The Curious About Everything Newsletter #43

The many interesting things I read in September 2024

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 42, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was my article about my August hospital visit and the futility of preemptive catastrophizing.

Personal Updates

After getting shingles, I’ve slowly gotten back in the saddle with my volunteering at the Spinal CSF Leak Foundation. I wasn’t able to take too much of a break, though, as we just launched registration for the org’s annual conference, put on in partnership with UCHealth in Colorado. The event is free to attend (virtually or in person) for non-medical professionals, and half of the speakers are patients. I’m speaking as well; the physician planners asked me to give a talk about why I’ve deferred treatment, and how I manage my many comorbid conditions while I wait for science to catch up to my needs. I hope I can support other complex patients by speaking to our unfortunate realities, and also by sharing how I’ve mentally managed this very limited life. You can register here if you are interested in learning more about the condition, and/or hearing my talk.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike.

Start here:

Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.

🐜 Ant geopolitics. Ants have globalized their societies alongside our own. Over the past four centuries quadrillions (!) of ants have, starting via Central and South America a few hundred years ago, spread across the planet by integrating into European networks of exploration, trade, colonization and war. “The scale and spread of ant societies is a reminder that humans should not confuse impact with control,” the piece notes. “We may be able to change our environment, but we’re almost powerless when it comes to manipulating our world exactly how we want.” Aeon Mag

🪶 My Harmony With the Heron. Gorgeous writing, throughout. In an excerpt from his new memoir, Something in the Woods Loves You, Jarod K. Anderson shares how nature became a balm for his mental health and depression. “Herons are gray wanderers. They are shards of winter landscape. They are the sky from below, and, from above, they are the dark water regarding itself. No, they don’t produce glowing dust, but if you don’t think herons are magic, I suggest you need to broaden your definition of that word.” I especially loved the line that there are two paths to magic, imagination and paying attention. Being a writer often means being paid to pay attention, but even still it feels like awe when you quiet the chaos. Atmos

🏛 The Canary. (Archive link.) Michael Lewis at his most classic quirky (in a good way!) self, writing about a talented engineer in the Department of Labor who was obsessed with fixing fatalities from roof fall in coal mines. This profile is part of a series called “Who is Government?”, highlighting public servants who’ve made a difference. It's is as captivating as any by Lewis. The Washington Post

☠️ The Fever Called Living. This is an interesting read, one that interviews people who have environmental illness. As someone with mast cell activation syndrome, my own immune condition was not given an ICD-10 code until 2016 and no doubt people thought it was ‘just in people's minds’ before research showed it wasn't. Environmental illness is something people dismiss wholesale today, and unfortunately, as the piece notes, the “environmental-illness scene has become cluttered with snake-oil salesmen.” And yet, there are other conditions such as MS that were dismissed outright as hysteria, and later found to be rooted in science. And, the piece notes, there are plenty of cases of environmental toxins that were considered safe and now are proven to be not-so-much safe — like air pollution, for example. Will future literature show that these people are delusional, or will they be proven right? Do these people actually have MCAS but don't know it? I'm very curious where future research nets out. Harper's Magazine

🤥 Picture Imperfect. Following up on CAE 42’s piece about fraud in science research, it turns out that a huge trove of papers by prominent neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah — also a former top US National Institutes of Health official — have been found to be riddled with falsified images. The shocking news raises lots of concerns, among them the validity of drug-development efforts for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, which were the topics of his research. Some of the papers that support the use of certain drugs in those conditions are “full of manipulated images”, notes this piece. This is horrifying for many reasons, but also so wasteful; so much funding went to this work, and for what? Science

🌝🌝 A Two-month Mini-moon: 2024 PT5 Captured by Earth from September to November. For 57 days, starting September 29th, earth will have 2 moons! This is because near-earth object 2024 PT5 will temporarily orbit our planet. (Can we name the second one moon deng?) RNAAS

🧊 The outside world knows Wim Hof as the eccentric Iceman. His family suffered domestic violence. For anyone who takes ice baths or knows someone who does: the background to health guru Wim Hof is brutal, and something I did not know until I read this. While he was becoming more and more famous, his ex and their kids endured physical and mental violence (including while his ex was pregnant). Now that a documentary about his life is being produced, his ex, their son, and her other children are sharing how he tortured them. This piece is extensively sourced, and very disturbing. De Volkskrant

