Residents of this California town say that birds are exploding

From ABC News: "Residents of a neighborhood in the Bay Area community of Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, claim they have found multiple dead birds in their yards on their street. Security cameras even recorded one fowl's fatality, showing it falling to its death from a power line after a loud pop was captured in the footage. Richmond resident Maximillian Bolling said he witnessed several birds succumb to a horrible death after perching on power lines. "So when they land and it happens, they just quickly explode and it's really violent," Bolling told ABC San Francisco station KGO-TV. Bolling said he and his neighbors have now counted at least 13 birds that have met a baffling demise. As the casualties have mounted, locals have speculated on everything from the birds being electrocuted by power lines to a phantom serial bird killer."

Scientists surprised to discover that sponges move – not very quickly, but they do

From Nautilus: "On a frigid August day, 2,000 feet beneath the frozen surface of the North Atlantic, a remotely operated camera captured a faint pale smudge snaking across the seafloor. The footage seemed unremarkable — mostly brown and gray seafloor, dark but for the illumination from the camera. But the biologists aboard a research icebreaker above were shocked: The smear in the upper left of the screen was the trace of a sea sponge on the move. Sea sponges are not supposed to move. At least scientists didn’t think they were. But there, off the coast of Greenland, along the seamounts of Langseth Ridge, they were very much moving—slowly. Why, you might wonder, would anyone care about a bevy of brainless organisms crawling along the dark ocean bottom? Sea sponges are in fact central engineers of ocean ecosystems; for over 600 million years they’ve been shaping the very nature of Earth’s seafloors. And the discovery of their unexpected mobility redefined these animals as movers and shakers of the deep."

He thinks most megastructures are evidence of a previous global civilization that disappeared

From The Telegraph: "Graham Hancock believes that we are “a species with amnesia.” Ours is not the first advanced, globe-straddling civilisation to have existed on this planet: there was another in the very distant past, now completely lost. 12,800 years ago, he says, this society was destroyed in a natural cataclysm called the Younger Dryas. The planet had been slowly emerging from its Ice Age, but global temperatures suddenly plummeted in a brief period of extreme climate change, and the survivors fanned out across the earth to pass on their secrets to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Usually, this cooling is attributed to natural cycles, but some maintain it was a result of a gigantic extraterrestrial collision. Either way, Hancock believes the Younger Dryas civilisation was the origin of agriculture, architecture, and many of the world’s myths."

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 last Pope named Leo was likely the earliest-born person to ever appear on film

From Wikipedia: "Pope Leo XIII was head of the Catholic Church from 20 February 1878 until his death in July 1903. He had the fourth-longest reign of any pope. He is well known for his intellectualism and his attempts to define the position of the Catholic Church with regard to modern thinking. He was also the first pope whose voice was recorded. The recording can be found on a compact disc of Alessandro Moreschi's singing; a recording of his praying of the Ave Maria is available on the web. He was also the first pope to be filmed by a motion picture camera. He was filmed in 1896 by inventor, W. K. Dickson, and blessed the camera while being filmed. The video contains three segments: the pope on a throne, the pope arriving in a horse-drawn carriage, the pope taking a seat on a bench. Born in 1810, he is also the earliest-born known person to appear in a film."

Zookeepers suspect a panda faked being pregnant so it could be pampered

From ABC News: "Zookeepers at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding say Ai Hin, a 6-year-old giant panda, first showed signs of pregnancy in July, but then returned to normal at the end of this month, after just a two-month observation. Chengdu officials say “phantom pregnancies” -– caused by progestational hormone changes –- are not uncommon for pandas, but that some “clever” pandas keep playing the pregnancy card long after. After showing prenatal signs, the 'mothers-to-be' are moved into single rooms with air conditioning and around-the-clock care. They also receive more buns, fruits and bamboo, so some clever pandas have used this to their advantage to improve their quality of life. The director of animal programs at the Memphis Zoo says that zookeepers must prepare pandas for birth at the first sign of pregnancy, even if it is hard to tell if they are actually pregnant. “Pandas and other bears don't make it real easy to tell whether or not they are pregnant,” said Matt Thompson.

How an antique sorting machine separates eggs by weight

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