A Swedish town moved its church and stopped for coffee

The lift in my building now has a sign asking for patience, and I have never felt less patient.

The 10,000-step goal probably began as a pedometer's trade name

A 2019 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine by I-Min Lee of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, with colleagues, says the 10,000-step daily goal likely derives from the trade name of a pedometer sold in 1965 by the Yamasa Clock and Instrument Company in Japan. The device was called Manpo-kei.

Its own data came from 16,741 women, average age 72, who wore accelerometers for a week. Over an average of 4.3 years, women in the second-lowest quartile, at around 4,400 steps a day, had a mortality rate 41 per cent lower than the least active quartile, at around 2,700.

A 2022 meta-analysis in Lancet Public Health, covering 15 cohorts that began between 1999 and 2018 and 47,471 adults, found mortality risk kept falling with more steps until about 6,000 to 8,000 a day for people aged 60 and over, and 8,000 to 10,000 for younger adults. Both are cohort studies, so the people walking more may simply be the people already well enough to walk, a caveat I wish came attached to every headline.

In Lee's study of women averaging 72, the benefit levelled off at about 7,500 steps a day, comfortably short of the number in the pedometer's name.

The zipper got its name from a rubber overshoe

B.F. Goodrich fitted a slide fastener to a new rubber overshoe, and in 1923, Britannica says, its B.G. Work named the fastener the zipper.

The fastener was older than the word. Whitcomb Judson showed his clasp locker at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and it had little commercial success at first, according to Smithsonian Libraries. Judson went on to form the Universal Fastener Company with Colonel Lewis Walker. There Gideon Sundback increased the number of fastening elements and, by December 1913, had built the modern zipper, two facing rows of teeth joined by a slider. Britannica says his Hookless #2 went on sale in 1914, and the patent was issued in 1917.

Early uses were mainly boots and tobacco pouches, Smithsonian Libraries says. In 1937, according to Smithsonian Libraries, the zipper beat the button in the Battle of the Fly.

A Swedish town moved its 672-tonne church five kilometres

In August 2025 the 1912 church of Kiruna, in Sweden, crossed town on rolling platforms. It weighs 672 metric tons, and AP reported that it moved at between 0.5 and 1.5 kilometres an hour along a five-kilometre route. Engineers widened a major road from 9 to 24 metres to make room.

The reason is underneath it. Kiruna sits above an iron-ore mine run by LKAB, and as the mine expanded, residents saw cracks in buildings and roads. LKAB is relocating the town centre and calls the church the largest building it has moved so far. The church was turned 180 degrees on the way, so its altar now faces west. As of July, AP reported, 25 buildings had been moved east and 16 remained, the church among them.

Actual moving time came to about 12 hours across two days, with a daily pause for fika, the Swedish afternoon coffee break, AP reported.

The three-point seat belt came from an ejector seat engineer

Before Volvo hired him in 1958 as its first safety engineer, Nils Bohlin had designed ejector seats for aircraft at Saab, including for the J35 Draken fighter. The three-point belt he developed debuted in 1959 in the Volvo Amazon and PV 544, sold in Nordic markets.

Lap belts already existed, and customers were initially sceptical of belts, Volvo's own account says, partly because the earlier two-point belt had a poor reputation. Car magazine says a lap-and-torso design had been tried in the USA with little success, because it could damage soft organs in a crash. Bohlin's version placed the diagonal strap across the chest, and his stated goal was to hold both the upper torso and the lower body securely in place.

Volvo says it made Bohlin's patent available to all car makers. German patent registrars later listed the belt among the top eight inventions of 1885 to 1985, Car magazine reports.

Six reasons people say stranger things to strangers online

In 2004 John Suler published a paper in CyberPsychology & Behavior on why people disclose more, or act out more, online than in person. He gave six reasons: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination and minimization of authority.

The effect runs in both directions. Suler distinguished benign disinhibition, which shows up as openness, self-disclosure and kindness, from toxic disinhibition, which shows up as rudeness and hostility. On this account a stranger confessing a secret and a stranger insulting you are both disinhibited, which I find a more useful way to read a comments section than outrage.

My favourite factor is solipsistic introjection: reading a stranger's text, you give the writer a voice inside your own head, and the exchange starts to feel like an inner conversation. You are currently reading me in a voice you made up, and I would like to apologise to whoever it belongs to.

The Kiruna church and its fika break is the one I would retell at dinner.