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My inbox this week has three papers I flagged in July and never opened. What I choose to flag says more about me than the papers ever will. |
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The sleeping brain may not rinse itself after all |
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In 2013 a lab at the University of Rochester led by Maiken Nedergaard published a paper in Science reporting that mouse brains flush out metabolic waste faster during sleep than while awake. She called the pathway the glymphatic system. Within a few years it was in textbooks, in wellness podcasts, and in the mouth of every neurologist who wanted a clean line about why sleep matters. Sleep, we all said, is when the brain takes out the trash. Then in May 2024, two Imperial College professors named Nick Franks and Bill Wisden published a study in Nature Neuroscience using a different method. They injected fluorescent dye directly into brain tissue rather than into cerebrospinal fluid and watched how quickly it moved. Clearance slowed by about thirty percent during sleep and by about fifty percent under anaesthesia. The direction was opposite to what the textbook said. Nedergaard pushed back hard. She called the injection method damaging and the interpretation misleading. The two labs may be measuring different things, and the honest answer today is that we do not know whether the sleeping human brain clears waste faster, slower, or roughly the same as the waking one. The reason my inbox still fills up with sleep and Alzheimer's headlines is that we told the story too well before the story was finished. |
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Fifty-eight boxes sailed from Newark and rewrote global trade |
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Malcolm McLean was a North Carolina trucker who spent an afternoon in 1937 watching stevedores lift crates one at a time from a truck bed into cargo nets, and from the nets into a ship's hold. He decided the whole business would move faster if you simply put the trailer on the deck. He bought a shipping company in 1955 to try it, converted an oil tanker called the Ideal-X, and on the twenty-sixth of April 1956 the ship left Port Newark for Houston carrying fifty-eight aluminium boxes lashed to a deck above its regular petroleum tanks. Loading took a few hours where the old cargo nets had taken days. Longshoremen at both ports lost the piecework that had built their unions. By the mid-1960s the box was the standard unit of ocean freight, cutting the cost of moving a ton of cargo by more than ninety percent and quietly making the modern global economy possible. |
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The farthest place from land is a spacecraft graveyard |
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The farthest patch of sea from any land is in the South Pacific, closer to astronauts on the International Space Station overhead than to the nearest coastline. In 1992 a Croatian-Canadian survey engineer named Hrvoje Lukatela ran the numbers and named it Point Nemo, after the captain in Jules Verne. The three nearest lands are all uninhabited: Ducie Island in the Pitcairn group, Motu Nui near Easter Island, and Maher Island off Antarctica, each about 2,688 kilometres away. No shipping lanes cross it. Space agencies have used the emptiness on purpose. Between 1971 and 2016 at least 264 pieces of spacecraft were guided back through the atmosphere to fall in the surrounding stretch of ocean, including the Russian station Mir and six Salyut stations. NASA plans to add the International Space Station itself in 2031. |
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A charred Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time |
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When Vesuvius buried Herculaneum in 79 AD it also carbonised a private library of about eight hundred papyrus scrolls in a residence now known as the Villa of the Papyri. For centuries the scrolls were unreadable. Attempts to physically unroll them turned most of them to crumbs. They sat in the Institut de France and the National Library of Naples looking like blackened logs. In 2023 a computer scientist named Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky launched the Vesuvius Challenge, an open competition offering cash prizes for anyone who could virtually unroll a scroll from X-ray scans and read what was inside. On the twenty-fifth of June 2026 the project announced that scroll PHerc. 1667 had been read from beginning to end for the first time. It is a Stoic philosophical treatise from the second century BC. One recovered line reads: we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature. |
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The word for today's internet was coined in a blog post |
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A blog post in November 2022 introduced the noun enshittification to describe what its author, the novelist and activist Cory Doctorow, had watched happen to Facebook, Twitter and Amazon in slow motion. The post was called Social Quitting. His three-stage account: a platform is generous to its users to lock them in, then it degrades the experience to squeeze value from its business customers, then it degrades the experience for those business customers to funnel value to shareholders. Two years later the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia named enshittification its 2024 word of the year, winning both the committee vote and the people's choice. The American Dialect Society had picked it the year before. The Oxford English Dictionary added it in September 2024. The reason a joke word made it from a blog post into the Oxford English Dictionary in less than two years is that people finally had a name for a sensation they had been trying to describe for years. |
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The scroll is the story I would tell someone at dinner tonight. |
