutic purposes. The experiments that came to be known as the “Transfusion Affair” were shrouded in the competing claims of a highly public controversy in which consensus and truth, alongside the animal subjects themselves, were the first victims. “There was never anything that divided opinion as much as we presently witness with the transfusions”, wrote the Parisian lawyer at Parlement, Louis de Basril, late in the affair, in February 1668. “It is a topic of the salons, an amusement at the court, the subject of philosophical dissertations; and doctors talk incessantly about it in all their consultations.” At the center of the controversy was the young Montpellier physician and “most able Cartesian philosopher” Jean Denis, who experimented with animal blood to cure sickness, especially madness, and to prolong life.

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An engineer in Wisconsin claims to have improved grief’s design. Aerodynamic, he says, showing off his sketches, barely grief at all! Applying physics like salve to a wound, he remembers what Torricelli said about vacuums, what Carnot said about absolute terror. He grabs a pencil and revises one more time. There’s money to be made in this, his father would assure, chopping chicken-necks through the afternoon. Flightless birds! The engineer pores over schematics, grimaces at draft after draft. His last sketch: confused. Joints unlabeled. A room inside a room inside a room.

J. Estanislao Lopez (2022)

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit created by the entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, launched a new feature called the National Emergency Library. Restrictions linked to the spread of COVID-19 had made it difficult or impossible for people to buy books or visit libraries in person, and so the Archive removed limits on the digital borrowing of the books in its database—of which there were more than three million, most of them in turn borrowed from physical libraries and scanned—and made them all publicly available, for free. The project was supported by a number of universities, researchers, and librarians. But some of the authors and publishers who owned the copyright to these books saw it not as a public service, but as theft.

In June 2020, Four publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit. The Internet Archive shut down the project, and went back to its previous policy of “Controlled Digital Lending,” which only allowed one person to borrow a free digital copy of a book at any given time. But this didn’t stop the lawsuit—because the publishers argued that any digital lending by the Archive constituted illegal infringement of the publishers’ copyright.

Last week, Judge John G. Koeltl, of the Southern District of New York, came down in favor of the publishers and dismissed every aspect of the Archive’s defense, including the claim that its lending program is protected by the “fair use” exception in copyright law. Koeltl wrote that the concept of fair use protects transformative versions of copyrighted works—a copy of a famous photo used in an artistic collage, for example—and that the Archive’s copies of books don’t qualify; the Archive made the case that its lending program  is transformative because the practice “facilitates new and expanding interactions between library books and the web,” the judge noted, but he ruled that just because the Archive might be “making an invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts” did not make the use transformative.

On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country. Based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago, it appears that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt. Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the operation that rescued his friend Benito Mussolini.

Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at Bush says his only regret is he “only had two shoes”

Two decades after the U.S. led the invasion of Iraq, one of the most memorable moments for many in the region remains the 2008 news conference in Baghdad when an Iraqi journalist stood up and hurled his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush. As the U.S. leader spoke alongside Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, he was forced to duck the flying shoes as the journalist shouted: “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” The man was quickly pounced on by security forces and removed from the room, and says he was subsequently jailed and beaten for his actions. “The only regret I have is that I only had two shoes,” Muntazer al-Zaidi, who expressed the feelings of many Iraqis at the time, told CBS News, 20 years after the beginning of the U.S.’s campaign of “shock and awe.”

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The 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine has brought fresh attention to paleogenomics, the sequencing of DNA of ancient specimens. Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo won the coveted prize “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” In addition to sequencing the Neanderthal genome and identifying a previously unknown early human called Denisova, Pääbo also found that genetic material of these now extinct hominins had mixed with those of our own Homo sapiens after our ancestor migrated from Africa some 70,000 years ago. The study of ancient DNA has also shed light on other migrations, as well as the evolution of genes involved in regulating our immune system and the origin of our tolerance to lactose, among many other things. The research has also ignited ethical questions. Clinical research on living people requires the informed consent of participants and compliance with federal and institutional rules. But what do you do when you’re studying the DNA of people who died a long time ago? That gets complicated.

How the ‘Godfather of Cybercrime’ got his start

he internet has connected nearly everybody on the planet to a global network of information and influence, enabling humanity’s best and brightest minds unparalleled collaborative capabilities. At least that was the idea, more often than not these days, it serves as a popular medium for scamming your more terminally-online relatives out of large sums of money. Just ask Brett Johnson, a reformed scam artist who at his rube-bilking pinnacle, was good at separating fools from their cash that he founded an entire online learning forum to train a new generation of digital scam artist. Eventually, he branched out on his own. His first scam: in 1994, he faked his own car accident. Second scam: eBay fraud. He reached his peak in the mid-’90s, during the Beanie Baby heyday. The Royal Blue Peanut, essentially a cobalt stuffed elephant toy, sold for as much as $1,700. Brett was trying to earn some extra money. A Beanie Baby scam seemed easy and quick. He advertised on eBay that he was selling Royal Blue Peanut for $1,500. Except he was actually selling a gray Beanie Baby that he dipped in blue dye.

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Adam Sandler’s comedy isn’t for everyone — the broad, scatalogical, somewhat sophomoric humour in movies like Waterboy, Happy Gilmore, and Little Nicky — but there’s no question he has been hugely successful. And yet, he seems like such a genuinely nice and down-to-earth person, unlike the driven, succeed-at-all-costs type of person you might think might be behind that $4 billion in box office sales. Everyone who spoke during the tribute at the Kennedy Center when he got the Mark Twain Award for Humour seemed devoted to him, including many comedians you might expect would normally be competitors. How did this happen? I was struck by what Sandler said when he got up to give his acceptance speech, because it was a deceptively simple recipe for success, and yet it clearly worked:

“I’ll tell you what kind of led me to this night. Growing up, my parents did everything they could to give me crazy confidence at literally everything I did. School, sports, singing, joking, they acted like I was the best at all those things, even though other kids were way better than me. My sisters, Elizabeth and Valerie, they included me in everything they did. They would always tell me to sing, tell stories, they’d go to all my games, they’d root for me. They’d even take me on dates with their boyfriends. They just always made me feel like I was the star of the family. My older brother, Scott, I shared a bedroom with him my whole childhood, and he was always nice to me. He would tell me, I’m funny all the time. He’d say I was great on the guitar.

When it came time to pick my college major, my brother said, “You should be an actor. You’re as funny as Rodney Dangerfield and Eddie Murphy.” And I never thought that, but he sort of made me feel like I was. He’s the one who brought me to do a standup comedy at Stitches Comedy Club. He set it all up. He says, you’re gonna get on stage, you have five minutes to do jokes. So I went up there, I was terrible. I don’t even know what I said. I was like in a fog. Those weird fogs you get when you’re a standup sometimes where you lose your mind. I just kind of was babbling. Anyways, I left. For some reason on the way home, my brother made me feel like I had the best set of any comedian that night. And he’s like, you just gotta prepare next time. But they loved you. And in my head I was like, “They did?”

Imagine what we could accomplish if we all had that kind of constant love and support behind us!