The Curious About Everything Newsletter #60
The many interesting things I read in February 2026
Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 59 is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was Adam Mastroianni’s article about how to be less awkward.
My updates
With Daylight Saving Time ushered in this weekend, I wrote a rant about why making DST time permanent is a mistake. Consensus among chronobiologists and sleep researchers is that if we’re eliminating the annual time changes, we need to make standard time permanent to avoid health consequences for a significant part of the population. Not DST.
For years, readers have asked me to make celiac translation cards with additional food restrictions, most commonly a dairy allergy or for vegan or vegetarian diners. With an ongoing spinal CSF leak, work is slow, but I’m very happy to share my GF cards for Japan now include 3 new cards: dairy-free, vegan, and vegetarian options.
Featured art for CAE 60
CAE 60’s featured artist is Gabe Benzur, whose piece Mania below caught my eye with its cave of ‘what ifs’ and its promise of bubblegum trees. When I reached out to ask about featuring it in my newsletter, our correspondence took a lovely turn as he shared how he was temporarily in a caregiving role for his wife after an injury, and started painting at home instead of his usual studio space. From his dining room, and through his creativity, he left his house in his mind. His paintings represent the curiosity, novelty, and discovery of exploring new places and new worlds — in my case, even viewed from bed. I enjoy his work, and so appreciated the conversation we had about it. You can find him on Instagram and on his website.
The most interesting things I read this month
Start here:
Start here for my faves, then fill up your browser tabs with the pieces below.
🎿 The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers. The Milan Cortina Olympics were the first Winter Games without fluorinated ski waxes, the end of an era that began in the 1980s when these PFAS-laden waxes revolutionized competitive skiing and snowboarding, giving people an injection of speed and serving as an equalizer for those with less shiny equipment. Fluoros also provided greater speed regardless of changing weather or snow conditions, and growing up I remember the pungent smells of them being laid down on skis in the mountain shop in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. California entrepreneur Terry Hertel was among the first to use them after he got a sample from 3M and realized they made skis “faster than anything before.” He soon added them to his company’s waxes, and other companies followed suit. Racers describe using these waxes as feeling like you they floating, racing downhill with “ridiculous” levels of speed. Alas, it turns out that the wax was not good for living creatures. An early study found PFAS accumulated in Scandinavian wax technicians’ bodies with blood PFOA levels averaging 25x higher than the general population, and a more recent paper confirmed these concentrations were among the highest of any occupation investigated to date. Yikes! Environmental contamination near slopes were also a problem: Utah detected PFAS in three wells near a Nordic race course and in the city’s aquifer. The International Ski Federation banned fluoros in 2019, which took effect in 2023. Grist See also: this piece about America’s “carpet capital” and how PFAS is also causing toxic havoc there.
🥌 The quirky geology behind Olympic curling stones. Another interesting Olympic sport deep dive, this time about curling. It turns out that every Olympic-level curling stone comes from just two geological sources: Ailsa Craig, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Scotland, and the Trefor granite quarry in Wales. For those less familiar, curling stones have two working surfaces: a narrow “running band” that slides over the ice, and a striking band that absorbs collisions with other stones, each requiring different mineral properties. The general belief was that the best curling stones contained little quartz, since quartz is brittle and could crack under the sport’s constant impacts. But the piece shares research by mineralogist Derek Leung, who found that the stones’ granites actually do contain quartz. What matters more than quartz content is that the rocks have uniform grain structures and relatively few microfractures, which lets them withstand collisions (repeatedly) while still moving smoothly across the ice. One reason he cites for their durability is that the rocks are “geologically young.” I put that in quotes because young is relative; Ailsa Craig’s granitoids formed about 60 million years ago when magma intruded into Earth’s crust during the opening of the Atlantic Ocean, and Trefor’s rocks formed roughly 400–500 million years ago during a mountain-building event. Still, they are geologically young enough to have experienced fewer tectonic shake-ups that might have created internal fractures. The stones used for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics combined Ailsa Craig “common green” granite with blue hone inserts, though quarrying on Ailsa Craig is now restricted because the island is an uninhabited bird sanctuary. Researchers are now looking for new sources with similar properties, potentially in my country’s Nova Scotia, a province that sits across the Atlantic rift from Ailsa Craig. Canada has tried alternatives before: an Ontario anorthosite tested in the 1950s began chipping almost immediately, and was a no go. Scientific American
