She flew fighter planes for the UK in WWII and lived to be 106

From The Guardian: "Nancy Miller Stratford sat alone behind the controls of a Spitfire fighter plane, charting an uncertain course through an impenetrable clot of dark clouds. On the horizon, the young pilot could see a promising patch of daylight, “like the devil waving his hand to come on through”. But just as suddenly as the sky opened up, the clouds closed in again. Her visibility plummeted to zero. She had no idea which way was up and which was down. Far beneath her lay the moody Scottish coastline, where an unplanned landing would be next to impossible. Fortunately, it was life-or-death scenarios like these when Stratford was the sharpest. In that moment, she felt no fear – this was simply a problem that needed to be solved. Despite having no formal instrument training, she relied solely on the control panel in the cockpit, rather than the view outside her window, to muscle the plane through the wall of clouds and land safely at the nearest airport. The year was 1944. Stratford was 25 years old."

Tech founder says he plans to give each of his 100 children more than $100 million

From Fortune: "Telegram founder Pavel Durov said the over 100 kids he’s fathered will inherit his fortune. That includes the six kids he’s an “official” dad to and at least 100 others born through his sperm bank donations. Each could inherit an eye-watering $132 million from Durov’s estate, currently worth nearly $14 billion. The 40-year-old Telegram founder has six “official” children with three different partners. But he’s also been donating to a sperm clinic for 15 years, which told him he has helped conceive over 100 babies across 12 countries. And luckily for them, they’ve just been included in Durov’s $13.9 billion will, despite potentially not knowing their wealthy biological father. “I wrote my will very recently,” Durov told French publication Le Point. “I make no difference between my children: There are those who were conceived naturally and those who come from my sperm donations. They are all my children and will all have the same rights!"

Orcas have been shown to use stalks of kelp as a skin treatment

From Scientific American: "Step aside, primates and crows. Thanks to new drone footage, killer whales have joined an exclusive club: the short list of animals that make and use tools. Scientists have discovered that southern resident killer whales — an extended family of orcas that live off the coast of the Pacific Northwest in the Salish Sea — incorporate seaweed into a social grooming technique, according to a paper published on Monday in Current Biology. Through footage from a drone more than 100 feet in the sky, the researchers watched orcas yank out sections of the stem of bull kelp, a giant seaweed that forms vast underwater forests in coastal waters. The texture of this stem, called a stipe, is firm but springy—kind of like a foam roller, says Michael Weiss, a study coauthor and behavioral ecologist at the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor."

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 sale of a painting is halted after Romania says it was stolen by a former king

From the Art Newspaper: "The legal dispute over ownership of an El Greco painting that was pulled from a Christie's New York sale in February is moving forward. Romania has now secured a "long-term hold", ensuring Saint Sebastian (around 1610-14) will remain at Christie's New York. Central to the Romanian government's case for the painting's restitution is that it was unlawfully removed from the national collection in 1947 by King Michael I as he fled the country to escape Communist forces. From 1977 until 1997, Romanian government officials engaged in a legal battle to restitute the painting and dozens of others he allegedly took in 1947, implicating in the process a number of art world figures, including the gallery Wildenstein & Co, which bought the El Greco work from Michael I in around 1975. The Romanian Finance Ministry "unequivocally denies the contention that the painting was transferred from the Romanian state/government's collection with its consent or accord."

Researchers at water treatment plant found a colony of more than a million spiders

From ResearchGate: "In late October, 2009, the managers of the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Baltimore, MD sought assistance in mitigating what they described as an “extreme spider situation” in their sand filtration facility. The building, consisting of almost four acres (16,099 square meters) under a single roof but with no side walls, had been prone to extensive colonization by orb-weaving spiders since its construction in 1993. However, the present infestation was considered to be worse than normal, and the facility’s maintenance and operations personnel had voiced concerns over the potential risk of bites. As an interagency team with expertise in arachnology, urban entomology, and structural pest management, we were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three-dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior. Far greater in the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing. In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose."

A herd of elephants became drunk after eating fermented fruit at a game preserve

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