Twin brothers who were UFO hunters are now tracking drones
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’s restricted airspace. The culprits could not be found.One retired major with the Massachusetts State Police, who had been dispatched to help investigate that night, called these unidentified aircraft the strangest thing he’s ever seen, says Brian Lauzon, deputy chief of Natick’s municipal police department. When Lauzon arrived on base later that weekend, he says, he saw drones that were larger than consumer models (most of which are pre-programmed to respect US military airspace these days anyway). By the end of this weekend-long breach, base police not only had called in local law enforcement for backup but were coordinating with the FBI and US Army commanders as well."
Stone Age settlement lost to rising seas 8,500 years ago found off Denmark coast
From CBS News: "Below the dark blue waters of the Bay of Aarhus in northern Denmark, archaeologists search for coastal settlements swallowed by rising sea levels more than 8,500 years ago. This summer, divers descended about 26 feet below the waves close to Aarhus, Denmark's second-biggest city, and collected evidence of a Stone Age settlement from the seabed. It's part of a $15.5 million six-year international project to map parts of the seabed in the Baltic and North Seas, funded by the European Union, that includes researchers in Aarhus as well as from the U.K.'s University of Bradford and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research in Germany. The goal is to explore sunken Northern European landscapes and uncover lost Mesolithic settlements. Moe Astrup and colleagues have excavated an area of about 430 square feet at the small settlement they discovered just off today's coast."
Hundreds of miles of desert between Egypt and Sudan are not owned by either country
From Wikipedia: "Bir Tawil is a 2,060 km2 (795.4 sq mi) area of land along the border between Egypt and Sudan, which is uninhabited and claimed by neither country. When spoken of in association with the neighbouring Halaib Triangle, it is sometimes referred to as the Bir Tawil Triangle, despite the area's actual quadrilateral shape; the two regions border at a quadripoint. Its unclaimed status results from a discrepancy between the straight political boundary between Egypt and Sudan established in 1899, and the irregular administrative boundary established in 1902. Egypt asserts that the political boundary is correct, and Sudan asserts the administrative boundary, with the result that the Halaib Triangle is claimed by both and Bir Tawil by neither. In 2014, the author Alastair Bonnett described Bir Tawil as "the only place on Earth that was habitable but was not claimed by any recognised government."
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 strange story of how the Return key on a typewriter became the Enter key
From Ares Luna: "In the popular imagination, the transition from the world of typewriters to the universe of computers was orderly and simple: at some point in the 20th century, someone attached a CPU and a screen to a typewriter, and that turned it into a computer. But the reality is much more fascinating and convoluted. The transition was meandering and lengthy, and traces of its many battles and decisions remain scattered across keyboards today. And no key might better represent the complexity of that journey than the Return key. Typewriters, born in the 1870s, did not understand information, and didn’t care about the meaning of their output. Early models lacked 0 and 1 keys for cost cutting reasons. You were supposed to type a capital O or a lowercase l instead – they looked just about good enough. In that universe, a carriage return – that distinctive lever on the left-hand side of each typewriter – was a kind of mechanical shorthand."
That time actor Nicholas Cage had to return a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull he bought
From The Guardian: "Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage agreed to turn over a rare stolen dinosaur skull he bought for $276,000 to US authorities so it could be returned to the Mongolian government. The office of Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan, filed a civil forfeiture complaint to take possession of the Tyrannosaurus bataar skull. The lawsuit did not specifically name Cage as the owner, but Cage’s publicist confirmed that the actor bought the skull in March 2007 from a Beverly Hills gallery, I.M. Chait. The actor was not accused of wrongdoing, and authorities said he voluntarily agreed to turn over the skull after learning of the circumstances. Cage's publicist said in an email that the actor received a certificate of authenticity from the gallery and was first contacted by US authorities in July 2014, when the Department of Homeland Security informed him that the skull might have been stolen."
A Chinese influencer selling dresses changes outfits every few seconds
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
