Forty years later he got paid for a song he sang while in prison

From Wikipedia: "James Carter was born in 1925 to a Mississippi sharecropping family and as a young man was several times an inmate of the Mississippi prison system. In 1959, Carter was a prisoner in a Mississippi State Penitentiary when Alan Lomax recorded him leading a group of prisoners singing "Po' Lazarus", an African-American work song, while chopping logs in time to the music. The recording was issued on volume nine of Bad Man Ballads in Lomax's 1959 Southern Journey LP series. Decades later, the recording was licensed for use in the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and topped the Billboard charts for weeks. Lomax's daughter Anna found Carter in Chicago and flew there to personally present him with a $20,000 royalty check."

This religion is dying out because it refuses to explain itself or evangelize

From The Dial: "The last thing a metal worker from Liège is expected to do is found a new religion. Yet that is just what Louis-Joseph Antoine did, in Jameppe-sur-Meuse, Belgium, in 1910. Antoinism, his namesake religion, is not nearly as popular today as it was in its early years. Bernard is an Antoinist healer, a sort of parish priest for the movement. He is elegant, slightly balding and quick to smile. His pseudonym is not intended to protect his identity, but to preserve the discretion about Antoinism required by his Council. Other Antoinists declined interviews, citing an unwillingness to proselytize. “Recruitment is not part of our statutes, writings, or belief system,” Bernard explained to me. “We do not wish to conquer the world or to tell people how to do better than they already are.” Antoine himself is said to have destroyed 8,000 booklets he had created to spread his word. This attitude has helped to maintain an aura of mystery around Antoinism. But it may also have stymied its future."

Could the Earth’s rotation generate power? Physicists can't seem to agree

From Nature: "Electricity could be generated from the energy of Earth rotating through its own magnetic field, according to a provocative claim put forward by physicists. The findings are controversial but intriguing. The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts — a fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron fires — making it hard to verify that some other effect isn’t causing the observations. If the phenomenon is real and the device could be scaled up, it could generate emission-free power while remaining static, which could be useful in remote locations or for medical applications. The authors published their findings in Physical Review Research. In theory, the device would work in a similar fashion to an electrical power station, in which passing a conductor through a magnetic field causes electrons to move, creating a current. As Earth rotates and part of its magnetic field remains static, a conductor on its surface would move through some of the field."

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.

Researchers created sound that can bend itself through space to reach just your ear

From The Conversation: "What if you could listen to music or a podcast without headphones or earbuds and without disturbing anyone around you? Or have a private conversation in public without other people hearing you? Newly published research introduces a way to create audible enclaves – localized pockets of sound that are isolated from their surroundings. Normally, sound waves combine linearly, meaning they just proportionally add up into a bigger wave. However, when sound waves are intense enough, they can interact nonlinearly, generating new frequencies. A new technique uses two ultrasound beams at different frequencies that are completely silent on their own. But when they intersect in space, nonlinear effects cause them to generate a new sound wave at an audible frequency that would be heard only in that specific region."

Nine new Tardigrade species were discovered thanks to some Danish students

From The Smithsonian: "In a small Danish cemetery, a researcher hovers over a fallen tree covered by a rich green mat. She collects samples of lichen and moss and places them into two separate coffee filters. Meanwhile, her colleague holds a wet test strip in the air to measure the habitat’s ammonia level, and another researcher checks GPS readings and records the location on a map of Denmark. These researchers are hoping to gather microscopic creatures in the largest experiment of its kind—and they’re only 10 years old. Guided by their teachers, nearly 30,000 Danish schoolchildren, ages 7 to 16, helped scientists from the Natural History Museum of Denmark catalog tiny, water-dwelling animals known as tardigrades, or water bears, and their microhabitats. Their contributions, published in October 2024 in Frontiers in Zoology, nearly quadrupled the number of known tardigrade species in Denmark and offered new insights into the biodiversity of these extraordinary animals."

The workout routine of this Polish weightlifter is a little insane

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