The Curious About Everything Newsletter #37

The many interesting things I read in March 2024

Welcome back to the CAE Newsletter! CAE 36, last month’s newsletter, is here, if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was the article about a camera can recreate how animals see the world through both visible and ultraviolet light.

Some Personal Updates

I am finally moved! It took some time as I had to put in place all of the accommodations I need to be able to live independently with an active spinal CSF leak. It was a tiring few weeks, but went smoothly thanks to the many people who helped things along. I’m here now, and I hope this unit brings better health. It has a sky view, so it’s already brightening my spirits and no doubt will do so especially in the winter when I’m unable to go outside.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

These links are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike, because Substack still doesn’t allow for easy hyperlinks on mobile.

Start here:

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

🚀 Useless in space? uOttawa helps elementary students make startling discovery about EpiPens. Elementary students in Ottawa wondered how cosmic radiation affects the molecular structure of epinephrine. So they came up with an experiment to launch epinephrine samples into space on a both high-altitude balloon and a rocket. The experiment was accepted into a great programme called Cubes in Space, that allows students to access space via NASA missions. The shocking results: not only was the epinephrine less effective (the epinephrine sent into space returned only 87% pure), but the remaining 13% transformed into extremely poisonous benzoic acid derivatives. So EpiPens are toxic in space, and NASA didn't know. I love that kids made this happen, as well as the wonder, programmes, and curiosity that let it unfold. uOttawa

⚰️ The perverse incentives of euthanasia. “The moral justification for MAID is based on the idea that people should get to choose when to die with dignity. But some people don’t want to choose death. If a health care system makes that decision for them, refusing to pay for non-MAID care, it has violated the principle that death should be a choice.” A good read on a topic I've touched on elsewhere; I'm all for dignity in dying, but not when it is used as a bludgeon / as eugenics. Anecdotal, but I personally know three people who were told by MDs that they ought to think about MAID, with one also chastised for 'being a burden on the system' in terms of cost. And this week in the news: a quadriplegic man opted for assisted dying after an ER stay for a respiratory virus left him with horrific bedsores (that eventually worsened to the point where bone and muscle were exposed and visible). Despite his partner asking the hospital advocating for him that he needed an alternating pressure mattress due to being a quadriplegic, he was left on a stretcher in the ER for 4 days straight. This is not what dignity in dying — or living — looks like. Noahpinion

🤳 What's the Price of a Childhood Turned Into Content? LE YIKES. “I was told by my mom, ‘Do you want us to starve? Do you want us to not be able to make our payment next month on the mortgage?’” Though we knew the consequences of being parented to perform for clicks were coming, it is sad to see the results. This piece cobbles together a series of interviews into an unsurprising, but indicting, read. Cosmopolitan

🐟 You know what’s back??? THE FISH DOORBELL! Some of you may recall that I shared the ingenious solution for fish who need to get through canal locks in Utrecht during spawning season back in in CAE 28, just before the last season ended. Well, ding-dong season is back, and the fish — ok, and a few crustaceans — are grateful for it. Visdeurbel.nl (literally, fishdoorbell)

🧠 Neurons help flush waste out of brain during sleep. Neurons help flush waste out of brain during sleep, and the findings may lead to new approaches for Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions. This topic is particularly interesting to me since, with a spinal CSF leak, where does that leave me? The article builds on recent pieces about the glymphatic system and CSF turnover, which help remove waste from the body and brain. “Individual nerve cells coordinate to produce rhythmic waves that propel fluid through dense brain tissue, washing the tissue in the process.” So what happens if you have a hole in the dura that makes it difficult (or, more difficult) to do so? What about those patients with venous compressions that prevent proper CSF flow? Questions that haven't been examined yet, but hopefully one day they will. I wrote to the study author to ask if there was any data on the questions I have, and he said no — though it certainly warrants further scientific investigation. Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