🍪 Our possums are a problem. Could Selena Gomez be the solution? Among my adventures during my months in New Zealand, I had a close encounter with a possum at 3am. So this article, sent by reader Sheila, caught my eye. European settlers first introduced possums to the country, and they’ve been “wreaking havoc on our natural ecosystem ever since”, notes the piece. New Zealand’s pest control efforts have found an unlikely ally, somehow, in Selena Gomez’s limited-edition Oreos. Yes, you read that right. Wildlife biologist Graham Hickling, looking for a way to lure trap-shy possums, stumbled upon research that suggested fat and sugar combinations could be addictive to the animals. After buying 20 packets of the horchata-flavoured, Gomez-inspired cookies on sale at a local shop, Hickling attached them to trap planks in a Canterbury trial and caught 15 possums in 20 days. This compared to just one in the control traps without the pop star’s cookies. News spread quickly through pest control networks, reaching Ian McNeill on Herald Island in Auckland, where possums had recently returned after five years of freedom (he’d even caught them mating on his security camera, “giving me the right royal finger”). After a desperate search across multiple supermarkets, McNeill’s partner secured 10 packets, and they promptly caught three of four possums that had previously ignored all bait. Oreo’s representatives, quoted in the piece, say that they are “pleased and humbled” their collaboration with Gomez found a demographic that was missed in product testing (ha). As it was a limited edition Oreo, the cookies will be off shelves by March. Extra giggles from this piece: McNeill admits he has no idea who Selena Gomez is; “I just know she makes a good Oreo”. The Spinoff
💡 This 14-Year-Old Is Using Origami to Imagine Emergency Shelters That Are Sturdy, Cost-Efficient and Easy to Deploy. Miles Wu, a 14-year-old NYC 9th grader, spent over 250 hours folding origami to try and design better emergency shelters for natural disasters. Wu was taken by the the Miura-ori origami fold, a series of tessellating parallelograms named after its inventor Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. It has been used in aeronautical engineering, including to make solar panels for spacecrafts and satellites. (One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite that launched in 1995.) Wu had been doing origami as a hobby for 6 years, but when Hurricane Helene hit Florida and wildfires burned on in California, he wondered if the collapsible Miura-ora patterns could solve a problem he’d spotted: that existing emergency shelters were sturdy, easy to deploy, or cost-efficient … but rarely all three. Using a computer program to design 54 different variants, he folded two of each using three types of paper, then tested their strength by placing them between guardrails then adding weights until they broke. He converted his family’s living room into a makeshift lab, shocked when his patterns supported up to 200 pounds. The strongest pattern held more than 10,000x its own weight, equivalent to a New York City taxicab supporting over 4,000 elephants. Wu’s innovation won him the top prize at the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, where he was soundly praised. Wu plans to continue, hoping to build a full prototype using a singular Miura-ori curved into an arch or multiple sheets combined into a tent-like structure. Smithsonian Mag
🐠 EVERYONE IT IS FISH DOORBELL SEASON AGAIN! That’s right, the Fish Doorbell is back. Featured in CAE28, now more popular than ever, it is a tool that allows fish swimming through Utrecht to cross the Weerdsluis lock on the west side of the city. The lock rarely opens in spring, but the city has implemented underwater camera at the lock, live-streamed, allows anyone watching online to press the ‘digital doorbell’ if a fish is there. Highly satisfying, and now you can take pictures of your waiting fish, too. Visdurbel
📫 In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration A change in how mail is postmarked could quietly disenfranchise voters this election year, relevant not only for midterm elections in the US, but beyond. The USPS began consolidating mail processing in regional centres in 2023, removing sorting and postmarking machines from local offices. Late last year, it officially announced it would no longer automatically postmark mail on the date it’s received. This means that election mail now sits overnight, gets trucked out for processing, then sent back. Articles about this change have mostly focused on how this affects ballots in the 14 states plus DC that require specific postmark dates, but this piece also notes that voting rights advocates worry it will also leave people off the voting rolls entirely since most states also require that registration forms be postmarked by set deadlines. Which, I imagine, is the point. USPS says voters can request manual postmarks at retail counters, but voting rights advocates further note that this burdens disabled people, seniors, rural voters, or those working multiple jobs who can’t get to the retail counter on time. A personal experience in the article is indicative of how this may play out: a newsletter that Oregon postal union president Jeremy Schilling mailed to head just 11 miles away took two weeks to arrive. Bolts Magazine
