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FBI is looking into the suspicious deaths of 10 top scientists

The FBI is looking for any connections among the recent deaths and disappearances of at least 10 scientists who had ties to government science projects or other sensitive information. Those who have died or disappeared include a nuclear physicist and MIT professor fatally shot outside his Massachusetts residence, a retired Air Force general missing from his New Mexico home, and an aerospace engineer who disappeared during a hike in Los Angeles. The announcement comes after the cases were highlighted by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers; growing online speculation hinted at a link between the incidents, although there is no known evidence of any connections among the individual researchers other than the nature of their respective jobs and the fact that none of the incidents occurred before 2022. The most recent case involves retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, who disappeared, along with a gun and his wallet, in February. (via Scientific American)

Meet the 82-year-old queen of jumping rope

It was a Wednesday morning in April, and Annie Judis had transformed the kitchen of her Beverly Hills mansion into a film set. With her iPhone balanced on a stand, the 82-year-old adjusted the lighting and smoothed her costume: an aqua spandex workout set that revealed a hint of cleavage, a matching head wrap and tinted glasses. When it was showtime, her housekeeper hit play on her adopted theme song, the peppy anthem “Good Morning,” by Max Frost. Smiling from ear to ear, Ms. Judis started jumping rope and didn’t stop for a full minute. “Come on, everybody, let’s move it, let’s go!” she said to the camera. She does this routine nearly every morning, greeting her 187,000 Instagram followers and reminding them: “You’re going to need that energy for the grandkids.” Ms. Judis currently holds the Guinness World Record for oldest competitive rope skipper. She also thrives on having an audience: If she doesn’t share a workout, she said, it’s like it never happened. (via the New York Times)

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.

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Gander Social and the debate over digital sovereignty

I recently wrote a feature piece for a new Canadian-owned media outlet called Be Giant about Gander Social, a new Canadian-owned and operated social-media app that is still in beta testing, and the broader debate around what some call “digital sovereignty.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Over the past few decades, the vast majority of our essential communications infrastructure has become entirely American. From the Slack messages we send at work to our X posts and our Instagram stories and Facebook Reels to the search engines and shopping platforms we use: all American. Even the undersea cables over which our digital communications flow were built by U.S. companies. That reality has become a lot more uncomfortable of late, and many Canadians are now thinking about what’s come to be called “digital sovereignty.” Should we have our own homegrown services? Is that even possible at this point? And if we had Canadian alternatives, would anyone use them?

You can read the rest here: https://www.begiant.ca/stories/ideas/canada-digital-sovereignty-gander-social

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A strange bank robbery with one of the great notes of all time

It was 2004. I was 31. I was up for several days on meth and drinking heavily for the past month or so. I decide to go rob a bank and take my son to Tijuana, Mexico to see my biological father – his new grandpa. I’ve recently been discharged from parole. I take this new freedom as a chance to use drugs uncontrollably and drink like a mad man. I sit down on my chair and snatch a piece of scratch paper off my desk and write a bank robbery note. Later, as we proceed with the trial, I sit in the courtroom in a suit and tie, looking as innocent as possible. The D.A. walks in with a huge poster board and easel. He turns to the audience, then back to the jury and asks the judge for permission to enter exhibit D. The judge grants this wish. It’s my banknote. Written in big bold black letters on a torn piece of a brown paper bag that I get from liquor stores. “Please give me all of your money,” it reads, “or i will tickle you to death put the money in the paper bag i have a pisol in my pocket. Have a nice day the paper bag bandit.” (via Dreamland)

Ancient damage from a kind of machine-gun discovered on the walls of Pompeii

In 89 B.C.E., Pompeii was under siege. An invading army of tens of thousands of soldiers led by Lucius Cornelius Sulla stormed the town’s walls with slings and catapults. The siege subdued the rebellious city back beneath the thumb of the Roman Republic. Recently discovered damage on Pompeii’s fortification walls likely resulted from this fateful siege — and some of it may have come from a deeply mysterious ancient “machine gun,” researchers reported recently. Excavations and surveys conducted since 2024 have revealed several clusters of gouges in Pompeii’s northern fortification walls that were pristinely preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in C.E. 79. The marks are arrayed in a way that suggests they may have been left by a repeating dart-thrower called a polybolos. “It was an antipersonnel weapon used to strike archers emerging from the battlements above and the postern below,” says study lead author Adriana Rossi. The machine “had been described in detail but had never before been unearthed in any archaeological find or material evidence.” (via Scientific American)

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.

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The one kind of crypto that might actually be useful

Before I even get started, I know that many of you may have already tuned out. Cryptocurrency? You mean the thing that gave birth to all those stupid NFTs of Bored Apes, and innumerable “rug pulls” where the founder of a coin disappeared with millions? The same thing Donald Trump and his family have used to steal, er… generate billions of dollars in alleged value? The thing where they don’t even know who actually created it, or who controls a wallet with about $135 billion in Bitcoin still in it? (No, it’s not the guy the New York Times just said it was, or the guy who keeps claiming it was him, or the guy who was on the cover of Newsweek back in 2014 who had the same name as the creator). Crypto is for hustle bros and drug deals on the Dark Web, right? Well, yes. But I still think there is one area that actually interests me — and others — and it is known as stablecoins. I realize this isn’t the usual kind of topic for this newsletter, but please bear with me while I try to explain why I find it so interesting (I am not selling anything).

First of all, what is a “stablecoin?” Simply put, it’s a cryptocurrency that is backed by some other “fiat” currency, like the US dollar, or by some collection of assets with a stable value (such as gold). And what is the point of doing this? Well, the most obvious point is in the name: unlike most cryptocurrencies, which have no underlying value and therefore can be extremely volatile, the value of most stablecoins (theoretically at least) trades in a range determined by the underlying fiat currency. However, the hard part is that just because you issue some crypto backed by a certain amount of hard assets like US dollars doesn’t mean that your currency is going to be as stable as you might want it to be. That’s because — as with every other currency, including US dollars — the stability of a currency is based on the level of trust that investors have that the value it claims to have is going to exist in the future. In other words, what the kids like to call “vibes.”

A great example of this is the company that has become one of the biggest players in stablecoins, an outfit called Tether, which has a market capitalization of more than $100 billion, and controls an estimated 70 percent of the stablecoin market, which has been growing extremely quickly (according to a report from the International Monetary Fund, the trading volume of stablecoins increased by more than 90 percent in 2024, and that trading was worth about $23 trillion). Tether is not a new guy on the block: it was founded in 2014, and in 2019 it passed Bitcoin as the most traded cryptocurrency in the world. But despite (or perhaps because of) its size and market power, Tether has been a lot more volatile in the past than something called a stablecoin should be. Why? Because of concerns that it didn’t have enough solid assets — either dollars, gold or US treasury certificates — to back up the value of all the cryptocurrency it had already issued.

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

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