The Curious About Everything Newsletter #55
The many interesting things I read in September 2025
Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter. CAE 54 is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Ted Goia’s warning about our inability to spot truth from fake in the modern era.
My updates
In 20 minute ‘uptime’ increments, I’ve managed to finish my Celiac’s Guide to Cambodia, and complete new celiac translation cards in Khmer and Korean. You can see all of my free guides and the associated cards here. Feels like a real feat with leak, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to broaden these resources for celiacs who travel, even if I can no longer be one of them.
I updated my post about my Vipassana meditation experience in New Zealand with a newer section that looks back on this 10-day silent meditation course ten years later.
Featured art for CAE 55
CAE 55’s featured artist is Martin Wittfooth, whose evocative image of a pelican feasting on the detritus of our consumerism fit well with this month’s read about the shrinking ecosystem for orangutans in Borneo, below. Wittfooth’s work has been exhibited or featured in galleries, publications, and museums worldwide and use allegory and symbolism to explore themes of the intersection and clash of industry and nature, and the human influence on the environment. You can find him on his website, or on Instagram.
The most interesting things I read this month
There are so many good reads this month that, despite how long this CAE is, I have overflow for additional articles. I’ll be sharing them on my Patreon later this month. (My Patreon memberships provide me with stable income, so I am able to keep creating CAE every month for free, without a paywall!)
Start here:
Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.
🏰 How to build a medieval castle. You may remember the article I shared about rebuilding Notre Dame in a CAE past, and how that restoration effort resurrected ancient techniques in the process. Similarly, archaeologists and craftsmen in France have spent the past two decades building a 13th century fortress named Guédelon Castle in the forests of Burgundy. It’s being built entirely with medieval methods and materials, and has become a living laboratory of its own. Launched in 1998 on the site of an old quarry, workers and researchers work together to experiment with stone masonry, lime mortar, timber framing, and even period machines like a giant treadmill winch. Their discoveries (like using painted linen instead of glass in windows) have already fed back into major restoration projects, including Notre Dame. Very interesting read about how Guédelon has become a of a living tree of its own, with some amazing photos in there, too. Archeology Today
🏈 How a Deaf Quarterback Changed Sports Forever By Inventing the Huddle. I grew up watching American football but it never occurred to me to ask where the huddle came from. It turns out, from one man! Specifically, a deaf quarterback from Gallaudet University named Paul D. Hubbard. In 1894, he invented what many believe to be the first football huddle after he realized that using hand signs in the open would tip his hand (literally) to the opposing team. So he had his team huddle around him in a circle before signing. Since then, the huddle has become standard across American football and other sports, and Gallaudet’s student newspaper honoured Hubbard in 1941 as the “daddy of huddle”. Although others later claimed credit, this piece notes that Gallaudet’s origin story is the one most supported by evidence. Lest you wonder, as I did, about the surprising accessibility of a football team learning sign language in the late 1800s, Gallaudet is a university for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Smithsonian Magazine
❓ Victorian Science’s Duck-Billed Enigma. As a kid, I had a stuffed animal that by Webkind called called a “Google”. It was a fluffy duck-billed platypus that I took everywhere I could. Today, Google means something very different. And we know platypuses fairly well too. But what of when it was first glimpsed in the wild? In the 19th century, the platypus was known as the “duck-billed enigma”, and it upended European scientific classification in all its weirdness. When the first specimen arrived in London in 1799, naturalist George Shaw believed it was a fake and (sadly) attacked it with scissors, eventually calling it the “most extraordinary” mammal he’d ever seen. Debate raged over its identity. Was it a bird? A reptile? A mammal? French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that platypuses should join echidnas (spiny anteaters) in a non-mammalian class, Prototheria, while Shaw suggested they be lumped in with anteaters and sloths since they are all toothless animals. It took decades before a researcher was able to confirm that the animal laid eggs, led to its nests by Aboriginal tribes in Australia. As with so many other animals, it was hunted almost to extinction, finally becoming legally protected in 1912. History Today
🍲 Stew Kids on the Block. As someone who grew up during the original NKOTB era, I cackled at this title. All about the rise of the stewfluencer (sigh), and how bottomless perpetual stews, which begin as “mouthbone soup”, are lovingly tended for days or weeks (sometimes even longer). They come into their own as stews via whoever is managing them and sometimes even naming them: author John DeVore meets the creators behind Stewtheus, Soupina, and Brotholomew. What started as family medicine broth has evolved into a TikTok-fuelled trend of creators keeping stews alive and bubbling indefinitely, updating the masses with how their stew pot is bubbling. “There’s a fine line between a delicious-looking broth and a plumbing emergency,” notes DeVore. (Yes, noted!) The internet didn’t invent the perpetual stew, of course; DeVore notes that it has persisted in different forms across centuries and cultures. Fun, first person read. Taste
