He survived for six weeks alone in the Australian Outback

From ABC.net: “Two men are walking down a desert track. They are from different worlds, but they have one thing in common. They know what it’s like to be alone in the vast outback wilderness of central Australia. They know how the heat sears your skin, the way thirst chokes your throat, and the sound dingoes make when they howl in the night. The lives of these men — an Aboriginal elder and a well-to-do American — intersected in bizarre circumstances a quarter of a century ago. In 1999, Robert Bogucki deliberately walked into the Great Sandy Desert, triggering one of the biggest land searches Australia had ever seen, and a fierce public backlash. He was found after six weeks alone in the wilderness, in what became known as the “Miracle in the Desert”. It’s an incredible story, but the questions of why Robert did what he did, and what he learnt when he skirted so close to death, remained unresolved. Until now.”

Scientists have sequenced the genome of an ancient Egyptian from 4,000-year-old teeth

From Scientific American: “Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt. The remains are 4,800 to 4,500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as of people from the Middle East, researchers report in Nature. Numerous labs have tried to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian remains. In 1985, evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo reported the first ancient DNA sequences from any human: several thousand DNA letters from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy of a child. But Pääbo, who won a Nobel prize in 2022 for other work, later realized that the sequences were contaminated with modern DNA — possibly his own. A 2017 study generated limited genome data from three Egyptian mummies that lived between 3,600 and 2,000 years ago.”

An AI-generated band has racked up hundreds of thousands of streams

From Stereogum: “There’s a new AI-generated act on the scene called the Velvet Sundown, and they have over 400,000 monthly listeners on Spotify after less than a month of existing. The psych-rock “band” has two albums on their Spotify-verified profile: June 5’s Floating On Echoesand June 20’s Dust And Silence. The writing/production/performance credits list only the band’s name. And the bio consists of meaningless adages. “The Velvet Sundown aren’t trying to revive the past,” it reads. “They’re rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened… but somehow they make it feel real.” An earlier version also included this made-up quote attributed to Billboard: “They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real.” The Velvet Sundown’s four members are described as “vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar.”

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.

A popular online fan-fiction site went down after someone saved the 2-billionth bookmark

From Tumblr: “Archive Of Our Own, or AO3 as it’s often called, is an online community that specializes in fan fiction and other forms of user-generated art. Users noticed recently that they were unable to share any new bookmarks on the service, and according to a report from someone in the know, this was because a user created the 2,147,483,647th bookmark and that is the largest ID that can be stored in a typical database of the type that Archive Of Our Own uses (which is known as MySQL). According to this user’s post on Tumblr, the service had to migrate the bookmarking function to a new database, which took some time because there were two billion of them. “Good job, guys you used all the bookmarks,” the user posted. “There are no bokmarks left.” Interestingly, the number of bookmarks the service had before crashing is also the eighth Mersenne prime number, one of only four known double Mersenne primes.”

A family of raccoons broke into an aircraft manufacturer’s facility and caused havoc

From CNN: “A family of raccoons recently broke into an Airbus factory in Canada, adding an unusual headache to the planemaker’s more familiar troubles with parts shortages and supply chain snags. Five of the baby mammals were found inside the plant near Montreal, which produces A220 airliners, sources told Reuters, after their mother was spotted climbing the landing gear of a jet being produced for a European airline. “A guy came face to face with the raccoon, after having entered the plane,” a factory worker said. A second source said damage included urine and chewed wires. Workers on the overstretched assembly line had to be pulled off normal jobs to undertake the time-consuming task of quarantining the first jet and inspecting for damage from the furry intruders, which are known for foraging in trash cans for food. Airbus confirmed the discovery of a family of raccoons on one plane but declined to say whether they had delayed production.”

Drone shows are the new fireworks

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