Instead of breaking out of a prison he broke into one

Lieutenant Thomas Conrad was standing in a control room in Nashville’s new central jail when he noticed something off with one of the key rings hanging on the wall. It was midday on December 30, 2019, and in two weeks the still empty jail would take in about seven hundred inmates. While contractors were finishing their work, Conrad, a senior correctional officer with the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office, was organizing equipment: handheld radios, handcuffs, and keys. Conrad had been an infantryman in Iraq, where he’d learned to spot slight inconsistencies in the landscape. Looking more closely at the key ring, he realized what was wrong: it was circular. All the others were horseshoe-shaped. Beazley pulled up footage from the control room that housed the keys. The footage showed nothing unusual until December 27th at 12:54 P.M. when the circular ring suddenly disappeared from its hook. A purple hand appeared in the frame. (via The New Yorker)

New Zealand's possum problem had an unlikely solution: Selena Gomez's Oreo-style cookies

Last year, American pop star, actor and beauty mogul Selena Gomez launched a surprising new expansion of her empire: Oreos. Nearly 200 years before the arrival of Selena Gomez Oreos, European settlers first introduced possums to Aotearoa. They’ve been wreaking havoc on our natural ecosystem ever since. Possums eat native birds and their eggs, contributing to 25 million killed each year. They spread tuberculosis to livestock, costing farmers $35 million a year. So a wildlife biologist decided to try the treats as bait in traps designed to catch possums. Hickling estimates he bought 20 packets of Selena Gomez Oreos for the trial, and soon was out in the field in Leeston attaching the cookies along the planks that lead up to the possum traps. In the control traps without Selena Gomez Oreos, they caught one possum in nine days. Once they began the “Selena Gomez regime”, they caught 15 possums in 20 days.  (via The Spinoff)

Chaos erupts at a camel beauty pageant after 20 competitors admit to using hump plumpers

A camel beauty pageant in Oman has been plunged into chaos as 20 of its competitors were disqualified after their owners enhanced their humps and other features using injectable fillers, silicone wax and Botox. Last month, veterinary inspectors at the 2026 Camel Beauty Show Festival in Al Musanaa, Oman, discovered that the camels had undergone several cosmetic procedures to enlarge the size of their humps using a mix of injectables similar to dermal fillers used on humans. The disqualified camels had received a mix of injectables, including hyaluronic acid injections for pouty lips, dermal fillers around their nose, Botox to soften their faces and silicone wax to inflate their humps. Festival organizers have said they are working to halt “all acts of tampering and deception in the beautification of camels,” adding that they would impose “strict penalties on manipulators” going forward. (via The Independent)

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.

NASA probe shifted the trajectory of not just one asteroid but two

NASA slammed a vending-machine-sized probe into an asteroid in 2022, changing its orbit. That was the plan. The entire binary system's path around the Sun also moved. The DART mission slammed a probe into Dimorphos — a 160-meter-wide moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos — at over 22,000 km/h on September 26, 2022, shaving about 33 minutes off its orbit. But long-term tracking data published in Science Advances now show that the collision also nudged the entire Didymos system, decreasing its along-track velocity by about 11.7 micrometers per second. As it turned out, the debris played a bigger role than the spacecraft itself. When DART hit Dimorphos, rock and dust blasted into space, and the momentum from that ejecta roughly doubled the push of the initial impact. Neither asteroid is on a collision course with Earth — the pair never comes closer than about 15 lunar distances. (via Boing Boing)

How an unappetizing shrub was transformed into a dozen different vegetables

Wild cabbage is unassuming: some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple that poke out from the soil. Nothing about it looks appetizing. Nevertheless, many cultures have recognized something special in this plant. By selecting plants with denser layers of leaves, ancient people created modern cabbage and kale. Others bred for the inflorescence, a dense bundle of small flowers that forms the head of cauliflower and broccoli. By favoring large, edible buds, thirteenth-century farmers living around modern day Belgium created Brussels sprouts. Under different selection pressures, Brassica oleracea has become German kohlrabi, or Chinese gai lan, or East African collard greens. This level of morphological diversity is unusual. Modern tomatoes, for example, vary in size, shape, and color, but are all recognizably tomatoes. Scientists have worked to understand how Brassica oleracea was domesticated and to deepen our knowledge of evolution and artificial selection. (via Works in Progress)

He built a revolver that fires a rocket

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