🛒 We Need to Talk About Trader Joe's. Unlike other companies that innovate by creating new products and product categories, this article argues that Trader Joe’s recipe for innovation relies on harvesting knowledge and expertise from third party vendors to bring existing products under the Trader Joe’s banner. Say it ain’t so! Taste

🇲🇽 The Last Days Of Mezcal. A piece near and dear to my heart, with photos that made me very nostalgic for my former home in Oaxaca where I living when I sustained my leak. This article traces the current obsession with mezcal, from it ramping up in the 2000s and only increasing since in a sometimes desperate land rush. Production soared from less than 1 million litres (264,000 gallons) to more than 14 million in a decade, faster than any other liquor. Like tequila prior to it, chasing down more and more sources of it may serve to erode communities, erase generations of quiet craftsmanship. Ironically, as Jacobsen writes, “the explosion of interest in mezcal rests on its artisanal nature, its reputation as agave’s anti-tequila”, but that interest will decimate the miraculous agave plants that have provided “food, fiber and intoxication” to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. “The wild agave species, wood fires, open fermentation vats, steampunk stills and whims of the mezcalero all contribute to an astonishingly flavorful and diverse spirit that mixes floral, fruity and herbal notes against a beautiful backdrop of smoke.” But how big is too big? A long read from one of the poorest states in Mexico now in the midst of a big alcohol boom. Bloomberg (Archive link.)

🍿 Irish Wish Is a Crypto-Fascist, AI-Generated Harbinger of Doom. This review of Lindsay Lohan’s new Netflix film is a masterclass in spoilers that actually make you more curious about the movie, one where “romance is not organic but a direct result of the systematic abuse of the rules of time travel”. It goes through the plot step-by-step, so if you are annoyed by spoilers this isn’t for you. But for the rest of us, it’s very entertaining, and I wouldn’t have thought of watching this film until I read the entertaining summary. Vulture

🛩 Suicide Mission. Eyepopping read on what went wrong at Boeing, including getting rid of their best engineers (choosing amorphous ‘leadership’ over actual skills), and on the alleged suicide of Swampy Barnett — whose attorney of 7 years and family insist he was NOT suicidal. The American Prospect

👑 The Boy Who Was King of Vanilla. A fascinating read about how vanilla's proliferation in modern times is owed to an enslaved, 12-year-old Black boy named Edmond Albius, who figured out how to pollinate the plant in 1841. His technique is still used today. Vanilla, prized by the Aztecs who believed it contained ‘zanat’ (nectar of the gods), was introduced to the Netherlands and France in the 1800s where it was considered an aphrodisiac. Favoured by royals, it soon began to be used in food and perfume. But no one was able to grow it outside of Mexico, where only one endemic species of bee pollinated it. Many botanists had tried to work out how to pollinate the plant by hand and failed. That is, until Albius came along. (Not in this piece, but for those who thought vanilla was endemic to Madagascar:  it was introduced to the country in the 1880s; it originates in Mexico). Nautilus

⚜️ Dune: Part Two premiered at a palliative care home in Saguenay, Quebec to fulfil a man's dying wish. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve sent his own laptop, so that a man could watch Dune: Part Two as part of his dying wish, a month and a half before it was released (with security standing by). The man died before watching the ending but he got what he wanted, and I’d hope he died a little happier because of it. CBC News

🫀 UChicago scientists invent ultra-thin, minimally-invasive pacemaker controlled by light. Millions of people worldwide need pacemakers, tiny devices that regulate the electrical impulses of the heart in order to keep it beating smoothly. Family members are among them, I was surprised to learn how minimally invasive the procedure was to insert the pacemaker as I thought it would be a lot more involved. Still, to reduce complications even further researchers want to make pacemakers smaller and less intrusive. This article describes a wireless device powered by light developed by the University of Chicago. Its membrane, thinner than a human hair, can be inserted easily and has no moving parts; it regulates heartbeats with the aid of an optic fibre. Fascinating! UChicago News

