From Slate: "29-year-old Taylor Stanberry was the grand prize winner at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The 10-day competition is a conservation event held in the Everglades to fight the invasive Burmese python population in South Florida. The pythons are believed to
From Nautilus: "Five years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of
From Nautilus: "In 2006, scientists coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe cases in which people showed an ability to remember vivid details about events that happened to them throughout their lives, including exact times and dates. Since then, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the
From Global News: "A Prince George, B.C., man received a 90-day driving prohibition after he was spotted by police driving an unusual vehicle on a street on Friday morning. On Sept. 5, an officer was on patrol in the area of 15th Avenue and Nicholson Street at 9
From History Workshop: "Africans crossed the Atlantic alongside the earliest Europeans, some trafficked in bondage, others navigating precarious forms of freedom. Yet recent scholarship, particularly since the turn of the century, is starting to give voice to the many Africans who have not been studied or considered important historical
From Wikipedia: "Hyraceum is the petrified and rock-like excrement composed of both urine and feces of the rock hyrax and closely related species. The rock hyrax defecates in the same location over generations, which may be sheltered in caves. These locations form middens that are composed of hyraceum and
From Boing Boing: "For the first fourteen years of his life, Viraj Dhanda, who has autism and apraxia (a neurological condition that limits muscle movements and motor skills), was non-verbal, non-communicative, and assumed to be intellectually disabled. He was diagnosed with autism at age 2. It wasn't
From The Times: "The message from the stranger popped into my Instagram account on June 10, 2024. The sender was a man calling himself Charles Chen, who said he was an international student at Stanford. I checked his Instagram page. It featured photos of a young Chinese man with
From NBC: "Finland’s air force, now part of NATO, still flies swastikas on a handful of unit flags — but is preparing to phase them out, largely to avoid awkwardness with its Western allies. The history of the Finnish air force’s use of the swastika, which since the
From Kottke: "Giles Clement, also known as Polymatt, decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. In a YouTube video where he breaks down the process, he says: "I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one
From MIT Tech: "On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement—federal, state, and local—was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Boston. A squadron of about 15 to 20 drones had been spotted violating the base’
From The Guardian: "More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina. A photo shows the painting,
From the Smithsonian: "During the late 19th century, in the years following the Civil War, Americans—mostly ailing veterans—were hooked on morphine. Syringes, which were sold at drugstores, allowed people to administer the opiate themselves. So with a morphine epidemic sweeping the country, Bayer offered a hot new
From Toronto Life: "It was the middle of the night, a Wednesday in early April, when the first bag of A&W french fries was deposited on my neighbour’s porch. Nobody saw who put it there, but when my neighbour opened her door to get her mail
From Astral Codex Ten: "Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru
From NDTV: "Russian President Vladimir Putin's bodyguards reportedly carried a "poop suitcase" to collect his faecal waste during the Friday Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump, as reported by The Express US. The unusual security measure was said to be aimed at preventing foreign
From Popular Mechanics: "After 500 years, researchers finally understand the anatomical function of a heart feature first described by Leonardo da Vinci. To find the answer, scientists used fractal theory, MRIs, and a lot of computational elbow grease to shed light on structures called trabeculae. They found this branching,
From The Smithsonian: "It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of the 20th century: the Earth rising above the Moon’s bleached and desolate horizon, a breathtaking jewel of color and life more than 230,000 miles away. In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and
From Veterans Breakfast Club: "You’ve heard of Japanese Kamikazes in World War II, but probably not Kaiten, the underseas version of the famous suicide attacks on Navy warships in 1944-1945. Kaiten was a top-secret manned torpedo program where the Japanese pilots would be sealed into explosive-packed steel cylinders
From LitHub: "One of the most disturbing sporting events in history took place on January 1, 1946, when the US military staged an all-star football game on a field in Nagasaki, Japan—less than five months after an atomic bomb killed over 70,000 in that city, nearly all
From ProPublica: "Jill Dopf Viles — self-taught genetic detective — passed away recently at the age of 50. She became convinced she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from certain parts
From New York: "Woeltz and Duplessie transformed the five-story townhouse they were staying in on Prince Street into an after-hours nightclub, filling it with young employees from Brandy Melville around the corner. The parties were wild and sometimes unnerving; the hosts bragged about ties to intelligence agencies and showed
From Wired: "Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to
From the New Yorker: "Around sunset on a rainy Saturday in November, 1906, a woman walked the streets of Rochester, in western New York State, trying to off-load a stack of counterfeit two-dollar bills. She looked about forty, tall, broad in the beam, with dark eyes and dark hair;