{"id":286281,"date":"2026-06-16T08:45:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=286281"},"modified":"2026-06-16T08:46:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:46:00","slug":"on-his-deathbed-her-dad-admitted-that-he-robbed-a-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/06\/16\/on-his-deathbed-her-dad-admitted-that-he-robbed-a-bank\/","title":{"rendered":"On his deathbed her dad admitted that he robbed a bank"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Thomas Randele was dying of lung cancer and had a secret. In March of 2021, with his daughter at his bedside after his first chemotherapy session, he made a stunning confession: He was a fugitive, and had been one for more than five decades. When he was 20 years old, he\u2019d robbed an Ohio bank of $215,000. And his real name was not Thomas Randele but Theodore Conrad. He implored his daughter not to look into the case. But after this bombshell revelation, Ashley did what most curious people would do. With every click, her father\u2019s dark past unspooled before her eyes. In Lynnfield, Massachusetts, Thomas Randele was a car salesman and a country club golf pro. He doted on his daughter and showed up for her soccer games in khaki pants and fast cars. But back in Cleveland, he was Ted Conrad, an elusive bank robber. He was barely out of his teens when he\u2019d pulled off one of the largest heists in Ohio history \u2014 the equivalent of $1.7 million today \u2014 inspired by his favorite movie. (via CNN<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some 3D printers are using the proboscis from a dead mosquito as a nozzle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Nature has long inspired engineering innovations. Recent advances in biohybrid research have taken this inspiration further by directly integrating biotic materials into engineered systems. 3D necroprinting is a biohybrid manufacturing technique that repurposes female mosquito proboscides as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles. The mosquito proboscis, with its unique geometry, structure, and mechanics, enables printed line widths as fine as 20 \u03bcm, surpassing commercially available 36-gauge dispense tips by ~100%. The mosquito proboscis dispense tip can withstand internal pressures of approximately 60 kPa, enabling effective fluid extrusion. Demonstrated applications include high-resolution printing of complex structures such as a honeycomb structure, a maple leaf, and bioscaffolds encapsulating cancer cells and red blood cells. (via Science.org<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: 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\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Celery used to be so rare that it cost more than the most expensive caviar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Celery wasn\u2019t always the easiest vegetable to cultivate. Wild varieties were unpleasant \u2014 much more bitter, tougher, and stringier than the celery we eat today. To grow something edible, farmers need to maintain precise growing conditions that nature didn\u2019t always allow for. Traditional celery was so bitter that growers often buried the stalks under soil or wrapped them in paper \u2014 a process called blanching \u2014 to keep sunlight off them, as this reduced the bitterness noticeably. But that effort made celery rare and, therefore, sought after by the gourmands of the Victorian era. Upper-class households displayed the vegetable in elaborate cut crystal vases designed specifically for the purpose, positioned in the center like a floral arrangement. According to the New York Public Library, celery was the third most frequently featured item for much of the late 1800s, appearing on one out of every four menus. On one menu from the era, celery sold for 35 cents while caviar went for just a quarter. (via Now I Know<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either <\/em>through my Patreon<\/em><\/a> or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called <\/em>The Torment Nexus<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Italian tourist attraction involved forcing dogs into a cave filled with carbon dioxide<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Cave of Dogs is a cave about ten metres deep on the eastern side of the Phlegraean Fields near Naples. Inside the cave is a fumarole that releases carbon dioxide of volcanic origin. The cave is thought to have been constructed in classical antiquity, possibly as a sudatorium; if so, the CO2<\/sub> emissions must have been much lower at the time. It became a tourist attraction for travelers on the Grand Tour. The CO2<\/sub> gas, being denser than air, tended to accumulate in the deeper parts of the cave. As a result, small animals such as dogs held inside the cave suffered carbon dioxide poisoning, while a standing human was not affected. Local guides, for a fee, would suspend dogs inside it until they became unconscious. The dogs could be revived by submerging them in the cold waters of the nearby Lake Agnano, although in at least one case this led to the dog drowning instead. Tourists who came to see this attraction included Sir Thomas Browne, Richard Mead, Goethe, and Mark Twain. (via Wikipedia<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 1971 experiment involved flying clocks around the world to prove the theory of relativity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The experiment began with a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Joseph C. Hafele, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis, was preparing notes for a physics lecture in 1969 when he worked out that an atomic clock placed on a commercial airliner should be precise enough to detect the relativistic time dilation effects that Albert Einstein had predicted more than half a century earlier. Hafele spent the following year unsuccessfully trying to obtain funding for the experiment, until he gave a talk on the topic in 1970 and was approached afterward by Richard E. Keating, an astronomer at the US Naval Observatory in Washington who worked with atomic clocks professionally. Together, Hafele and Keating obtained $8,000 in funding from the Office of Naval Research \u2014 one of the cheapest tests of general relativity ever conducted \u2014 and arranged for one of the most famous experiments in 20th-century physics. (via Space Daily<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That time a giant inflatable soccer ball turned traffic into a video game<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/em>: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as <\/em>The Morning News<\/em><\/a> from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s <\/em>Curious About Everything<\/em><\/a>, Dan Lewis’s <\/em>Now I Know<\/em><\/a>, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s <\/em>The Browser<\/em><\/a>, Clive Thompson’s <\/em>Linkfest<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Why Is This Interesting<\/em><\/a> by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy<\/em>. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com<\/em><\/p>\n

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Thomas Randele was dying of lung cancer and had a secret. In March of 2021, with his daughter at his bedside after his first chemotherapy session, he made a stunning confession: He was a fugitive, and had been one for more than five decades. When he was 20 years old, he\u2019d robbed an Ohio bank of $215,000. … <\/p>\n

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