☣️ Toxic exposure creates disease risk over 20 generations. A new Washington State University study reports that a single exposure to a toxic fungicide during pregnancy can increase the risk of disease for 20 subsequent generations in rats, suggesting that environmental exposures may have longer biological consequences than we previously understood. In pregnancy, not only are the fetus and mother exposed to environmental contaminants, but the germline inside the fetus is also exposed. Notes WSU biologist Michael Skinner, “once it’s programmed in the germline, it’s as stable as a genetic mutation”. (The germline is the lineage of cells that eventually develop into sperm and eggs.) The research tracked rats exposed to a fungicide, vinclozolin, and found that prenatal exposure led to elevated rates of conditions including kidney disease, obesity, and reproductive complications. Some effects became more severe in later generations. This “epigenetic transgenerational inheritance” research is built on existing research that tracked 10 generations. In rats, 20 generations is just a few years, but extrapolated to humans that’s around 500 years. Could someone’s 2026 cancer be rooted in an ancestor’s exposure to toxins centuries ago? Although the experiment was conducted in rats, the researchers suggest the results may help scientists understand rising rates of chronic disease and identify epigenetic biomarkers that could predict disease risk long before symptoms appear. WSU News
🫂 My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump’s America. Former Reuters bureau chief Steve Scherer chronicles his life changing from covering prime ministers and documenting humanitarian disasters to driving Uber in Northern Virginia. He went from earning $130,000 in Canada annually to less than $7 per fare. What happened? After 28 years abroad as a foreign correspondent in Romania, Italy, and Canada, Scherer returned to the US in July 2025 when his job was eliminated in Canada and he could no longer stay in the country. He describes what it’s like to drive an Uber now, picking up workers before dawn. He draws parallels between his current life and the threats impacting his passengers’ lives with those of the migrants he once covered for Reuters. He reflects on how his decades of international experience now seems to have little value in Trump’s America, where it feels “anathema to the values marketed by the ruling class.” Tough read, one story among many others (many much more violent) that exist in 2026. Navigating the Drift
💛 When we hold open the door. Brendan Leonard on the mundane grace of holding a door at a grocery store, small act that is depicted in his comic illustrations but I’d like to also look at it as a mirror of human decency. Sure, it’s a simple concept (someone exits the store with groceries, notices another person approaching the door and holds it), but with the onslaught of awfulness in the world, it’s a nice reminder of how little things go a long way. He doesn’t moralize or create discourse either! It’s an example of how extending small courtesies to others is part of what it means to be human. I agree. Semi Rad
❓ Jeopardy!: A Partial Taxonomy. I’ve watched Jeopardy! for as long as I can remember, and have shared other related pieces in CAEs past. When longtime host Alex Trebek died in 2020, the “Jeopaverse firmament shook,” Adrienne Raphael writes. But Jeopardy! has stood the test by regenerating itself from within, “like an axolotl”, hiring superchamp, Ken Jennings, as permanent host. “Jeopardy! is bigger than us all,” Raphael notes, launching into a partial taxonomy of the iterations and spin offs it has spawned, as well as the skill levels within them. Enjoyable read for those who love the show like I do! Paris Review of Books
🐝 The dreams of a bumblebee in August. At first, looking at the title, I thought this was going to be an essay of thoughtful anthropomorphism, but no: bumblebees do dream, and their sleep resembles our own. Their bee brains alternate between deep sleep and a shallower REM-like state with twitching antennae, and scientists who study them think that they might dream of colours, odours, places, or even “their warm home.” Research also reveals bees possess subjective consciousness, can direct their attention selectively, and experience emotions demonstrated through cognitive bias experiments (where colony-shaken honeybees hesitated to investigate ambiguous scents, while bumblebees who’d received sugary treats ‘cheerfully’ approached uncertain cues more readily). A lovely short read about an animal whose brain was more human than I ever realized. Nautilus
🎸 Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer. This piece made me think differently about Hendrix’s music. Rohan S. Puranik sought to change the “Hendrix was an alien” narrative (i.e. that his music just appeared out of nowhere), with “an engineering-driven account that’s inspectable and reproducible”, including plots, models, and a signal chain from the guitar through the pedals that readers can probe stage by stage. Hendrix’s mission was to “reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope” and its tone to make it feel like a human voice, via augmenting the instrument through his own movement in a feedback field. Puranik’s analysis of Purple Haze and Hendrix’s other work is beyond my full understanding, but I found it so dedicated and creative that I wanted to share it here. IEEE Spectrum