🟦 Museum of Color. This beautiful and reflective essay takes us through pigment as a form of nature, our love and our obsession with colour, and how seeking out new ways to generate pigment has shaped our history. Stephanie Krzywonos follows ochre from prehistoric palettes to its role in Aboriginal languages, where it merges colour and ancestral place, and reflects on how pigments carry both beauty and injustice and connects us across time, culture, and land. Colour isn’t visual, the piece notes, it’s a vessel of memory, of emotion, and power that shapes our relationship with the natural (and cultural!) world. Emergence Magazine
🤑 Who’s getting rich off your attention? Another thoughtful read from Kyla Scanlon, who I’ve shared in CAEs past. This time, she writes about how the internet’s attention economy has collapsed the old process of how we determined what is true. We used to transit from data to understanding to wisdom via journalists, education, and other messaging. These days, we have a distorted information ecosystem and we’re “drowning in outrage”. We are flooded with information, but thanks to bots and foreign interference and manipulation of multiple sorts, we never make it to wisdom. Why did this happen? She argues the roots of our morass go back to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which concentrated media power instead of democratizing it. That laid the groundwork for today’s empire of billionaires who own and control the news, the feeds, and the platforms. “Controlling the means of mass communication means controlling the narrative,” she writes, which is basically the attention economy version of a monopoly. And the currency is our eternal rage. This is a structural economic problem, not just misinformation; if the system rewards misinformation, you can’t fact-check it to truth. Worth a full read. Kyla’s Newsletter
🤯 Mental time travel: a new case of autobiographical hypermnesia. My memory is photographic, and my family is often surprised at how I not only remember things from my past in great detail but can place the colours, times, and ‘see’ what happened as if it’s present day in my mind’s eye. This case study is the first thing I’ve read that is an approximation of how my brain works. I forwarded it to my brother asking if his worked similar, and he was like, “what?! no!” so it appears to just be me. I silo information in different ‘places’ with Rolodexes that allow me to easily retrieve it. This newly documented case of autobiographical hypermnesia (also called hyperthymesia (or autobiographical hypermnesia) spotlights a 17-year-old girl who has vivid, date-specific memories of her life that she can access with surprising control. Unlike typical hyperthymestic cases, where memories can be overwhelming or involuntary, she organizes her recollections using a mental “memory palace”. Her autobiographical memories are sorted into themed binders in her mind inside a room she dubbed the “white room”, while factual knowledge (like from her school classes) with no emotional weight are stored separately. She also uses mental representation tools to isolate memories that emotionally intrusive or sad, like a chest to ‘hold’ her grandfather’s death. When tested, she demonstrated exceptional ability not only to relive past events from varying perspectives, but also to vividly imagine future scenarios with rich sensory detail. Eureka Alert
🦧 An Orangutan Sanctuary in Borneo Is Giving the Endangered Primates a Second Chance, Just When They Need It Most. In my many years of living and traveling in Southeast Asia, I regret never having made it to Kalimantan to see orangutans at the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, or BOSF. Providing a safe haven for orphaned and displaced orangutans, BOSF gives them the opportunity to learn essential survival skills before reintroduction. Borneo used to be covered in rainforest, yet now half of its forest land has been cleared. Its remaining forest has some of the highest species diversity on earth; scientists have found 1,000 species of insect in a single tree (!). The island is home to 6% of the world’s biodiversity, and nearly 90% of all orangutans in the world. As Borneo faces growing human population pressures, BOSF’s efforts are vital to protecting the primates’ natural habitat. Smithsonian Magazine
🧂 The Miracle of Salt. (Transcript here, which is what I read as listening to podcasts is hard on my brain) A conversation with Naomi Duguid, author, cook, photographer, and overall amazing human. I’m lucky to call her a friend and mentor for years now. She takes us on a journey through salt’s role not just as seasoning, but as a lifeline. As those who’ve read Mark Kurlansky’s Salt well know, humans have depended on salt to preserve food, manage abundance and scarcity, and travel, trade, and tax for centuries. Duguid explains how salt keeps food from spoiling, enables fermentation, makes long winters or dry seasons survivable rather than deadly. In the process of writing her newest cookbook, The Miracle of Salt, she visited places where salt is used and harvested around the world. Her prose is vivid, weaving together the ingredient’s role in landscape and labour alike. Eat This Podcast