🃏 The State of the Culture, 2024. “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal.” Ted Gioia on ‘the dopamine cartel’, the tech companies that turn everything we interact with, be it art or politics or our personal lives, into an addiction-driven and gamified experience that messes with our brains. And: How to Break Free from Dopamine Culture, his follow up post, provides a list of ways to mitigate this. They include immersive experiences, music and otherwise, using paper maps, disconnecting, and more antidotes to the madness. Much like meditation or deep work, a brain trained on dopamine rewards will rebel against this attempt to ground it. Stick with it until it stops fighting you. The Honest Broker

📰 Welcome To Me Mountain. “If we want to change the way election year news is disseminated, we will have to do more than stand in our bubble, hollering at the bubble. In the months ahead, we can continue to direct our fury and umbrage at the clickbait corporate media and the social media companies and algorithms that have built the bubbles. Or we can ask ourselves what matters to us, and why we aren’t seeing it, and how we might find it.” Dahlia Lithwick on the media's failures at a very crucial time in reporting. Slate

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

📖 On Letting Go of the Idea of ‘Keeping Up’. So, what have you read lately? sounds like an innocent question, but comes with ‘a pile of expectations’ says this article in an interesting, short discussion of whether reading goals actually serve us. “What we get from reading is not quantifiable, not a statistic to earn or an item to collect. It’s an experience, a process, an education, a gift.” I liken this discussion to travel, where for some people the number of countries they’ve visited is like a badge they wear. I traveled to eat and to learn, but never counted the countries until I had to for a project I was working on. That doesn’t make my way better of course, but it did take away the pressure to go and see and do vs. to experience. Same here, with reading. Reactor

⚖️ The Incel Terrorist. Oguzhan Sert was 17 when he walked into a Toronto massage parlour and killed an employee with a sword. The Crown argued the attack wasn’t just murder, but an act of terror against women. The hard part would be proving it, since no one anywhere had ever been convicted of terrorism based on incel ideology. The charges are poised to spark a broader reckoning on what terrorism means in Canada and beyond. Maclean's

🦯 Blindness from some inherited eye diseases may be caused by gut bacteria. Sight loss in certain inherited eye diseases may be caused by gut bacteria, and is potentially treatable by antimicrobials, finds a new study in mice co-led by a UCL and Moorfields researcher. Fascinating connection I never thought to link. The authors of the paper say that their findings suggest that the genetic mutation (CRB1 gene) may relax the body’s defences, thus allowing harmful bacteria to reach the eye and cause blindness. UCL

💻 Kinahan Cartel: Wanted Narco Boss Exposes Whereabouts by Posting Google Reviews. When you're on the lam (with a multimillion dollar bounty on your head) but just can't stop posting online reviews, like: “I had the açai bowl, followed by eggs with almond bread and green salad. My meal was well presented and tasty. I give this establishment five stars.” Christopher Kinahan Sr is one of the world’s most wanted men, whose gang is implicated in multiple murders, but he left a trail of Google reviews providing insights into his movements and whereabouts over the past five years. The question is, is he doing it on purpose? Bellingcat

😱 Former University of Iowa Hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years. This story is different to the usual, but bonkers. A thief steals a victim’s identity then gets a job in a hospital IT department. Twenty-four years later (!!) thief fraudulently accesses the victim’s birth certificate via sleuthing he did about the victim on Ancestry.com (!!!). Thief gets multiple loans in the victim’s name. The victim is homeless, can’t open a bank account (because thief opened it in his name), then gets arrested because thief says victim is the thief, and the police believe him. Victim is forced into a psych ward for claiming they’re the person THEY ACTUALLY ARE, as the the con is so long that the judge assumes the thief is actually the victim. Victim finally makes headway in figuring out where the thief works, and manages to convince the hospital where the thief works that something’s rotten in Denmark. Their investigation concludes the victim is who he says he is, in part by doing a paternity test on the actual victim’s actual father (!!). Thirty-five years of this. Heartbreaking and so unfair for the victim here, I can’t imagine. The Gazette