The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:
🐀 The perks of being a mole rat. Despite the chaos of today’s world, there are many people trying very hard to live longer within it. In this piece, Aria Schrecker looks at nature’s longevity masters, from Turritopsis dohrnii (a very cool looking jellyfish - don’t miss the picture) that can regenerate and revert to its infant polyp stage indefinitely, to centuries old clams, sharks, and also the title animal, the mole rat. Humans are already pretty strangely long-lived, and we are also quite obsessed with living longer. Promising avenues of longevity include activating telomerase (which repairs chromosome-protecting telomeres and worked in cancer-resistant mice), or metabolic interventions like rapamycin that inhibit mTOR and extended mouse lifespans by 25% when given from youth. Also options you’ve probably seen on the socials: metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors, and GLP-1 agonists that are all being touted to promote longevity. Can we stay as healthy as the average 25-year-old for centuries until a freak accident or pandemic kills us? Who knows. Will we still want to? Also a very good question. Works in Progress
⚠️ Selfish and Stupid. Paul S., a paralyzed former climber notes that he hasn’t consumed climbing media since waking up in hospital. (This is something I can relate to as in the early days of my leak I had to cut travel and food content online, just to stay sane with the weight of my grief.) In this essay, he reflects on the his past free solo climbing (climbing without ropes), and the moral tension surrounding it: adrenaline rushes can create a deep flow state, heightened senses, and a drug-like high — but when there’s few safeguards, death is but a mistake away. Looking at philosophy as part of his processing, he writes about the concept of akrasia, acting against one’s professed better judgment. Why do people still do dangerous things, even when the risks and consequences are potentially devastating? Not only to them, but to their loves ones. Reflecting on Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of Taipei 101, he’s contemptuous about the commercialism surrounding it, too. Most climbers rolled their eyes at Honnold’s stunt, Paul argues, because the moves were technically trivial for someone of Honnold’s skill. “Take it from me,” he writes, “for somebody of his ability, climbing Taipei 101 is about as difficult as going up a ladder.” But instead of showcasing skill, the Netflix special capped with a selfie at the top made him a sell-out in Paul’s eyes. Paul is now wheelchair bound, and I imagine tired of people asking him what he thinks of other free or solo climbing. I appreciated that he wrote it without tying the narrative into a bow; life often doesn’t work that way after all. Sometimes life is simply profoundly unfair. Diary of a Punter
📸 Our 2026 winners. Stunning photography, as always, from the winners of the World Nature Photography Awards. The 2026 gallery is no exception, and is well worth a few moments of awe. World Nature Photography Awards
🦪 The Most Remote Homestead On Earth. I met Celeste and her partner Josh at a conference one year, and was fascinated that she was part a travel writer, part a pearl farmer. Josh’s family started a pearl farm on a remote atoll in the Pacific, and it remains a family-owned, sustainable alternative to industrial farming, using natural, lagoon-friendly methods to cultivate high-quality, sustainable Tahitian pearls. Lest this sound like an ad, I’ve bought from them and appreciated their eco-friendly practices that prioritize the health of the Ahe atoll, a coral atoll in the northern Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. This video is a 24 minute, short documentary about the farm and their practices and features Josh’s family. YouTube
🇺🇸 How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account. (Gift link) Good writing as always from Adam Serwer, who I’ve shared prior in CAE. This time, he talks about how Americans have dismantled accountability over decades, creating a elite impunity problem where many of the people (and institutions) who helped elect Trump would rather burn down their own houses before admitting they made this mess. Leaders in Brazil, South Korea, Poland, and Britain have faced consequences for their actions, but in the USA not so. “Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor in the name of ‘healing’,” Sewer writes, “but inadvertently set a precedent that executive lawbreaking was no crime.” Since, from Regan to Bush to Clinton and Obama (Obama’s decision to “look forward not backwards” on what caused the 2008 financial crisis is cited here), executive crimes have gone mostly unpunished. At the same time, under Roberts’ Supreme Court, we’ve seen a quiet dismantling of anti-corruption laws on different fronts. Serwer argues that while there was some pushback in the country, backlash to the pushback only fed a twisted nostalgia for “the good old days” when sexual assault and police brutality were “easily rationalized or not even discussed.” The cruelest irony is that many Americans who might have raged against the machine instead direct their resentment at poorer fellow citizens while exempting elites entirely. The Atlantic