💉 The Strange History of the Anti-Vaccine Movement. When Edward Jenner pioneered the smallpox vaccine in 1796 after noticing milkmaids were immune to the disease (it turns out, thanks to cowpox), he wouldn’t have imagined that the same arguments against vaccination would persist centuries later. Opposition emerged almost immediately, and by the mid-1800s, Britain had anti-vaccine leagues publishing pamphlets with titles like Vaccination, a Curse. Protests erupted from England to Canada to the US, and many of the tropes we recognize today were popular in 1802: claims that vaccines are “unnatural,” that they transform the body (there were cartoons of the vaccinated sprouting cow body parts, for example), that they’re poison, or part of a doctor’s profit scheme. Also popular were arguments that vaccination infringed on personal liberty, a stance that helped keep Stockholm’s vaccination rate at just 40% in 1873 — shortly before a devastating smallpox outbreak hit, and killed more than 10x as many residents in the city as in the rest of Sweden where vaccination rates were higher. Despite smallpox ultimately being eradicated in 1980 after it killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, the pattern remains today. As we’ve seen, measles is no longer considered ‘eliminated’ and is making a comeback via undervaccinated pockets or communities, to the detriment of all of us. BBC News
🫎 The messy reality of feeding Alaska. Most of Alaska’s food supply arrives from out-of-state. During this era of tariffs and political flare-ups with Canada and elsewhere, as well as high transport costs, an already fragile supply chain is even more uncertain. Living just across the border in Whitehorse, Yukon, Eva Holland assumed the long, thin thread of the Alaska Highway was the main route to feeding Alaska. But once she started digging, calling grocers as well as trucking companies and both governments, she found not just limited data, but almost no coherent data at all. How much food actually travels that road? How many gallons of milk or loaves of bread? No one seemed to know. The paucity of data is a reminder that Alaskans’ access to basics rests on shaky ground: “for a state where many residents pride themselves on their self-sufficiency,” she writes, “their food supply is unusually dependent on public infrastructure.” Eva is a friend, and I loved reading about a part of the country I wouldn’t otherwise know about were it not from her. High Country News
🗺 How Does a Blind Model See the Earth? “Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the earth from space,” writes Henry, “we can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great uncharted void below the Cape of Good Hope. But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps.” Today, satellites give us certainty, but also strip away that creative subjectivity. This piece is a result of the author asking the following: if AI has never seen Earth directly, what does the globe look like in its mind? To find out, he probes LLMs one coordinate and question at a time, uncovering strange, evolving world maps that (of course) still leave us with questions. Super interesting experiment. Outside Text
🐾 Are Greyhounds Really Dogs? Greyhounds are absolutely dogs, but this pieces from 2024 goes into some of the unusual biology that led to this clickbait title. They belong to the sighthound group, bred to chase prey by sight rather than scent, with over 15 related breeds sharing traits like long noses, slim build, and incredible speed. What makes greyhounds stand out scientifically is how many of their blood and biochemical values fall outside “normal” ranges for other breeds, including their red blood cell count, white blood cell and platelet counts, thyroid and calcium levels, even how they metabolize certain drugs. For example, healthy greyhounds often have hematocrit (HCT) between 50-63%, a level that in most other breeds would indicate disease. The piece emphasizes that many lab tests and veterinary standards are based on “typical” breeds, so greyhounds often look “abnormal” even when they’re perfectly healthy. If you ever wondered why vets treat greyhounds differently, it’s not because they’re not dogs, but because their biology is exceptional. TIL! Sent to me by my friend Mike, who has a greyhound named Lucky. Couto Veterinary Consultants
🗼 One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies (archive link). This piece takes us into the mind of the most prolific anti-5G arsonist in the world, a late 20s man from Texas who set fire to 22 cell towers around Texas, convinced the tech was part of a global mind-control plot. He credits a Joe Rogan podcast clip about 5G for catalyzing his transformation from apolitical citizen to tech-savvy arsonist, and his radicalization follows a now-predictable pattern: social media algorithms pushed him deeper into conspiracy content, reinforcing his belief that authorities were hiding truths about radiation, surveillance, and control. Plus, the piece notes, he “liked the idea of going down in a blaze of glory, of martyring himself for the anti-5G cause.” He disguised himself as a worker, studied tower infrastructure, and then escalated to targeted sabotage. Eventually, forensic evidence and surveillance footage connected him to the fires. In prison, he now says he’s found peace in sobriety, philosophy, and a quieter life. Though he also wants to start a podcast on the dangers of technology. WIRED Magazine
📸 Three photo galleries worth clicking for:
Capture the Dark 2025’s winning photographs
Oceanographic’s ocean photographer of the year award winners.
