Bubble Wrap began as an attempt at textured wallpaper

A stranger on the tram spent twenty minutes insisting to his phone that he was not a robot.

The trillion-smell figure changes wildly with the settings you choose

Humans can supposedly tell apart more than a trillion smells, a figure that moves across roughly 25 orders of magnitude when someone changes the settings. The claim came in 2014, in a Science paper from Rockefeller University, against earlier estimates closer to 10,000.

The 25 orders of magnitude come from Richard Gerkin of Arizona State University and Jason Castro of Bates College, who reanalysed the data in eLife in 2015. The original team had asked volunteers to distinguish blends built from 128 odorant molecules, with 10, 20 or 30 components each, and then extrapolated. Gerkin and Castro found that changing the number of subjects, the number of tests or the significance threshold moved the estimate from a few thousand to around 10 to the 29th power. They also noted that the formula gives an upper bound, so the data could support at most a trillion, the opposite of the original claim. Their conclusion was that there is "no evidence for the original claim."

My field loves a number that sounds like a miracle, and I took this one at face value because I wanted it to be true. The title of the eLife paper is the whole conclusion: the number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is still unknown.

Bubble Wrap began as an attempt at textured wallpaper

Two pieces of plastic shower curtain went through a heat-sealing machine in 1957, and the result disappointed the men who made it. Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, a Swiss chemist, had been trying to create a textured wallpaper that would appeal to the Beat generation. What they got was a film with air bubbles trapped inside.

Smithsonian Magazine reports that they tested it in greenhouses as insulation, where it proved ineffective. They founded Sealed Air in 1960 to keep developing the product under the Bubble Wrap name, and the next year they tried it as packaging. IBM had recently introduced its 1401 computer and needed it protected in transit, and the best way to protect an item during shipping had been to surround it with balled up newsprint.

Sealed Air's Chad Stephens told Smithsonian, "It was the answer to IBM's problems."

Bolivia's constitution names one capital and its government sits in another

"Sucre is the Capital of Bolivia." That is Article 6 of the 2009 constitution, in the Constitute Project's English text, and the executive and legislature sit in La Paz. Britannica describes La Paz as the administrative capital and Sucre, founded in 1539, as the national constitutional capital, home to the Supreme Court.

The split dates to a civil war in the late 1890s over moving the capital. It ended in a compromise, with the executive and legislature going to La Paz and Sucre keeping the court.

In 2007 the argument came back. Protests over the capital began in August and forced the assembly to suspend debates for three months. Protesters in Sucre wanted it made the "full capital," with Congress and government offices moved from La Paz, and Al Jazeera reported that police used rubber bullets and tear gas outside the assembly drafting the new constitution. Delegates were meeting in an army compound under heavy military guard.

A Colorado radio station sets the time on millions of clocks

Radio waves about five kilometres long are telling clocks across America what time it is. NIST's station WWVB has broadcast from Fort Collins, Colorado, on 60 kilohertz since 5 July 1963, when it ran at 4 kilowatts. A time signal was added in 1965 and was used to synchronise power plants and analogue telephone networks.

In 1999 NIST raised the power to 50 kilowatts so the signal would reach the whole US mainland, which it says enabled mass production of radio-controlled clocks. By 2013 it estimated that 50 million clocks, watches and other devices were listening. The time is sent by raising and lowering the signal's power, one bit per second, so a full time code takes a minute.

Most clocks decode it only once a day, and coverage is widest at night. Between those checks, NIST says, the clocks keep time using their quartz crystal oscillators.

Boaty McBoatface won the vote but the ship got another name

James Hand, a former BBC radio host, suggested Boaty McBoatface off the cuff, and in 2016 an online poll run by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council to name a polar research vessel gave it about 124,000 votes. The ship became the RRS Sir David Attenborough anyway, after Science Minister Jo Johnson rejected the winner and said the ship needed a more "suitable" name.

The name Sir David Attenborough had received roughly 11,000 votes, according to NPR. Boaty McBoatface went to one of the sub-sea vehicles the ship carries. I suspect the winning name was simply the one people most enjoyed typing.

On its first mission, in April 2017, the submarine Boaty McBoatface ran for three days along the Orkney Passage, a seabed ridge off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and found deep-water mixing that Smithsonian says is not included in current models of ocean warming.

The shower curtain wallpaper is the one I would retell at dinner.