📉 S'more! S'more! On the rise and fall of Smashmallows (which were absolutely delicious): “Nobody was forcing Sebastiani to turn Smashmallow into a national brand. The company was already generating nearly $15 million a year. It had dozens of employees. It was making a product that people loved and wanted to buy. Rather than trying to blow the company up into another Krave-size winner, Sebastiani could have just … stopped.” I loved their mint chocolate smashmallows (not to be confused with squishmallows, which I also love), but haven't found them of late. Here's why. Also, this article is what made me realize there’s no marshmallow emoji, and I think we need one. Business Insider

💘 Breaking News: Love May Not Actually Be Blind. “The greatest plight of daters today isn’t that you’re exorbitantly judged on your looks; it’s that dating via apps creates the illusion that there is a never-ending sea of opportunity—that there could always be something better out there. It eschews commitment for theoretical opportunity. And if someone has that mentality in the real world, they’ll likely have it in the pod world as well.” A read about Love is Blind, which the article also calls “the Stanford Prison Experiment, but make it sexy”, and Netflix’ dystopian approach to reality TV. Season 6 of the show just ended. The Ringer

📸 Photo roundups! Can’t miss out on some recent awe for the month:

• Underwater Photographer Of The Year

• British Wildlife Photography Awards

• Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest (finalists)

• Sony 2024 World Photography Awards (short list galleries)

• World Nature Photography Awards

🏡 The Squatters of Beverly Hills. This piece by Brittany Read is an eye-opening tale of how a group of Burners, DJs, and actors moved into a 90210 mansion up for sale, causing havoc for wealthy neighbours that included Lebron James, Jennifer Lopez, and Ben Affleck. Someone will need to make this into a Netflix film. Curbed

⚕️When Infection Sparks Obsession. On the controversy surrounding a condition called condition PANDAS/PANS, one I initially shared a piece about in CAE 5. This current article demonstrates how the condition is getting to be more accepted — especially when it affects the children of healthcare providers themselves — and covers pre-Covid post-viral illnesses in kids, as well as questions surrounding the biological roots of mental illness. While many doctors rely on lab results and imaging, PANDAS/PANS requires a clinical investigation and connecting disparate dots, which practitioners are reported as wary to do. Notes a doctor profiled in the article, “how many people walking around in the world who we see as psychotic or mentally ill or crazy, who are nonfunctional, might have an inflammatory brain disorder?” A valid question that we’re only now starting to unpack. Undark

📬 20 years of Gmail. Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 with fast email searches, threaded replies, and a big storage limit of 1GB. People thought it was an April Fool’s joke, but it wasn’t— and it changed the email landscape. These days, what was once a game-changing tool isn’t exciting. People open Slack or Whatsapp or Threads a lot more, day-to-day. So where will Gmail be in another 20 years? A look at its impact on online communication and its future as other messaging apps have come to dominate how we communicate. The Verge

💸 Watch It Burn. “No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.” Fascinating read about the two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s biggest carbon trading scam in history. Embedded in the story are the mind games, money networks, and market trickery that took Jessica Camille Aguirre a full 5 years to unravel and report. Atavist

🖼 Inside the Biggest Art Fraud in History. Another superlative fraud: a decades-long forgery scheme ensnared Canada’s most famous Indigenous artist, a rock musician turned sleuth, and several top museums. “Not even the artist himself could have imagined the scale of the fraud, likely the biggest art fraud in history—not in Canada or North America but anywhere in the world.” The number of fake Norval Morrisseau works could be number than 10,000, with criminal profits of up to $100 million. Here’s how investigators unraveled the incredible scam. Smithsonian Magazine