The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:
🌱 Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life. Researchers have finally solved a long-standing mystery at the base of the animal tree of life: using new chromosomal analysis techniques, they determined that comb jellies (and not sea sponges) were the first group to branch off from the common ancestor of all animals. By comparing gene group placements on chromosomes in comb jellies and sponges, as well as their single-cell relatives, the team found that comb jellies retained a more original set of gene arrangements. This means that they were likely the first divergence. Popular Mechanics
🤖 My mom and Dr. DeepSeek. After an exhausting medical journey full of long waits, rushed exams, and little reassurance, Viola Zhou’s mother began using an AI chatbot called DeepSeek for medical help. A 57-year-old kidney-transplant patient in Eastern China, Zhou’s mother fed DeepSeek her lab results, symptoms, biometrics from wearables, and more to receive guidance from AI. A different perspective of where AI can fill a gap, and as Zhou writes it her mother became increasingly smitten with her new AI doctor. “DeepSeek is more humane,” Zhou’s mother mother told her in May. “Doctors are more like machines.” I’ve seen patients with my conditions use AI to get answers that aren’t reflective of the realities of the field; as with anything it’s a double-edged sword — you have to know where its limits lie, and often people don’t. Rest of World
🥧 Inside the World of the Great British Bake Off. (Archive link) I first started watching GBBO in between treatment procedures for my spinal CSF leak in 2017, and I’ve watched every season since. (My second favourite in the franchises is the Great Australian Bake Off — lovely cast of judges and hosts!) I rarely watched TV prior, but in 2017 I was holed up in an Airbnb in North Carolina, in excruciating pain, and simply waiting to see if the latest treatment to try and seal my leak had worked. GBBO was a balm for my health worries, a drama free celebration of food and camaraderie. Very different to the Bravo-style reality catfights, it was all about the dishes. This piece by former contestant Ruby Tandoh is about what it was like to be on the show, and how it felt to be thrust in the spotlight thereafter. If you watch GBBO, you’ll want a read. New Yorker
⚕️ Confessions of an Ambivalent Psychiatrist. A powerful essay shaped by psychiatrist Susan Maher, who writes from the dual vantage point of patient and physician about how treatments themselves can complicate care. What struck me was not only the strength of her prose, but also how her reflections mirror the catch-22 familiar in the spinal CSF leak world: sometimes the very procedure meant to help can deepen the issue. In the leak world, invasive imaging makes a new hole in order to find a hole or tear in the dura. In psychiatry, it can be more dense and destructive: she shows how ECT, while offering relief for some, may also negatively affect memory, cause physical side effects, and unsettle identity. How does a doctor’s own experience with treatment reshape their practice? And how can any complex field reckon honestly with the limitations of its tools? Beautiful writing, and thoughtful in all ways. Psychiatry at the Margins
🇪🇸 San Fermin. Janis Hopkins lands in Pamplona on the penultimate day of San Fermín, the festival of white-and-red regalia, thunderous bulls, and sweaty jubilance. She is immediately confronted not by the festivity, but by the smells: vomit, urine, spilled beer, and the sharp bite of synthetic lemon-detergent fighting its way through the streets. Amid looming storms, she watches the city swell with people in red scarves and sashes, everywhere effervescent with music, alcohol and food carts. There’s a thrill in the sidewalks, but also tension but not from the crowds or fights within them, but the reason for the festival itself: bulls running through the streets. It’s an honest, first person piece, one that wrestles with traditions vs. cruelty, culture vs. choice. Hopkins feels guilty for participating but curious to understand; she cannot ignore how real the violence is. In the end, “San Fermín festival is more than the bulls,” she writes. “But nobody seems to have informed Pamplona.” Unlaced (via Web Curios)
🔗 Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency. Techmeme just turned 20, and I realized I’d been reading it for close to its entirety, put onto it initially by a friend when I was still a lawyer. Started by Gabe Rivera in 2005 as a simple, free, single-page aggregator of tech news, blogs, and commentary, it looks and works almost entirely the same way 20 years later, now with varying links to different commentators’ takes on the piece via their social media feeds, instead of just hyperlinks to the piece itself. Its strength lies in that consistency, and by curating what people need to see most and fastest as tech news break, with sharp takes and editorial write-ups alongside the headlines. Despite all the noise and change in where we read news, this scrappy headline site is still important shared context for people in tech, and for that I am glad. Congrats to Gabe and his team. Techmeme
