He says the infamous skyjacker D. B. Cooper was his father

The FBI is reinvestigating infamous thief D.B. Cooper’s unsolved 1971 skyjacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305, despite having publicly declared the case closed in 2016. Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a Vietnam veteran and experienced skydiver who carried out an almost identical skyjacking five months after Cooper, is one suspect being closely examined. His son, Richard McCoy III, supplied the bureau with a DNA sample to test against any remaining evidence roughly six months ago. He has also handed over one of his dad’s old parachutes and a logbook detailing practice jumps his father conducted before the Cooper hijacking and his copycat stunt in 1972. Rick told The U.S. Sun that he’s convinced his dad was DB Cooper. He claims his mom, Karen McCoy, told him and his sister on numerous occasions that their dad was the infamous skyjacker and that she helped plan both of his heists. (via The Sun)

Darwin's kids doodled all over the original copy of his famous book On The Origin Of Species

Charles Darwin was not the only artistic, creative mind in the Darwin household. While Darwin's manuscripts and journals are full of sketches of the natural world, many of his children inherited a similar love of art and nature. Darwin and his wife and first cousin Emma had ten children together – six boys and four girls, seven of whom survived into adulthood. At some point the Darwin children found their father’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), and drew all over it. George Darwin drew a taxonomy of the British infantry. Francis Darwin doodled a salad. One of them drew a caricature of Darwin. Scholars suspect that many of the drawings came from Francis, who went on to follow his father's footsteps and become a botanist himself. The pictures show a young mind with a keen interst in the outdoors—from the swarms of gnats clustered around a flower to the flock of birds in the English sky. (via The Smithsonian)

The lost manuals for the most advanced Nazi cipher device in World War II have been found

For decades, the Schlüsselgerät 41 (SG-41) was a ghost in the history of cryptography. More advanced than the famous Enigma, this 17-kilogram machine designed by the German inventor Fritz Menzer in 1941 incorporated innovations that placed it far ahead of its time. However, the lack of original documentation and the scarcity of functional machines had turned it into a mystery for historians and cipher experts. That gap has now begun to close. A study recently published by Eugen Antal, Carola Dahlke, and Robert Jahn reveals the discovery of the technical documents and the original instructions of the SG-41 in two archives in the Czech Republic. The material, which includes everything from operating manuals to the cipher keys used in March 1945, finally makes it possible to answer questions that had remained unresolved for nearly eighty years: how did this machine actually work? How was it used in the field? (via La Brujula Verde)

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 creator of Fortnite uses his fortune to buy land and protect it from development

When you hear the name Tim Sweeney, you might think first of the smash hit game Fortnite. But there is another, lesser-known side to him: land conservation. The game generates around $4.5 billion annually. Sweeney has a net worth of $5.1 billion. As the founder and CEO of Epic Games, Sweeney, 55, has amassed considerable wealth — but his latest move isn’t about building or flipping property; it is about protecting land. He has quietly been buying thousands of acres in North Carolina, not to develop them, but to leave them untouched. According to recent reports, Sweeney owns more than 50,000 acres across the state, spread over 15 counties. He often acquires land through a specially created entity, then either places it under conservation easement or sits on it until state or nonprofit groups are ready to take over. (via Newsweek)

The public works department of this Minnesota town has a chicken mascot

We've heard plenty of stories about offices, stores, and other work places that adopted a cat or a dog, but this tale is a bit more offbeat. A hen wandered into the Public Works department in Truman, Minnesota, about a year ago, and never left! Employees said she was pretty bedraggled, and they suspect she had been chased there by a dog. But no one in the area seems to have lost a chicken, or at least they didn't claim her. That's understandable. I asked a friend how many chickens she had, and she couldn't say because they won't stand still long enough to be counted.  Anyway, this chicken decided that the city facility was now her home, and they named her Noodles. She is well loved and fed. Noodles spends her days supervising the staff from a high perch and her nights laying eggs for the utility workers, and they couldn't be happier about it. (via Neatorama)

Hackers got Doom to run on the cover of a Michel Foucault book

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