Faked research may have caused almost 1M deaths

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. As many of you probably know, 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 Ghost 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. And I appreciate it, believe me! If you like this newsletter, please share it with someone else. Thanks for being a reader!

From Vox: "Don Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s. One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines recommended it accordingly. The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. After the revelations, a new meta-analysis was published in 2014, evaluating whether to use beta blockers before non-cardiac surgery. It found that a course of beta blockers made it 27 percent more likely that someone would die within 30 days of their surgery. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths between 2009 and 2013 compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner."

A shark's case of indigestion revealed that a murder had been committed

From Now I Know: "In April of 1935, a fisherman named Bert Hobson caught a 14-foot tiger shark off the coast of Coogee Beach in Sydney. Hobson’s brother ran the local aquarium, so he brought it there — he figured the shark would make for a good exhibit. But the shark didn’t seem too happy. After a few days in which it seemed to adjust to its new home, the shark became irritable and began behaving erratically. It repeatedly rammed the walls of its tank before sinking to the bottom and swimming in lazy, irregular circles. Then it threw up, and what came out was a human arm. Upon closer inspection, there was something strange about this arm. It appeared to have been severed from its owner by a knife, not teeth. The arm had a distinctive tattoo, so the police asked the press to share a description in hopes that someone would recognize it, and someone did. Edwin Smith said his brother, James, had such a tattoo and had gone missing a few weeks earlier."

A look inside a millionaire's bizarre 1978 doomsday bunker

From Designboom: "Jerry Henderson, a pioneer in underground living, designed the residence to accommodate enough people to form a community during a nuclear fallout situation. The house features five bedrooms and six bathrooms. Additionally, it seems Jerry enjoyed partying and intended to maintain that lifestyle even in a doomsday scenario. The house includes a swimming pool, two hot tubs, a dance floor (complete with a pole), a four-hole putting green, a bar, a barbecue, and a sauna. The house is air-conditioned, equipped with a 1,000-gallon water tank, and has cell phone reception, cable, and internet access underground. Jerry lived in the house with his wife, Mary, for five years until he passed away in 1983. The house is now owned by an organization called the Church of Perpetual Life, which aims to extend human life and cryogenically freeze bodies to bring them back to life when science allows."

Matching sets of dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean

From CNN: "Matching sets of footprints discovered in Africa and South America reveal that dinosaurs once traveled along a type of highway 120 million years ago before the two continents split apart, according to new research. Paleontologists have found more than 260 dinosaur footprints from the Early Cretaceous Period in Brazil and Cameroon, now more than 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The footprints are similar in age, shape and geologic context, said Louis L. Jacobs, a paleontologist at the Southern Methodist University in Texas and lead author of a study describing the tracks published Monday by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science. Most of the fossilized prints were created by three-toed theropod dinosaurs, while a few likely belonged to lumbering four-legged sauropods with long necks and tails or ornithischians, which had pelvic structures similar to birds."

How Singer won the sewing machine war

From The Smithsonian: "Isaac Merritt Singer didn't invent the sewing machine. It was Elias Howe who created the original sewing-machine concept and patented it in 1846, charging exorbitant licensing fees to anyone trying to build and sell anything similar. But Singer came upon a few ways to improve Howe’s model. Singer patented his version of the machine in 1851 and formed I.M. Singer & Co., but by then a handful of other inventors had made their own patented improvements to Howe's original concept, including the addition of a barbed needle and a continuous feeding device among other enhancements. Together all these innovations created what lawyers call a “patent thicket,” in which a number of parties can lay claim to key parts of an invention. That was when Orlando Brunson Potter, a lawyer and the president of rival manufacturer Grover and Baker Sewing Machine Company proposed an unprecedented idea: an agreement that would charge a single, reduced licensing fee that would then be divided proportionally among the different manufacturers."

So-called Blue Zones where people supposedly live longer are mostly fake

From Cremieux: "Dan Buettner correctly identified that a disproportionate number of the super-old in Italy can be found in Sardinia. But exceptional lifespans predate the introduction of proper old-age recordkeeping. Across Italy, life expectancy at age 55 predicts life expectancy at each age from 60 to 95, but once you cross over into ages that came before quality birth certificates were introduced, the correlations tilt to being negative. News stories tell the rest of the tale: it was found that the Italian government was paying out pensions to about 30,000 dead people and cutting those people off would save the Italian government between $164 and $410 million per annum. Those dead people were disproportionately exceptionally old people from Sardinia. So Sardinia is not really a blue zone, it’s a fraud hotspot."

This guy just fulfilled a child's playground dream

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