He experiences seizures but only while doing a Sudoku
A team of doctors working at the University of Munich reported the unusual case of a young man who experiences epileptic seizures every time he tries to solve a sudoku puzzle. The 25-year-old right-handed physical education student was buried in an avalanche during a skiing holiday, as a result of which his brain was deprived of oxygen for some 15 minutes. He then developed shock-like contractions of the muscles in his mouth when he tried to talk, and in his legs when he tried to walk. Several weeks later, while trying to solve Sudoku puzzles, he developed clonic seizures in his left arm. These produce repeated jerking movements, and are far rarer than tonic-clonic seizures, which are typically preceded by muscle stiffness, and cause a total loss of consciousness. In this case, the seizures stopped immediately when the patient stopped solving the Sudoku puzzle. He didn't experience any seizures when he read a book, wrote something down, or did calculations. (via The Guardian)
An ancient fingerprint is among the clues to a 2,000-year-old invasion of Denmark
More than 2,000 years ago, a mysterious band of attackers descended on an island called Als off Denmark’s coast. Locals seem to have successfully fought back against the marauders and dumped one of their boats—chock-full of weapons—into a bog to celebrate their defeat of the invaders. Remnants of this ancient battle were unearthed in the 1880s by people digging for peat in the Hjortspring bog on Als. Researchers excavated the invaders’ boat in the 1920s and recovered nearly half of it, which provided enough material for a full reconstruction. This ancient wooden plank boat is the only intact vessel of its kind ever discovered in Scandinavia, and it resembles boats depicted around a millennium earlier in Bronze Age rock art. The bog boat still begs a major question: Where did the invaders actually invade from, and when? (via Nautilus)
The Norwegian ski-jump team was disqualified in 2025 for reinforcing the groins of their suits
In Norway skiing isn’t just a popular pastime, it’s the national sport, which is what propels the men’s large hill ski‑jumping event at the Nordic world championships in Trondheim into the stratosphere. A scandal embroiled five Norwegian athletes, two of them Olympic gold medallists, and three team officials, all of them men who, like so many men over history, were worried about the stiffness of their groin area. This led to them using a reinforced thread to improve the crotches of their ski suits, with the aim of boosting its aerodynamics. These modifications were secretly filmed, and their existence proven when the suits – exact circumstances uncertain – were torn open by organisers. “What we have done is manipulate or modify the jump suits in such a way that it violates the regulations,” the coach admitted. “It was a deliberate act. Therefore, it is cheating. It was a joint decision. I should have stopped it. We regret it like dogs." (via The Guardian)
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.
An experimental airplane flying at 70,000 hit bugs blown up that high by nuclear tests
In 1959, Lockheed began work on the design of a long-range, high-altitude plane, then known as the A-11. It was a Cold War project. Five years after work began on the A-11, on Feb. 29, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told reporters that the aircraft (by that time modified to the A-12 Oxcart production version with a reduced radar cross section) had attained speeds of over 2,000 mph and altitudes of more than 70,000 feet in tests at Area 51. After an A-12 flight they found specks of insects on the windshield. "We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material," one aerospace engineer recalls. "They were insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there? We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomics in Russia and China." (via Aviation Geek)
A French man became famous throughout Europe in the 1700s for his legendary appetite
Tarrare was born in 1772. By the time he was a teen, he could devour a quarter of a cow in one day, enough that his family ran him out onto the streets. He travelled around France in the company of a band of prostitutes and thieves before becoming the warm-up act for a travelling charlatan. In this act, he swallowed corks, stones, live animals, and a whole basketful of apples. Tarrare joined the French Army in 1792 but quickly found that standard military rations were far from enough to satisfy him. He quickly fell victim to exhaustion and was admitted to a military hospital, where even quadrupling the normal ration was found to not be enough. French officials decided that they should keep in the hospital for further study, where he ate food intended for fifteen people in one sitting. On other occasions, he ate a live cat, snakes, lizards, puppies, and an entire eel. Tarrare was finally kicked out of the hospital when a fourteen-month-old child disappeared, as he was suspected of eating them. (via Wikimedia)
Women singing as they work the Harris tweed in the Outer Hebrides in 1941
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
