A two-year-old walked seven miles through the wilderness

From NBC: "A 2-year-old boy spent the night alone in the remote Arizona wilderness and walked 7 miles through mountain lion territory, authorities said. A huge search operation was launched when the boy disappeared from his home in Seligman, Arizona, about 100 miles south of Grand Canyon National Park. The sheriff's office said that more than 40 rescuers, including Department of Public Safety rangers, joined the search, and a DPS helicopter spotted two mountain lions in the area. But 16 hours after he went missing, rancher Scotty Dunton found him on his land 7 miles away. The boy was safe and well and had apparently been led to his property by the rancher's dog, Buford. Dunton asked the boy if he had walked all night, and he answered, "No, I laid up under a tree."

In the Czech Republic it's an Easter tradition for boys to whip girls with willow branches

From Radio Prague: The Czech Republic has a rather unusual tradition on Easter Monday. Boys get willow branches, braid them together into whips and decorate them with ribbons to whip girls with for luck and fertility. The word for this whip in Czech is pomlázka, which has also become the name of the tradition itself. According to tradition, the boys will also sing a song that says: ‘Hody, hody, doprovody, dejte vejce malovaný, nedáte-li malovaný, dejte aspoň bílý, slepička vám snese jiný " which means something like "Feast, Feast give me a painted egg if you don't give me a painted one give me at least white one, the hen will give you another." Said Noemi: “In the past it was worse because boys came really early in the morning. They hit the girls a lot, they poured water on the girls and then they wanted an egg or something sweet. It's terrible.”

A lion bite on the butt may be the first proof that Roman gladiators fought animals

From Scientific American: "Roman gladiators’ fights to the death have inspired morbid fascination for millennia. But for something seemingly so well-documented, it’s rare for archaeologists find physical evidence of such combat in the form of Roman gladiators’ remains. Most of what we know about the fights comes from indirect records, such as texts or illustrations that described the bloody, raucous events. Among such records, some depicted so-called beast hunts, in which gladiators were pitted against predators that included lions, tigers and even elephants. Now archaeologists have found the first physical evidence of a gladiator locked in combat with one of these animals—which appears to have left a huge, lion-sized bite mark on the fighter’s butt."

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.

A sandwich made of raw ground pork is a popular German snack food

From Wikipedia: "Mett, also known as Hackepeter is a preparation of minced raw pork seasoned with salt and black pepper that is popular in Germany. It is frequently spread on halves of a bread roll, with raw onion optionally on top. Since the 1950s mett has also been offered as a buffet dish decoratively formed into the shape of a hedgehog, with raw onion "spines". German law forbids mett being sold with a fat content exceeding 35%. The name is derived from Low German mett for "chopped pork meat without fat", or Old Saxon meti for "food". It consists of minced pork meat, generally seasoned with salt and black pepper, regionally also with garlic or caraway, and eaten raw. Unless pre-packaged, the German  Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung ("food hygiene/health directive") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production."

Scientists are trying to control cicadas and use them to make music

From ArXiv: "We propose an Insect–Computer Hybrid Speaker, which enables us to make music made from combinations of computer and insects. Many studies have proposed methods and interfaces to control insects and obtain feedback. However, there has been less research on the use of insects for interaction with third parties. In this paper, we propose a method in which cicadas are used as speakers triggered by using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS). We explored and investigated the suitable waveform of the chirp to be controlled, the appropriate voltage range, and the maximum pitch at which cicadas can chirp. We utilize cicadas as the devices to produce sounds since cicadas are easily controlled due to the fact that there are no large muscles or internal organs in their abdomens, in addition to the tymbal muscles." (Thanks, David!)

Doing bike tricks while on a moving train

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