💅🏻 Rupaul Doesn't See How That's Any Of Your Business. I read anything and everything Ronan Farrow writes, but this piece was certainly up my alley as a long-time fan of Rupaul’s Drag Race and all the related shows that have sprouted up around it. I enjoyed this nuanced piece about Rupaul behind the scenes, as introverted as he is. The title is a reference to how, when asked how he’s doing, Rupaul often responds, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” Despite the prickliness and privacy, he is always looking to play with a motto of “don’t take life too fucking seriously”. The New Yorker

🕵🏻 A Chronicle reporter went undercover in high school. Everyone is still weighing the fallout. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter, then 26 years old, went undercover at Washington High to investigate the impact of Prop. 13 on California’s schools. She changed her home answering machine, and told her husband to pretend he was her dad if anyone called. Several decades later, Peter Hartlaub tracked her down — she is now running a goat farm in Wales — and she shared about narcs, ‘emotional tupperware’, and ‘the ethical choices we live with forever’. Can’t see this experiment getting greenlit today, but what a fascinating read. SF Chronicle 

🌱 Recurrent infections drive persistent bladder dysfunction and pain via sensory nerve sprouting and mast cell activity. People with recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) experience ongoing symptoms like pelvic pain, burning, and incontinence—even after antibiotics have cleared the bacterial infection. A new mouse study found that part of the cause is immune cell activity that encourages pain-sensing nerve cells to grow in the bladder, called ‘nerve sprouting’. Which cells, you may ask? MAST CELLS OF COURSE! They hypothesize that nerve growth factor release from mast cells in the bladder leads to nerve sprouting. From the lead author: “Understanding the communication between mast cells and nerves is essential for developing targeted treatments for individuals prone to urinary tract infections (UTIs).” Science Immunology (open access paper)

🖥 FCC Employees Targeted in Sophisticated Phishing Attack. Yes, CAE 37 has a lot of pieces about scams. In this case, a wild phishing scheme. FCC employees, were lured to a phishing page on fcc-okta[dot]com, one that mimics a legitimate FCC single sign-on page. They were asked to complete a captcha using hCaptcha, then asled to provide their username and password, and then asked to either wait, sign in, or provide a multi-factor authentication token, based on a series of options the phishing page’s administrators could use in real time. “A high percentage of the credentials collected by these sites look like legitimate email addresses, passwords, OTP tokens, password reset URLs, photos of driver’s licenses and more. The sites seem to have successfully phished more than 100 victims, based on the logs observed.” While the official FCC single sign-on page was taken down, most of the identified phishing sites continue to operate. SecurityWeek

🐼 A homozygous 25-bp deletion in Bace2 may cause brown-and-white coat color in giant pandas. Why are brown pandas brown? And why haven’t you heard of brown pandas? For the latter, it’s likely because there have only been 7 (!) of these pandas ever documented, all from a mountain range in Shaanxi province in China. For the former: a study found that their colouring is caused by a missing sequence of DNA in Bace2, a pigmentation gene. Pandas aren’t generally helpful for humanity (don’t @ me), but they sure are cute! For what a brown panda actually looks like — kind of like a sepia-filter panda? — see here from Wikipedia. PNAS 

🌀 The Americans Who Need Chaos. The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the “need for chaos,” which they defined as “a mindset to gain status” by destroying the established order. “If journalists want to understand the need for chaos, it might be useful for us to scrutinize the ways in which we are partly responsible for growing the public’s taste for narratives that catastrophize without promise of improvement.” Amen. This quote also echos the crux of Dahlia Lithwick’s post, above in ‘Start Here’. The Atlantic

🤥 It Matters That Mainstream Media Missed Katie Britt's Lie. And also on the media front, Parker Molloy’s read about another Katie Britt, and how her speech reply to the Biden State of the Union address was not actually filled with ‘mistaken’ facts as some of the media reported — it was outright falsehoods. The Present Age

🗽 The Endangered Languages of New York. New York City is home to hundreds of languages on the verge of disappearing, many I had never heard of. This piece documents many of them and the people who still speak them in NYC—as well as how the knowledge was passed down to them. Interactive, very interesting read. New York Times (Gift link)

