Hidden in remote mountain temples across Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures, you’ll find Japan’s mysterious Sokushinbutsu — self-mummified monks who underwent an extreme ritual to achieve enlightenment. Sokushinbutsu is the ancient practice of self-mummification followed by Shugen-do Buddhist monks in Japan’s mountainous regions. This extreme ritual
As one medieval Italian father puts its: “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” Here is a typical example from the 1220s: "B. to his venerable master A., greeting This is to inform
It was the autumn of 1865 — a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war — when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark
In July of 1945, Han van Meegeren picked up his badger-hair brush and began to paint his last forgery. Over a decade, the wiry Dutchman had surreptitiously become Europe’s premier conman — a disgruntled artist-turned-forger who’d sold his works for tens of millions of dollars. He
On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison 😭”. The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year
Robert William Barker was an American media personality, game show host, and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS's The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. Barker also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975. Born in
An Australian man who defrauded a bank by exploiting an ATM loophole said he does not regret his actions after using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle for months. Dan Saunders managed to spend more than AUS$1.6m ($1.1m) in just over four months after he found
From TheForce.net: "Here's how that came about: My co-producer was Tony Bongiovi. Jon Bon Jovi was his little cousin and by little I mean we were all in our 30s and early 40s but Jon at that time was 17 years old. And we were
From Gareth Edwards at Every: "In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he
From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: "In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had
From Chris Lewicki: "Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’
Links that interest me, and maybe you
More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls,
Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. On five acres, he has a stucco house
(Note: I am backcountry camping this week in the remote Canadian wilderness so this is a repeat of an earlier newsletter) On January 23, 1973, the 5,000 residents of the tiny Icelandic island of Heimaey — located just four miles off Iceland’s southern coast — woke up to the Earth
The organism in question is a protozoan, meaning a single-celled animal, and it’s called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s one of the most successful parasites on the planet. Depending on which country’s serology data you look at, somewhere between eleven per cent of Americans, thirty per cent of
(Note: I am backcountry camping this week in the remote Canadian wilderness so this is a repeat of an earlier newsletter) It’s not uncommon for a 9-year-old child to love dinosaurs, but it is quite rare for someone so young to have opened a museum of their
(Note: I am backcountry camping this week in the remote Canadian wilderness so this is a repeat of an earlier newsletter) Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included
The Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a prominent politician in the Tuscany region of Italy in the 16th century, died under mysterious circumstances in 1587 – with the suddenness of his death giving rise to rumors that he'd been poisoned. According to historical documents, Francesco's brother and
How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a
Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other
It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed
Many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me — like, well, friends. What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field
Ask most people who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and you'll get one name: Paul Tibbets. He's the one who named the Enola Gay after his mother, the one who spent decades insisting he never lost a night's sleep over