She caught 60 pythons with her bare hands and won $10,000

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 have been initially introduced through the pet trade and are now  threatening the native wildlife. (All captured snakes are killed.) Stanberry caught 60 pythons — three times the number of last year’s winner — and collected $10,000. "Everyone thinks that pythons just throw themselves at me because I post the good moments online," Stanberry said, "but every night is hit-or-miss. I could go to the same area seven days in a row — one night I might catch nothing, and another night, I could nab 10 pythons in an hour. I just catch them with my bare hands — no equipment or anything."

This cassette tape made of DNA can store every piece of music that has ever been recorded

From New Scientist: "Retro cassette tapes may be making a comeback, with a DNA twist. While DNA has been used as an information storage medium before, researchers have now combined this with the convenience and look of a 1980s cassette tape, creating what they are calling a DNA cassette.Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. “We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer,” he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 metres of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data – equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives."

How a group of strangers helped deliver a baby at the Burning Man festival

From the New York Times: "Kayla Thompson and her husband, Kasey Thompson, were asleep in their R.V. camper at their first Burning Man festival on Wednesday morning when she awoke in pain. She thought it might be something she ate, or worse, her appendix. Kayla's cramping was unrelenting. The couple knew they needed medical help, but they did not anticipate what would happen next: Minutes later, Kayla was giving birth to their first child, a 3-pound, 9-ounce baby girl, in the bathroom of their camper. The couple had not been planning for a child and had no idea that Kayla was pregnant. Kasey ran out of the R.V. and desperately called for help. Within minutes, a neonatal-care nurse, a pediatric doctor and an obstetrician-gynecologist filled their camper. Dr. Jacob Christ, an OB-GYN, was wearing nothing but his underwear as he helped Kayla."

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.

Why so many Sherlock Holmes portrayals involve him being kind of a jerk

From Now I Know: "Sherlock Holmes stories didn’t end when Arthur Conan Doyle passed away in 1930 — far from it. There have been countless Sherlock Holmes adaptations since. And in almost all of them, Holmes is a big jerk. That’s not by accident — it was, partially, to avoid a lawsuit. In the United Kingdom, works typically remain under copyright protection until 70 years after the author dies, whil in the United States, copyright protection runs until 95 years after the first date of publication. Given the dates above, Sherlock Holmes entered the public domain in the UK in 2000. But in 2020, the Doyle estate came up with a creative argument: if you used Sherlock Holmes in your stories, he had to be mean. In Doyle's final twelve stories, Holmes is notably different — he comes across as affable, genteel, empathetic, and even warm. He’s simply a more likeable guy. And it was that warm, caring version of Sherlock Holmes that the estate asserted was, as of 2020, still their protected IP."

So-called "ghost ships" baffled Einstein 100 years ago and could be making a comeback

From Popular Science: "On the rough and icy waters of the North Sea in 1925, an unusual vessel plowed its way from Poland to Scotland, marking a first in maritime history. This maiden voyage was historic not for its distance but for the vessel’s ingenuity: Its simple design even impressed Albert Einstein. “Denuded of all sails, masts, and riggings,” wrote G. B. Seybold, reporting for Popular Science, the 177-foot-long steel schooner was propelled by nothing more than “two strange cylinders, resembling giant smoke-stacks. But no smoke was pouring from them and no engine noise was heard. Like a ghost ship, it moved mysteriously through the water with no apparent means of propulsion.” Several months later, on Boston’s Charles River, two U.S. naval officers, studying at MIT, launched their own modified version of the same strange vessel. “This American boat,” wrote Popular Science in 1925, “was the first actual demonstration in this country of how a revolving metal tower can replace canvas sails.” 

What a video taken with a 125-times zoom lens looks like

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