💨 The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air. A home acts, at the most basic level, as a form of shelter. As the outdoor climate becomes more erratic, everyone will need, even more than we already do, places to cool down, warm up, stay dry, and breathe freely. But how far should architecture or technology go to protect from all the dangers of the outside world? New Republic

💀 The sinister history behind some of the world's first tourist sites. As with true crime podcasts, many people are fascinated by relics. “Still,” writes Tony Perrottet, “the question lingers: can we learn from human remains, or are we merely indulging a morbid curiosity, with museums profiting from the work of tomb-raiders and body-traffickers? BBC Travel

😰 A protein found in human sweat may protect against Lyme disease. Conversely, researchers also found that a variant of the protein is not as protective against the bacteria and increases susceptibility to the disease, found in 1/3rd of the population. MIT Press

🔗 Quick links 🔗

• Fancy a good crab joke? Maybe you can win the Crab Joke Competition, put on by the Crab Museum. Rules include that lobsters may be mentioned in the set-up, but not the punch-line, and that children are on the judging panel so jokes must be PG.

• Parents file $1.5M lawsuit after a Montreal, Quebec teacher is accused of selling students’ artwork online. Yikes. (Students discovered their classroom artwork selling for more than $100 on teacher's website.)

• How do you rhyme in sign language?

• Poland’s ‘Heart of the Garden’ crowned 2024 European Tree of the Year.

• Interesting etymological map of the United States’ names and city names illustrates the literal translation of both state and capital city names in the country. I learned a lot in here, e.g. that both the state of Kansas and Kansas City, MO, derive their names from the Kansas River, which, in turn, honors the Kanza tribe, translating as ‘People of the Southwind.’

• A reminder to NOT USE TAP WATER if you are using a nasal rinse like Neti Pot.

• A Dungeons & Dragons and Hubble Space Telescope mashup wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are. NASA released a tabletop role-playing game that takes us to a mysterious exoplanet “where science and magic meet”. 

• An illustrated guide to mouth gestures and their meanings around the world. Excerpted from François Caradec’s book “Dictionary of Gestures”, it includes ones for hunger, contrition, regret, and condescension — among many others.

• Reindeer’s eyes change colour as colder months approach, to enhance UV sight and help them spot lichen vital for their survival, even at night. In summer, their eyes are golden-orange. In winter, their eyes turn blue.

• Elite performers, no matter the subject, are “all basically thinking about the same handful of things, accessing the same core mental skills: Resilience. Creativity. Focus. Collaboration.” A round up of career advice.

• Camembert and brie cheeses may disappear, warn French scientists, due to a decline in the strains of fungus that give them their unique taste, smell, color and texture.

• These 50 companies have donated over $23 million to election deniers since January 6, 2021

• Low-stakes bird drama.

• “There are as many as 89 million dogs in the U.S., collectively manufacturing about 24.4 billion pounds of poop each year—more than the weight of 33 Empire State Buildings.”

• Apparently eating like a salmon is better for us than eating salmon. A study found that eating “small wild fish such as mackerel, anchovies, and herring” is more nutritionally beneficial to humans than eating salmon itself.

This month’s featured artist is Vancouver-based Liron Gertsman, with this stunning shot of a frigate bird flying in front of April's total eclipse of the sun:

About this picture, he says on IG:

After over a year of research and virtual planning, and close to a week of intensive in-person scouting up and down the coast of Sinaloa, Mexico, if all finally came together on the morning of April 8th, 2024. Just offshore from Mazatlan, eclipse totality lasted almost 4.5 minutes, and I enlisted the help of a small boat to position myself near some islets where I found lots seabirds frequented during both the day and the night. As the moon began to uncover the edge of the sun at the end of totality, I captured this image of a Magnificent Frigatebird in front of the spectacular “diamond ring”.

You can buy a print of his image here.

Hope to see you next month,
-Jodi