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I spent an embarrassing part of this week doubting a fact I have taught for a decade, and I am not over it yet. |
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The chemical behind runner's high probably isn't endorphins |
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For twenty years I've taught runner's high as an endorphin story, and I'm increasingly sure that's the wrong molecule. Endorphins are peptides, long chains of amino acids that are too polar to cross the blood brain barrier in any meaningful amount. Whatever they're doing during a hard run, it's probably happening in the body, not lighting up the reward circuits in your skull. The stronger candidate is anandamide, a fat soluble compound from the body's own cannabinoid system that crosses into the brain easily and reliably rises after thirty or more minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise. In a 2021 randomized trial, researchers blocked opioid receptors with naltrexone before a run, and the calm and the euphoria showed up anyway. In a separate mouse study, blocking cannabinoid receptors erased the exercise induced pain tolerance and the drop in anxiety completely. There's a stranger footnote. A 2012 study measured the same anandamide rise after thirty minutes on a treadmill in humans and in dogs, both built for sustained running, and found nothing of the sort in ferrets, which aren't. The study's own authors think this reward chemistry may have evolved specifically to make endurance running feel good, in species whose survival used to depend on covering long distances on foot. |
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Bubble wrap started as failed wallpaper for beatniks |
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Bubble wrap started its life as wallpaper. In 1957, an engineer named Alfred Fielding and a chemist named Marc Chavannes were working out of a garage in Hawthorne, New Jersey, trying to invent a textured plastic wall covering for the beatnik market. Their method was heat sealing two sheets of shower curtain plastic together, which trapped a grid of small air pockets between the layers. Nobody wanted the wallpaper. They pitched the same material as greenhouse insulation next, and that failed too. Instead of giving up, they founded a company called Sealed Air in 1960 and kept the material around. Within a few years, IBM needed something to protect its new 1401 computers in transit, and the failed wallpaper turned out to be exactly the right shape for the job. The patent for the process, US3,142,599, wasn't granted until 1964, four years after Sealed Air was already selling the stuff as packaging. |
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Losing a border war gave Michigan a mining empire |
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A compass going strange near a small Michigan town is the reason the state is shaped the way it is. In 1835, Michigan and Ohio nearly went to war over a 468 square mile strip of land that included the port of Toledo, the legacy of a botched 1787 survey. Congress settled it by making Michigan give up its claim to Toledo as the price of statehood. As compensation, Michigan received the western Upper Peninsula, about 9,000 square miles that everyone involved treated as a frozen afterthought. Four years later, the state's first geologist, Douglass Houghton, surveyed the region and reported serious copper deposits. In 1845, a surveyor named William Burt noticed his compass behaving strangely near what is now Negaunee and traced it to a massive iron formation. The territory's first mining venture, the Jackson Mining Company, was incorporated on July 23 of that same year, less than a decade after Michigan lost Toledo for good. |
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A coffee pot in Cambridge became the first webcam |
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Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky were tired of walking down the hall to a coffee machine that was always empty. In 1991, the two computer scientists at Cambridge shared a single coffee machine with their colleagues, kept in a room called the Trojan Room. So they pointed a camera at the pot and wrote software that let anyone on the internal network check its status from their desk, updated a few times a minute. In November 1993, colleagues adapted the feed to run over the brand new World Wide Web, two full years before webcam was a word anyone used. The page drew millions of hits from around the world, watching a British coffee pot do essentially nothing. When Cambridge retired the camera in August 2001, the actual pot was auctioned on eBay for 3,350 pounds to a German magazine. It now belongs to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Germany, cataloged alongside the rest of computing history. |
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A lawyer engineered Godwin's law as a Usenet experiment |
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Godwin's law exists because online arguments on Usenet kept ending the same way. In 1990, a lawyer named Mike Godwin noticed that the longer a thread ran, the more certain someone was to compare the other side to Hitler, so he coined a name for the pattern and started spreading the phrase through newsgroups himself. He has since said this wasn't really an observation. It was a deliberate experiment in what he called memetics, an attempt to make the pattern embarrassing enough that people would catch themselves mid sentence and stop. It worked better than he expected. The phrase entered ordinary internet vocabulary and eventually landed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then in August 2017, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Godwin publicly suspended his own rule, writing that comparisons to actual neo Nazis were fair game, again and again. The man who spent decades quietly discouraging people from reaching for Hitler told them, just this once, to go ahead. |
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The coffee pot story is the one I would tell at a dinner party this week. |