💉 Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus, researchers say. As well as bacterial lung infections, and may even ease allergies! Stanford researchers have developed a nasal spray that that is different to how vaccines have worked for over 200 years. Instead of training the immune system to recognize specific pathogens, the spray mimics the communication signals immune cells exchange during infection, leaving lung macrophages on heightened alert ready to respond to any threat. The protection lasted 3-ish months in animal models. Mice in the study showed protection against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, hospital-acquired bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus and Acinetobacter baumannii, and even house dust mite allergens (wow), with the primed innate response reducing viral levels in the lungs by 700-fold. The team built on their 2023 discovery about the tuberculosis vaccine’s cross-protection. It would be very useful to take a nasal spray vaccine in the autumn months that protected us from all respiratory viruses including Covid, the flu, and RSV and cold plus allergies in the spring. Don’t get too excited though, it is probably 5-7 years away if it gets adequate funding. BBC News
💸 Victims and villains. Authors Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li spent years listening to people who escaped Southeast Asia’s fortified scam compounds, facilities where people are forced to labour around the clock running online fraud operations. This piece, a graphic read, goes into how they run, and how often “the boundary between victim and perpetrator is blurred”. They write of different case studies from victims, but also of victims forced to become perpetrators themselves (called the “victim-offender overlap”), with one person trafficked for a customer service job but once her captors found out that she had financial literacy, they had her refining their scams instead. Other victims were told their only escape was to recruit replacements, and so on. The authors note that most workers don’t fit the “ideal victim” type; often this leads them them to be dismissed by authorities, distrusted by communities, and sometimes refused help by NGOs wary of ambiguous cases. Aeon Mag
🪦 This Ontario family said an unauthorized obit exploited their grief. Inside the rise of ‘obituary pirates’. (Archive link) A brief writeup about obituary pirates, one I’m sharing because they are more and more prevalent and prey on the grief and curiosity of the masses. WIRED wrote about the YouTube version of them in 2023, and in 2026 bigger sites like Echovita and Afterlife crawl the web for public obituaries posted by funeral homes and newspapers, summarizing and rewriting the information and then posting the new summaries to their sites (usually without the consent of the deceased family). Then, they use use their posts to pitch products like flower sales or virtual candles to those reading. Toronto Star
💊 Experimental pill dramatically reduces ‘bad’ cholesterol. Patients taking a daily pill called enlicitide that binds to the PCSK9 protein in the bloodstream reduced their LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels by about 60% compared with a placebo, according to clinical trial results. The phase 3 trial involved 2,900 adults whose LDL levels were still too high despite treatment. Enlicitide works by blocking the PCSK9 protein, which normally reduces the number of LDL receptors in the liver; by inhibiting this protein, the drug allows the liver to remove more cholesterol from the bloodstream. For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article. (Note that injectable PCSK9 inhibitors have been around for a decade plus, so it’s only the delivery of the med is novel, not the targeting itself.) UT Southwestern News
🔗 Quick links
For the first time in more than 150 years, giant tortoises are returning to the wild on Floreana Island in the Galápagos, guided by NASA satellite data.
How do patients die ‘of’ kidney disease? New research suggests it’s because kidney failure eventually poisons the heart.
The backstory for that adorable wolfdog dog who crashed the cross-country skiing course during the Olympics.
How far back can you understand English? (Quite the test!)
A new sabre-crested species of dinosaur, Spinosaurus mirabilis, was found in the Sahara Desert.
It’s an animal-laden quick links this month! A very funny short video from New Zealand, sent by Doug: “Why are kākāpō so horny this year?”
Meet the gorgeous winner of Japan’s capybara bath contest.
Also in Japan: scientists find a new compound that may reset the body clock and cut jet lag recovery nearly in half.
How Covid quietly rewires the brain (archive link).
Denmark has eliminated postal letter delivery, and is going digital instead.
Did banning lead in gas work? New research from Utah says yes, analyzing samples of hair going back a century to document 100x decrease in lead concentrations.
Hope you enjoyed these links! See you next month,
-Jodi
Enjoyed this compilation Jodi! I find the origami shelters amazingly cool!