🥀 The AI Doomsday Machine is Closer to Reality Than You Think. Oh, you know, just including some light reading about the end of the world as we know it. This Politico feature examines the Pentagon’s growing interest in using artificial intelligence in nuclear strategy as a decision-support tool that can sift through vast data in crises. Where’s it leading? Per this piece, nowhere good. “Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars”, author Michael Hirsh notes. Even to the point of launching nuclear weapons. Proponents argue that AI could give leaders faster, clearer insights under extreme time pressure, but past experience with AI in other domains (including articles I’ve shared in CAEs past) suggests it may also be used to distort judgment or escalate. The military wants the advantages of AI’s speed and scale, but how will they guarantee using it won’t amplify hugely consequential risks? (They can’t). Politico
🌐 Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring. (Archive link) This long (looong) piece deep dives into Wikipedia's enduring success within a digital landscape of many websites shuttering and others rife with the consequences of ideological polarization. Despite facing much political and legal pressure over the years, including state-sponsored harassment, Wikipedia has remained chaotically neutral (though I know some may disagree!) via strict editorial policies and a community-driven approach. Enjoyed the anecdotes about how Wikipedia has developed what newsletter Today in Tabs called “an immune response to outside grievances.” If a topic becomes controversial, an editor restricts the page to logins only, then redirects viewers to read about the controversy and suggest edits (if those edits meet Wiki’s rules). It works so well that some people who started out as troll-vandals are now community editors, won over by the site and its policies. The Verge
👣 The Great Reverse Migration. After seeing the fallout from Trump’s new policies, some migrants in the U.S. are self-deporting, while others bound for the country are turning back before even reaching the southern border. The piece highlights migrants like Edinson, a Venezuelan father who once risked everything crossing the Darién Gap toward the US, now returning home. Thousands of others are retracing their steps south via a perilous sea route. For many, the collapse of shrinking opportunities and what they used to see as the American dream, combined with lack of safety in the States, make returning home an act of survival. Type Investigations
🎨 Your Red Is My Red: Shared Brain Codes for Color. For some time, scientists thought that colour was managed by different areas of the brain, but as the eye doesn’t treat colour evenly across its surface, they still weren’t sure how colours showed up in the brain. Previous work noted that it is possible to decode which colour someone is looking at from their brain activity — but only when trained at tested on the same people. So the question remained: do colours trigger unique brain responses in different people? If I looked at a green traffic light, do I see the same ‘green’ as someone else? Researchers from the University of Tübingen have found that shared colour ‘signatures’ do exist in the brain, and that people share similar neural patterns when seeing the same colour. Neuroscience News
🇹🇭 Bangkok reckons with a giant lizard boom. Around 400 Asian water monitors (Varanus salvator), the world’s second largest lizard, hang out in Bangkok’s parks, sois and canals. I remember seeing a few in Lumphini Park in my years of living there and marvelling at their size. They’ve made a home in Bangkok with no natural predators and lots of food waste, fish, and birds to eat. Once widely derided in Thai culture (the word for these lizards doubles as an insult), public opinion on these “largely harmless” lizards is shifting; city officials even installed a large statue of a monitor lizard near one of Lumphini’s artificial lakes. The Guardian
🛑 Why I Left the Network. Mental health support is such a crucial tool in chronic illness, but it’s increasingly difficult to find a therapist who is taking on new patients, especially one that accepts insurance. In this piece, we learn why that’s the case in the US: hundreds of providers from across all 50 states describe being squeezed by low reimbursement rates, delayed and denied payments, constant paperwork/red tape, and insurer interference in how and how long they treat patients. One psychologist left a network after UnitedHealthcare questioned whether her patient’s treatment was really necessary—even while that patient was struggling with suicidal thoughts nights at a time. Another found a Cigna plan refused to cover ADHD testing, forcing her to plead with insurers or bill clients directly. Many said they simply couldn’t survive financially under the constraints, and that leaving the insurance network was the only way they could continue practicing. Pro Publica
