The amazing mine-sniffing rats of Cambodia

From Substack: "The problem of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Cambodia is a grave legacy of the Khmer Rouge period, with landmines and cluster munitions posing threats to the personal safety of people and communities, but also contaminating land that could otherwise be used for housing, agriculture and other infrastructure. After 25 years of demining, the dangers still persist, although incidences of death and injury have been falling over time. Apopo’s mine-sniffing rats are a pivotal part of addressing this issue. These African rats are much larger, about the size of a cat, and can live for up to eight years. What makes these rats ideal for mine detection is their extraordinary sense of smell, which they use to detect explosives."

He passed himself off as an oil magnate and conned people out of billions

From the New Yorker: "When she left, she passed by the couple’s twin Mercedes-Benzes. She saw the men at a nineteen-twenties-themed club luncheon, wearing top hats and tailcoats. Turner seemed to especially relish dressing up and mingling with bigwigs. At one fund-raiser, he reportedly bought a table for ten thousand dollars, then raised his paddle at the auction and pledged a hundred thousand more.When the first heat of summer arrived, West Palm Beach emptied out. As soon as Maria returned, this past August, she called up Turner to arrange a drink. His number wasn’t working, which seemed odd. Then one of her friends told her to Google “Alan Todd May.” Maria was soon staring at a mugshot: May, the man in the photo, was slimmer, and his hair was darker, but he was clearly the person she knew as Jacob Turner. He had escaped from a federal prison almost five years earlier, she read, while serving a twenty-year sentence for an oil fraud that had netted him millions."

She’s a four-time Olympian but her parents want her to get a real job

From the Wall Street Journal: "Lily Zhang is the queen of American table tennis, a six-time national champ and four-time Olympian in the prime of her career. At only 28 years old, the California native can’t help but dream ahead about playing in front of a home crowd at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Her parents are less enthused. “We always try to convince her to stop playing,” says her mother, Linda Liu. “We just want her to have a normal job.” It turns out even the most decorated American of all time in her sport can’t escape parental career pressure. Besides enduring frequent and unsolicited professional advice from Mom and Dad, what’s most annoying to Zhang is that she concedes they have a point."

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect probably doesn't exist

From McGill: "I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. In a nutshell, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally defined as a bias in our thinking. If I am terrible at English grammar and am told to answer a quiz testing my knowledge of English grammar, this bias in my thinking would lead me, according to the theory, to believe I would get a higher score than I actually would. In 2016 and 2017, two papers were published in a mathematics journal called Numeracy. In them, the authors argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect was a mirage. And I tend to agree."

Summer on the Thames means the annual swan count led by the King's Swan Marker

From the BBC: "The traditional counting of swans on the Thames is an annual summer spectacle, with brightly dressed teams of rowers going up the river, under the stewardship of the King's Swan Marker, who wears a swan's feather in his cap. This medieval ceremony now has a modern conservation purpose in monitoring the swan population, counting, weighing and measuring swans before releasing them back into the water. There were only 86 young swans found in a five-day search of the river between London and Oxfordshire, a 45% decline in two years. The King's Swan Marker, David Barber, blamed catapults and air-gun shootings, as well as the ongoing impact of avian flu."

Scientists believe that babies emit a chemical that makes mothers more aggressive

From Science: "Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by babies called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to foster aggressive behavior in women and blunt it in men. “We cannot say that this is a pheromone,” says study author Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. “But we can say that it’s a molecule expressed by the human body that influences human behavior, specifically aggressive behavior, in a predicted manner.”Humans emit HEX from their skin, saliva, and feces, and it’s among the most abundant molecules babies emit from their heads. When researchers isolated the odorless compound and piped it into mouse cages, it had a relaxing effect on the animals, says Sobel, who studies the role of scent in human interactions."

In Basel, Switzerland people commute to work by floating down the river

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