best of the internet - march 2024
History of scurvy – an interesting read about how the knowledge of what causes scurvy was lost, rediscovered, and forgotten again by Western explorers across the centuries. Fun fact – most animals, including dogs, produce their own Vitamin C. Humans and guinea pigs are some of the few animals that don't, and the fact of scurvy being caused by deficiencies of Vitamin C was only re-discovered through the pure luck of choosing guinea pigs for an experiment on scurvy in animals.
A poignant short story predicting the rise of generative art. Written in 1965, about the invention of a machine that writes poetry. Really, really prescient.
Terry Pratchett and the publisher who inserted ads for soup into his works. Imagine your work being vandalized by the very people you trusted to put it out there for the world! But also, pretty hilarious.
Henrietta Lacks - the woman whose cells became "immortal." Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman with cervical cancer, whose cells were swabbed in 1951. Unlike most cells, which die a short while after being swabbed, Lack's cells continued to divide and divide, providing invaluable scientific insights into the nature of cancer and forming the 'immortal' line of HeLa cells, still in use to this day. This is a transcript of an interview with Henrietta Lacks' biographer, who worked closely with the Lacks' family to present their mother and grandmother's story as they wanted it to be presented – granting ownership of the narrative to the family of a woman whose cells were taken without her consent. The family now has a foundation to preserve her legacy.
A fun little article about why nautiluses have the shape they do, told in an entertaining and engaging way.
Parrots being taught to play tablet games. I don't know... is inter-species addiction to these platforms really something we want to enable? That said, "parrots being successfully taught to place video calls to each other, and doing that on their own" is something I've got to see. What do parrots talk about on the phone with each other? Video of a parrot watching Youtube videos, because the article doesn't have nearly enough parrot videos. I love the fact that the parrot clicks only on videos that have other parrots in them. It's got priorities!
There are sharks that live to pass 250 years old. 250 years old. There are sharks swimming around that are the same sharks that swam around when George Washington crossed the Delaware, when the Constitution was signed, when Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, when World War II broke out and when covid-19 swept across the earth. There are sharks, individual sharks, older than the country I live in.
Sharks as a species, too, are older than the North Star.1 What does it mean for sharks to have evolved as their own species before we did? What kind of wisdom would they share if they could talk to us, if they had any interest in human society? Those sharks have been watching the history of this country from an ocean's perspective. They can feel the rise in temperature over a timespan of multiple centuries. They probably remember oceans with so much less pollution, oceans without modern-day fishing trawlers. Oceans before submarines. What would it be like, to be a shark and to see a submarine for the very first time?
Polaris wasn't always the North Star---its role as that is only a few thousand years old. Before Polaris, there was a different star in that same location which humans used as a North Star, until it gradually drifted out if the proper place. The star Polaris hadn't even been formed when sharks evolved to be their own separate species.
Sharks evolved 450 million years ago. The North Star, Polaris, is 70 million years old. Humans are 6 million years old.↩