Romanian-born mathematician Stefan Mandel used simple probability and a massive ticket-buying operation to win lottery jackpots 14 times. Born into a poor Jewish family in Romania in 1931, Mandel developed a passion for mathematics at a young age but could not pursue an academic career because of financial hardship. Instead,
A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies are searching for
A Kitchener, Ont., teen has won the best project award for innovation at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote PPG from First Principles was the name of the project by Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student at Cameron Height Collegiate Institute in Kitchener.
Berlin-based Italian photographer Paride Ambrogi recently combined two of his loves, photography and pasta, in a brilliant, possibly tasty way. Ambrogi made the Ravihole Camera, a working pinhole camera made entirely from fresh pasta dough. Ambrogi made the Ravihole as part of a workshop on fresh-filled pasta in Hamburg, Germany.
When Denis Alimov passed through the arrivals hall of El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá on the morning of February 24, 2026, he had the outward appearance of a middle-aged Russian tourist escaping Moscow's harsh winter: a salt-and-pepper goatee, a light travel bag, a connecting flight from Istanbul,
In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of Japan’s
In 1963, a Turkish resident who simply wanted to expand his house ended up making an unexpected and monumental discovery. While knocking down a wall in his basement, he found a mysterious room—then another, and another. Without realizing it, he had uncovered the entrance to Derinkuyu: an underground city
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 in
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 explained
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
There is one time of day when Dawn Faizey Webster can feel normal. It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix, the ever-considerate streaming service,
Master Yan'an has trained at the Shaolin Temple in China since he was 6 years old. He has climbed the roughly 1,500 stone steps up Wuru Peak to the Bodhidharma Cave thousands of times. None of the steps is the same size or height. Some are narrow;
In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, his first collection of short stories, which included his first published boxing story, “The Battler.” On a cool Tuesday evening in October of 1955, three decades after the publication of “The Battler,” an adaptation of Hemingway’s boxing story aired on NBC.
The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in Kentucky. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall. His application of a fresh coat of paint was gradually obscuring the sign that had been painted there.
The year was 1957. The Cold War was in full swing. The U.S. was seemingly lagging behind in the technological arms race and needed to make a show, a display of power and prowess. Project Plowshare was a project in which the nation’s scientists were supposed to find
A Swiss man named Jonas Lauwiner has drawn attention after declaring himself the “king of Switzerland” and assembling a patchwork of land parcels without paying for them. His unusual rise is not based on conquest or wealth but on exploiting a little-known legal provision that allows claims over ownerless or
It’s July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are about to land on the moon. They will be the first humans to set foot on Earth’s only natural satellite. Suddenly, the onboard computer flashes: “Alarm 1202.” Over the next 278 seconds, four more alarms trigger: “Alarm 1202,
One July morning in 2023, I was driving my son to an art class when my friend Amy Ryan called. The Gilgo Beach serial killer had just been identified and taken into custody.“You will not believe who it is,” she reported: “It’s Rex Heuermann.” However unlikely it was
The screeching of peeling tape is a familiar albeit annoying sound. However, despite decades of study, its source has remained elusive. The peeling of adhesive tape from a solid surface is known to progress with a stick-slip mechanism. Indeed, numerous studies investigated the chaotic trajectory of these motions and the
A police officer has recalled the moment he was lowered from a helicopter into a crocodile-infested river in South Africa as part of an effort to recover human remains. Captain Johan Potgieter was tasked with capturing a crocodile suspected of eating a businessman who had been swept away by floodwater.
At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid state had taken that from him, along with everything
A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house. Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape”