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A pigeon has moved onto my windowsill, and I resent how relaxed it looks. |
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Hard thinking costs the brain only about 5 percent extra energy |
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The brain is about 2 percent of body weight and accounts for roughly 20 percent of the body's resting metabolism, more than ten times what its weight alone would predict, a figure that makes thinking sound ruinously expensive. A 2025 review by Sharna Jamadar and colleagues in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, titled "The metabolic costs of cognition", looks at what happens to that bill when you concentrate. Goal-directed cognition, they report, is associated with only a relatively small increase of about 5 percent in glucose consumption over resting activity. In early childhood, the paper adds, the brain can use up to half of the body's basal nutritional requirements. The authors describe that as an approximate estimate and credit it to earlier work by Marcus Raichle. What irritates me in my own field is how often the 20 percent figure turns up in a sentence that ends with a product, as though thinking were what ran up the bill. Quanta Magazine, reporting on the research into brain energy, says that keeping up the electrical voltage across neuron membranes takes at least half of the brain's energy budget. At least half the cost of running a brain, then, is the cost of having one. |
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Early tin cans were opened with a hammer and chisel |
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Peter Durand received a patent from King George III in 1810 for preserving food in tinplated cans. They were wrought iron lined with tin, up to three-sixteenths of an inch thick, and the manufacturer's suggested way in was a hammer and chisel. Smithsonian Magazine reports that early production ran at about six cans an hour, rising to sixty an hour in the 1840s. That made a growing number of people with a hammer and a lunch problem. Ezra Warner patented a can opener on 5 January 1858, a blade with a guard that sawed around the lid and left a jagged rim, and the U.S. Army used it in the Civil War. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine says early openers resembled a bayonet, which is what most Civil War soldiers would use on their canned goods. William Lyman's 1870 patent brought in a rotary cutter, and Smithsonian says Charles Arthur Bunker's toothed-wheel crank design from the 1920s is still the standard. |
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Iceland recorded its first three mosquitoes in October 2025 |
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At dusk on 16 October 2025, in Kjós just north of Reykjavik, the insect enthusiast Björn Hjaltason caught sight of "a strange fly on a red wine ribbon". He wrote that he "immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected the fly", a female, and later trapped two more. The Natural Science Institute of Iceland identified all three as Culiseta annulata, two females and a male, a large mosquito found across Europe that can survive cold weather. NPR reports that they most likely arrived with freight and that the institute said they appeared able to withstand Iceland's climate. Yale Environment 360 reports that Matthías Alfreðsson, an insect specialist at the institute, told RÚV these were the first mosquitoes spotted on Icelandic soil, although mosquitoes had turned up on incoming boats and planes before. That leaves Antarctica as the only place in the world believed to have none, according to NPR. |
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A spy bug with no battery hid in an ambassador's office |
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On 4 August 1945, a carved seal was presented to W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Inside the carving was a listening device that, as IEEE's Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society puts it, needed no power supply. Leon Theremin, who also invented the instrument that carries his name, devised it. A radio signal of about 330 MHz, aimed at the seal from outside, lit it up. A diaphragm moved with the sound in the room, changed the capacitance of a small resonant cavity, and so altered the signal the device sent back. NPR says it went undiscovered for seven years. The same report follows the idea forward. In 1970 Mario Cardullo filed a patent for a battery-free transponder, which NPR says became the basic template for electronic toll devices such as E-ZPass. Its verdict on Theremin is that he "may have created the first RFID-like device". |
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A made-up Aboriginal god survived on Wikipedia for nearly ten years |
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For nearly ten years Wikipedia carried an article on Jar'Edo Wens, an Australian Aboriginal god of earthly knowledge and physical might. No such god existed. Whoever invented him gave him two departments to run, which is more than I managed at my last job. According to IOL, the article got a grammar fix in 2006 and was flagged for lacking sources three years later. In November 2014 an anonymous user tagged it as a possible hoax, noting "Not found in several (reliable sources) on Aboriginal religion". Policy called for debate first, and the administrator Ira Matetsky removed it in March 2015, calling it a "blatant and indisputable hoax". It had lasted nine years, nine months and three days, a record. By the time editors found it, IOL says, the god had leaked off Wikipedia and on to the wider internet. Matetsky said Wikipedia is "uniquely vulnerable to deliberate mistakes" and also "uniquely gifted at its ability to fix misinformation". |
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My dinner pick is the carved seal that listened without a battery. |
