A teacher split her $2.8M estate among her favorite students

From the New York Times: "In August 2021, a mysterious package from Sarasota, Fla., showed up in Nicole Archer’s mailbox in Manhattan.Dr. Archer hurried upstairs to her cramped Chelsea apartment with the thick envelope in hand and tore it open at her dining table, revealing a legal document she had wondered about for months.She knew that a beloved college professor had bequeathed her something in her will. She was expecting a modest gift — enough money for a fancy dinner, perhaps, or one of the beaded bracelets the professor liked to make by hand.But when Dr. Archer, 49, saw the number on the last page — $100,000 — she thought there must be a misplaced decimal point.“I truly, honestly believed that I read it wrong,” she said. “I remember following the number with my finger, making sure I understood how many zeros it was.”At about the same time, 30 other people across the country received similar letters, sent at the behest of a professor whose class they had taken years earlier."

Physicists managed to turn lead into gold but only for a fraction of a second

From Scientific American: "The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost. The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run. Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold. But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means. CERN researchers achieved the feat by aiming beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. The ions occasionally glance past each other, rather than hit head on. When this happens, the intense field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold."

The first advice column was published in 17th-century London and it was about sex

From the Wall Street Journal: "The earliest example of advice writing was found in the Athenian Gazette, more commonly known as the Athenian Mercury. John Dunton, a London printer, started this broadsheet in 1691 and designed the paper to appeal to the customers of coffee shops, novel establishments where men met to sip that “newfangled drink,” smoke and gossip. With two friends — including Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism — Dunton dreamed up “the question project”: Readers could anonymously write in with questions on any topic, and answers would be provided in subsequent editions. The first call for questions evoked such a huge mailbag that the weekly broadsheet quickly began to appear twice a week. While many of the questions were of the abstract type, many more were about personal relationships. And, shocking to say, many came from women."

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

This startup makes futuristic tires that have an engine inside them

From Dezeen: "Technology company Donut Lab has created a range of doughnut-shaped motors that fit directly inside a vehicle's wheels and enhance performance by removing the need for traditional powertrain systems. The circular motors form part of a modular platform of components created to support the manufacturing of high-performing electric vehicles. The motors can be integrated into a tyre to provide direct power to the wheel while reducing space and weight. This allows for enhanced energy transfer and greater output with lower energy consumption. The family of five motor models includes different sizes to suit vehicles from cars and trucks to motorcycles and scooters, as well as a small version for use in drones. Donut Lab developed the products as an alternative to traditional powertrains consisting of an engine, transmission and driveshaft. These systems can be expensive to manufacture and maintain, while adding weight."

There is a secret tennis court inside the walls of the Vatican

From The Athletic: "When in Rome, head to the corner of the Via Leone IV and the Viale Vaticano and turn west for about 50 yards along the latter, to where the line for entry to the Vatican Museum starts to build. Crane your neck up to the top of the 39-foot-high Vatican City wall, and there it is — one of the few things besides trees and buildings that peek above the fortifications to be visible from street level. A high, netted fence juts above the wall, stretching a few meters across. It would not deter anyone who had just overcome 12 meters of vertical brickwork, but it is not there to protect the Pope, the Cardinals, the Swiss Guard and Vatican staff. It is there for the benefit of the people walking below: to stop a bad shank, an over-enthusiastic lob or a spiked smash sending a tennis ball plummeting to earth and onto the heads of passing pedestrians. That fence encircles the campo centrale of the Catholic church: the Vatican City tennis court — now under the dominion of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, or rather Pope Leo XIV."

Sony dropped hundreds of thousands of balls on SF 20 years ago and they are still being found

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com