⚡️ The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology. Invisible to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon, and this article gives some fascinating examples: parasites (like ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. By ‘ballooning’, spiders take flight — and do so by extending silk threads to catch charges in the sky. This year, studies from Robert’s lab showed that status attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators. TIL! Quanta Mag (via The Browser)

🌱 A lonely and ancient plant needs a female partner and researchers are using drones and AI to find it. (Podcast) “It felt like a sort of botanical love story, harbouring the hope that a female might still be out there.” Biological artist Laura Cinti is using artificial intelligence to hunt for an elusive female specimen of ‘the world’s loneliest plant’, the tree Encephalartos woodii. Most of the species in existence are clones of one wild, male specimen found in 1895, leaving them vulnerable to disease. If she can find a female, the trees can pollinate and reproduce. The Conversation

👵🏻 UCL demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans wins Ig Nobel prize. Wild. A researcher from University College London won an Ig Nobel for showing that “Blue Zones” — areas where people are said to live well past 100 at unusually high rates — are not what they seem. In reality, clerical errors and pension fraud led to those (erroneous) conclusions. UCL website

🌊 Strange and wondrous creatures: plankton and the origins of life on Earth. “If plankton had not infused the sea and air with oxygen, modulated ocean chemistry and become key regulators of global climate, there would never have been forests, grasslands or wildflowers, nor dinosaurs, mammoths and whales, let alone bipedal apes gawking at moving sidewalks and incandescent lightbulbs.” Writer Ferris Jabr — who, like Ed Yong, is always on my must-read list for his fantastic ability to break down complex science for the rest of us — pays delightful tribute to plankton. This piece is an extract from his new book, Becoming Earth. The Guardian

🚸 Who do children belong to? We raise children to become the things we hope for ourselves — but ultimately their lives are their choices. And when we create a world and laws that make it hard for them to survive, when we demand their unearned respect more than we demand their safety, we treat them as property rather than the promise they are. Men Yell At Me

🥗 She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away. Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results. Mother Jones

📋 “I Don’t Want to Die”: Needing Mental Health Care, He Got Trapped in His Insurer’s Ghost Network. Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after 21 phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, he STILL couldn’t access care. He was just shuttled through a “ghost network” where no one could get him a therapist — to awful consequences. ProPublica

🧠 Brain Scanning Approach Shows Wiring of Depression. By repeatedly scanning the brains of a small group of patients for a year and a half, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers identified a specific pattern of neuronal interactions that seems to predispose some people to depression. Does this mean that the brain could be “pre-wired” to depression later on? It seems like that may be the case! Researchers even found these patterns in children as young as nine years old, who then went on to develop depression as teenagers — meaning that the pattern increases the risk for depression (and isn’t something that happened because OF depression). Really interesting. Weill Cornell Medicine

💰 Russia’s First Secret Influence Campaign: Convincing the U.S. to Buy Alaska. Interesting read, especially as a Canadian where we didn’t learn much about this Alaska sale in history class. While we hear a lot about disinformation / misinformation campaigns right now, intensified due to AI and technology, “foreign regimes have attempted to target and sway American policymakers for centuries,” — as far back as the earliest days of the USA. In the mid-1900s, czarist Russia, “hoping to unload the giant frozen expanse of Alaska,” hatched a scheme to manipulate Washington into buying a territory nobody really wanted. And it worked! It also created a strategy for future dictatorships to follow. Politico

🚹 Not all men...but how many? In a disgusting story that’s been all over the news, Gisèle Pelicot’s husband of 50 years had been crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep, and placing ads for himself and dozens of men to rape her over the course of a decade. Gisèle had disturbing symptoms and worried she was developing Alzheimer’s — a fear she shared with her husband who “supported her.” But she didn’t have Alzheimer’s — she “just” had a husband who hated her. Gisèle could have stayed anonymous in this trial, but chose to be publicly identified to drive home the horrors she went through at the hands of her husband and others, including men she interacted with in her town. Incredibly brave. Invisible Women

❤️ The Strange Romance of Seahorses. A marine biologist and photographer get up close and personal with pygmy seahorses, finding that “not all seahorses are the portraits of domestic bliss that we assumed.” They saw love triangles, brawls between male seahorses, and romantic intrigue — in addition to male seahorses getting pregnant and giving birth. A really interesting snapshot in a species I knew little about! Nautilus Mag

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🤠 A Rodeo Doctor Fixes Much More Than Broken Bones. “You can ride a bull without an ACL. The problem is when you get off.” A profile of Tandy Freeman, the doctor who has devoted his career to helping injured rodeo athletes perform seemingly impossible (and very painful) feats. Texas Monthly

🥐 One man's journey from state prison to a revered San Francisco restaurant. Michael Thomas was an inmate in the California prison system for nearly 30 years of his life, and was used to cooking with hamburger meat and white rice as part of being on “the chow hall crew”. Around 17 years into his sentence, he realized a newfound passion for baking and decided to pursue it when he was released. This piece interviews him a month into a new job ad Flour + Water, where he now works for four days a week, sharing what it’s like for him to be cooking as a free man. SFGate

✈️ The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is a Google Doc. The “old” ways of finding travel recommendations, even those from just a few years ago, are now approached with “a heavy dose of skepticism”, writes Kate Lindsay. From the piece: “Nothing is more embarrassing than waiting for a viral pastry because some influencer said it was yummy after not paying a dime”. The alternative? Getting recommendations from people who both share your tastes, but have also been in the destination long enough to know it well — not just parachute in for a photo op. Enter the travel-list Google Doc. Thrillist

🍳 Julia Child’s Kitchens. Julia Child didn’t just make cooking more accessible, she also had a focus on function over style, and the changes she advocated for helped design kitchens that were more usable by older or disabled cooks. Her involvement with the Universal Design movement also stressed that designing inclusive of those groups should not be stigmatized or shameful. I did not know this background, and found the piece really interesting, especially given my own disabilities. Places Journal

🏞 Why Does Yellowstone National Park Turn Us All into Maniacs? Drew Magary, talking about how he — “a big, stupid American” tourist — visited Yellowstone during the most busy time of the year to observe tourists like him in the wild, in all their ridiculousness. “Like most other Yellowstone visitors,” Magary writes, “I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!).” The piece thankfully concludes with an indictment on the mess, how “an intelligent person can’t walk into Yellowstone without realizing that our incursion into this sacred land, however we’ve tried to minimize it, has altered it irrevocably, and not for the better”. Will it make a difference? Doubtful. But it’s good to see the rule-breaking and carelessness discussed, even if it’s done in an entertaining way. Outside

🦠 What We Know About Covid’s Impact on Your Brain (archive link). When people started losing a sense of smell or taste with Covid, scientists worried about the long term consequences due to how the olfactory bulb and the brain interact. Now 4 years in, there is more and more research about the virus’ profound impacts on the brain. Millions of people suffer from persistent issues that affect mood, cognition, and executive function, increasingly affecting their ability to function as they used to. There was a surge in Parkinson’s and dementia following the 1918 flu, and scientists are worried that these symptoms we’re seeing in an early indicator in just that. This piece rounds up some of what we know. Bloomberg

⚖️ She defended ‘El Chapo.’ Now this lawyer is using her narco-fame to launch a music career. Wowza. Mariel Colón previously defended El Chapo in the US courts, and is leveraging her involvement with him for her own musical aspiration — including, recently, a music video with the narco kingpin’s wife (who was recently released from prison herself). The video led to a modeling gig for both in Milan. Associated Press

💸 Canada’s version of Bernie Madoff’: The rise and fall of Greg Martel. Greg Martel was a mortgage broker who coached his kid’s hockey team and pledged money to charity. By the time he owed investors $317 million, he was nowhere to be found. CBC

🧀 The World’s Oldest Cheese Was Buried in a Chinese Tomb 3,600 Years Ago. Now, Scientists Have Sequenced Its DNA The world's oldest cheese was discovered in Xinjiang, China. A type of kefir made from a mix of cow and goat cheese, it dates 3,600 years to the Bronze Age, 400 years earlier than the previous “oldest cheese”, which was a 3,200-year-old sample buried next to an ancient Egyptian mayor. Researchers found multiple bacterial and fungal species in this Xinjiang cheese, including Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii; both of these are found in modern kefir. Smithsonian Magazine

