Friends for 60 years found out that they were brothers

Alan Robinson and Walter Macfarlane were born in Hawaii 15 months apart. The duo met in 6th grade and have been friends for 60 years. While they've shared a very close bond, they never thought they were related, until a DNA website revealed their relationship. Robinson was adopted, and Macfarlane did not know who his father was, so the pair were always searching individually for information on their families. For years, Macfarlane had tried unsuccessfully to find clues about his father. With the help of his daughter, they began sifting through matches he got on a DNA website. One of the top matches was username Robi737.  Macfarlane-Flores told KHON-TV, that her father's best friend, Robinson, flew 737 airplanes for Aloha Airlines, and his nickname was Robi. The pair soon learned that they shared a birth mother. (via USA Today)

Archeologists have found honey in 3,000-year-old Egyptian tombs that is still edible

Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey. There are a few other examples of foods that keep–indefinitely–in their raw state: salt, sugar, dried rice are a few. But there’s something about honey; it can remain preserved in a completely edible form, and while you wouldn’t want to chow down on raw rice or straight salt, one could ostensibly dip into a thousand year old jar of honey and enjoy it, without preparation, as if it were a day old. Moreover, honey’s longevity lends it other properties – mainly medicinal – that other resilient foods don’t have. Which raises the question: what exactly makes honey such a special food? (via The Smithsonian)

A green jacket from the Masters tournament showed up in a Toronto thrift shop for $5

The origin of the famous "thrift store green jacket" now amounts to a $185,000 mystery. The same green jacket worn by Masters champions and the members of the prestigious Augusta National Golf Club has certainly appreciated in value — when its story began in 1994, it had been hanging among the blazers at a Toronto Goodwill. Its price tag then? Five dollars. A Toronto sports journalist who knew its value handed over a blue bill and held on to the blazer for years before selling to a colleague, according to Ryan Carey, whose auction house sold the jacket Saturday for $139,000 US. It's still unclear how the jacket ended up in a Toronto thrift store, a mystery that Carey said fuelled bids. Only one Canadian has ever won the PGA Masters tournament, Mike Weir, in 2003, and it's unclear if there are any others north of the border who belong to the exclusive club. (via the CBC)

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.

The chainsaw was originally invented for use by doctors during childbirth

In the 1900s, C-sections were incredibly dangerous, often resulting in the death of either or both the mother and child in the process. For this reason, C-sections were more generally a last resort following the exhaustion of all other options. In the late 18th century, two Scottish doctors, John Aitken and James Jeffray, developed a prototype of the chainsaw for use during C-section surgery. The design of the chainsaw was based on a watch chain with teeth that moved through the use of a hand-crank. This meant that if the mother looked down during the procedure, she would have seen her doctor furiously cranking a chainsaw. With the invention of the chainsaw, obstetricians and gynecologists were bowled over by how much better chainsaws were to use for conducting symphysiotomies than the previous methods they were relying on. (via The Pharmacy Times)

At the age of seventeen she was 20 inches tall and weighed less than five pounds

Lucía Zárate was a Mexican entertainer with dwarfism who performed in sideshows. Zárate is the first person to have been identified with Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II. She was entered into the Guinness World Records as the lightest recorded adult, weighing 4.7 pounds at the age of 17. At age twelve, Zárate moved from Mexico to the United States, where she was exhibited for her small stature. She first worked as part of an act billed as the Fairy Sisters, later partnering with Francis Joseph Flynn. She weighed 14 pounds at her peak at age 20. At the time, her height was measured at 20 inches, and her calf was measured as 4 inches in circumference, a little more than the thumb of an adult man. After her circus train became stranded in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains, Zárate died of hypothermia in 1890. (via Wikipedia)

A Chinese EV broke the speed record set by a 1,000-horsepower Bugatti Chiron

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other places 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 and Why Is This Interesting by Noah Brier and Colin Nagy. If you come across something you think should be included here, feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com