📇 The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card Business cards weren’t always business cards, it turns out. They began in 17th-century France as “calling cards,” a card aristocrats could use when showing up at someone’s gate (or leaving there, should the person not be home). Around the same time, in London, shopkeepers made mini-advertisements with hand-drawn maps to their storefronts called trade cards, handed out freely to help people find them as they still are today. Over time and with printing options becoming more and more available, these types of cards evolved into what we now call business cards, a small card that in the earlier 1900s had intricate, individualized designs. Short, fun post with images to illustrate all the iterations. The Malin Journal (via Kottke.org)
🌊 Seasteading is making a comeback — but these utopian paradises on the high seas have a history of failure. Speaking of flooding: ever contemplate building a floating, libertarian utopia? Yeah, me neither. But Wayne Gramlich did, imagining it as a way to engineer communities on the ocean that could exist outside the reach of traditional governments. Called ‘seasteading’, this part engineering experiment, part political project was pitched as a way to “start over” beyond the reach of governments. Teaming up with Patri Friedman, he helped launch the Seasteading Institute, soon drawing in tech libertarians like Peter Thiel, who funded the project and offered his Palantir offices as a base. Their boldest attempt came in French Polynesia, where they hoped to build offshore “floating islands” as experimental zones of self-governance. The politics, however, quickly turned sour: accusations of neo-colonialism and unease from locals wary of billionaire enclaves sank the project. What’s emerged instead is Oceanix, a conceptual pivot that ditches the libertarian edge (and Wayne) and instead markets floating, climate-resilient neighbourhoods like one planned in partnership with the local government in Busan, South Korea. Turns out, floating free from society is harder than learning to float with it. The Independent (via Aubrey)
☠️ The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job Ben Giles, Wales’ go-to “extreme cleaner,” has spent decades confronting scenes most that most people just can’t bear: post-mortems, hoarder homes, crime scenes, biohazards, decay, and more. After starting out cleaning windows, he stepped in during the 1990s to clean a disastrously filthy vacated house, and in the process discovered a new niche for himself. Over 25 years, he built his company Ultima (because they’d “ultimately” try to clean anything), created a training academy with hundreds of freelance cleaners, and developed what he calls the “Giles Method,” a collection of techniques for dealing with everything from layered human waste to rigid phlegm, using scrubbers, foggers, bespoke cleaning chemicals, and every tool he could invent or adapt. The Guardian
🐒 In the wild, chimps likely ingest the equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day. Berkeley researchers measured ethanol levels in 21 species of fruit from two chimp habitats in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire, finding that they eat ~14 grams of ethanol daily. While the chimps show no obvious signs of intoxication, scientists think it’s because the alcohol is consumed gradually over the day. The study revitalizes the “drunken monkey” hypothesis, first proposed by UC Berkeley professor Robert Dudley in 2014 and met with scepticism. His theory was that that human attraction to alcohol may stem from ancestral primates’ routine exposure to dietary ethanol. UC Berkeley News
🔗 Quick links
Researchers in China have developed a bone glue inspired by oysters, now tested on 150 patients. It repairs fractures in 3 minutes. It can also be naturally absorbed by the body as the bone heals, eliminating the need for another surgery to remove implants. Sooooo… can it work in a dural graft??
1 in 40,000 snails have their spiral on the left side of the shell, and they can only mate with other lefties (TIL). New Zealand Geographic asks, can you help Ned the snail find true snail love?
Huntington’s disease treated successfully for the first time.
We knew that pasteurization inactivates H5N1 in milk, but a new study looked into any inactivated viral proteins that may linger after the process and found that they also do not affect our immune systems. (Best to just keep the virus out of our milk system entirely, though that ship has clearly sailed).
Spiders that trap fireflies in their webs attract more prey. (Spider photos at the link, you’ve been warned).
Rodents have thumbnails, it turns out, and they help them survive.
NEW MARSUPIAL JUST DROPPED in the cloud forests of Peru.
Bizarre discovery of interspecies cloning in ants “almost impossible to believe,” biologists say.
OpenAI says AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.
A 34-year-old man in Vancouver, blind since age 13 due to Stevens-Johnson syndrome, has regained vision after undergoing a rare “tooth-in-eye” surgery (I KNOW).
The movies that defined Gen X.
Watch the masterful flight of tree swallows.
Official map of the Star Wars Galaxy.
Soundslice ended up adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thought it already existed.
Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi
Oh my gosh. The bone glue!!!
Go greyhounds!
As always, incredibly interesting!