🌲 Woman In The Woods. “As I foraged murders like a terrible, bitter fruit that is always in season, and collected them onto the page, it was clear that women found dead in the woods are all part of an ecology of gendered violence,” writes Holly Haworth in this beautifully-written, horrifying piece. What keeps her walking in the woods is seeing “how one thing is connected to another” — which is what writers do. She braids her own solo walks in the woods with the stories of the women she's found dead within them, a “terrible thicket” of sadness that is nonetheless important to acknowledge as true. The Bitter Southerner (via Longreads)

💍 Will you marry me (again)?: the rise of divorce regret. The average adult has five relationships and falls in love with three people, but what happens if you fall in love with the same one again? This piece talks to couples who chose to rekindle after a divorce, coming through their pain and anger together to remarry once more. The Guardian

☣️ Cancer, the Master of Hijacking. “Cancer doesn’t really invent anything new— it just hijacks processes that already exist,” notes Eric Topol in this overview of the disease that shares some of the many ways that cancer can take over various types of cells, as well as cell organelles like the mitochondria, our tissues (neural and blood vessels alike), and elsewhere in our body, breaking down our defences and promoting its own growth. No wonder cancer is often so challenging to treat, especially long-term. Ground Truths

📺 How the Media Sanitizes Trump's Insanity. The political press’s efforts to rationalize Trump’s incoherent statements are eroding our shared reality and threatening informed democracy. By normalizing his statements, and covering them as if they “are” factual instead of calling out their untruths, the political press has contributed to the culture of all-out lies and frothing outrage that we see on social media, especially evident in post-Helene recovery where even Republican politicians are trying to set the record straight. The New Republic; American Crisis

👃🏻 How Chain Restaurants Use Smells to Entice Us. Given how scent, emotion and memory are deeply linked, I suppose it’s no surprise that restaurants have figured out how to leverage our nostalgia for further sales. Auntie Anne’s, a pretzel chain, even released a perfume called ‘Knead’ — infused with notes of buttery dough, salt, and “a hint of sweetness”. It sold out in within 10 minutes of its launch. Atlas Obscura

📸 Photos! Photos! Photos! 2024 awards season is upon us

• Ocean photographer of the year

• Comedy wildlife photography

• Beaker street science photography

• Bird photographer of the year (that winning photo is, oof — right in the feels)

• Landscape photographer of the year

• Wildlife photos of the year (no comedy)

🐱 ‘Postcards are the email of their day’: How cat memes went viral 100 years ago. Long before any cat “haz cheezeburger”, or the technology existed to post viral videos of your furbabies, the Edwardian postcard was an early 20th century hit. At the time, postcards were like social media — used for random thoughts, jokes, and cat pictures. The world’s first postcards were printed in Austria-Hungary in 1869; more countries followed and the postcard became a worldwide hit. BBC (via NextDraft)

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• I LOVE this! Write your name name in Landsat photos of planet earth. Creative, engaging tool from NASA.

• One teacher’s explanation of why ChatGPT led her to quit her job. (“I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.”)

• Ireland fines Meta €91 million for storing passwords in plaintext.

• The ‘other’ British invasion: how Britishisms took over the United States.

• Canada named country with most optimistic economic outlook, again. (Though you wouldn’t know it from the online outrage!)

• A mushroom was given a robot body and learned to crawl (what could go wrong???)

• How blind soccer was played at the 2024 Paralympic Games.

• Researchers were able to see through a living mouse’s skin by using a common food dye found in Doritos, of all things, to make it transparent. It’s temporary too; as soon as they rinsed off the skin and massaged, see-thru mouse time was over. Crazy!

• Bees lose their sense of smell during heat waves.

• Wonderful exploration of the English language in this list of the names of things that you probably didn’t know. E.g. the day after tomorrow is called overmorrow, and finding it hard to get out of bed in the AM is called dysania.

This month’s featured artist is astrophotographer Marcella Giulia Pace, who photographed many moons and made the beautiful composite below. Viewed from earth, the moon can look very different depending on position and atmosphere. This photo captures the awe of astronomy’s many facets, and Marcella was happy to oblige when I asked if I could feature her work for CAE 43.

© Marcella Giulia Pace

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi