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Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the 9th century, and has seen little additional in-migration since. Even today, more than 90 percent of Iceland’s 390,000 residents can trace their ancestry back to the earliest permanent inhabitants, a Nordic-Celtic mix. The tradition of the Norse sagas lives on in the form of careful record-keeping about ancestry—and a national passion for genealogy. In other words, it is not the place to stumble upon old family mysteries. But growing up in the capital city of Reykjavík in the 1950s, neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard stories that left him curious. Stefánsson’s father had come from Djúpivogur, an eastern coastal town where everyone still spoke of a Black man who had moved there early in the 19th century. “Hans Jónatan”, they called him—a well-liked shopkeeper who had arrived on a ship, married a spirited woman from a local farm, and became a revered member of the community. The local census did record a man by the name of Hans Jónatan, born in the Caribbean, who was working at the general store in Djúpivogur in the 19th century—but that was all. No images of the man had survived, and his time in Iceland was well before any other humans with African ancestry are known to have visited the island. If tiny, remote Djúpivogur did have a Black man arrive in the 19th century, the circumstances must have been unusual indeed. It was an intriguing puzzle—and solid grounds for a scientific investigation. Given the amount of homogeneity in the baseline Icelandic population, the genetic signature of one relative newcomer with distinct ancestry might still stand out across a large sample of his descendants. Geneticists thus joined locals and history scholars, and they pieced together a story that bridged three continents. Continue reading ▶
It’s been a busy summer, and the large shortfall in donations last month has been demoralizing, so we’re taking a week off to rest and recuperate. The curated links section will be (mostly) silent, and behind the scenes we’ll be taking a brief break from our usual researching, writing, editing, illustrating, narrating, sound designing, coding, et cetera. We plan to return to normalcy on the 11th of September. (The word “normalcy” was not considered an acceptable alternative to “normality” until 14 May 1920, when then-presidential-candidate Warren G. Harding misused the mathematical term in a campaign speech, stating that America needed, “not nostrums, but normalcy.” He then integrated this error into his campaign slogan, “Return to Normalcy.” Also, the G in Warren G. Harding stood for “Gamaliel.”) While we are away, on 06 September 2023, Damn Interesting will be turning 18 years old. To celebrate, here are the first emojis to ever appear in the body of a Damn Interesting post: 🎂🎉🎁 If you become bored while we are away, you might try a little mobile game we’ve been working on called Wordwhile. It can be played alone, or with a friend. If you enjoy games like Scrabble and Wordle, you may find this one ENJOYABLE (75 points). Launch Wordwhile → And, as always, there are lots of ways to explore our back-catalog. View this post ▶
We’re not going to post things on Twitter X anymore. The new owner keeps doing awful stuff. If you have enjoyed our mostly-daily curated links via the aforementioned collapsing service, we invite you to bookmark our curated links page, or follow us a number of other ways. Rather than linger any longer on this tedious topic, here are some home-grown dad jokes. If there is any order in this universe, the comments section will fill with more of the same. Q: What is the flavor of a chair? Do you even know the meaning of the word ‘rhetorical?’ Don’t answer that! My friend bought an alarm clock that makes loud farting sounds in the morning. He’s in for a rude awakening. You’re right, these ARE my orthopedic shoes. I stand corrected. I want a good game of hide and seek, but skilled players are hard to find. Like tight sweaters, corporate acquisitions are hard to pull off. I was offered a job at the mirror factory. I could see myself working there. Did you hear about the farmer in Colorado raising cannabis-fed cattle? The steaks are high. Q: What is the best stocking stuffer? I used to be addicted to soap, but I’ve gotten clean. I finally worked up the courage to tell my hot female coworker how I felt. She felt the same. So we turned down the thermostat. The universal remote: This changes everything. Q: How fast are donkey trucks? It smells like death in there, and not in a good way. My dad demanded that I go fetch some water from that deep hole in the ground. He means well. Calendar makers: Your days are numbered. A: I enjoy cooking with ghee, but I don’t buy it, I make my own. I will not rest until I find a cure for my insomnia. I bought my wife a new refrigerator. I can’t wait to see her face light up when she opens it. Did you hear about the hilarious thing that happened at the mandatory meeting? I guess you had to be there. Remember that sweet grandmother on Twitter who thought that ‘lol’ meant ‘lots of love’? “Sorry to hear about your uncle passing. lol.” Yesterday, we were standing at the edge of a cliff. Since then we have taken a huge step forward. We had to cancel the big game of tag because somebody got hurt. It was touch and go there for a while. “Of course you can count on me,” said the abacus. IBS is genetic, you know. Runs in the family. My grandfather once told me, “It’s worth investing in good speakers.” That was some sound advice. Extreme camping is in tents. The solar panel company wouldn’t let me pay for the installation. They said it was all on the house. I was chopping herbs all day, and now my hands are quite fragrant. I’ve got too much thyme on my hands. A weather balloon measures about 4 feet in diameter (adjusting for inflation). A: Have you ever had a flatulence-based tea? Like a German dietitian, I tend to see the wurst in people. I don’t care for rulers. That’s where I draw the line. Why did the farmer propose to his horse? He wanted a stable relationship. I still think whiteboards are one of mankind’s most remarkable inventions. The Earth has successfully rotated around its axis. Let’s call it a day. My daughter dropped a brand new tube of toothpaste and it made a big mess. She was crestfallen. You’ve got to hand it to customs agents: Your passport. My friend tried to steal a box of lipstick for us, but she accidentally grabbed a box of glue sticks. My lips are sealed. Elevators: They take things to a whole other level. A friend gave me an expired pack of batteries. They were free of charge. Comedy: To taste a bit like a comet. A: How many times do I have to apologize? My wife said that the battery in my hearing aid needed to be replaced. That was difficult to hear. I asked the ski lift operator if I could get a free ride to the top of the mountain. He didn’t take me up on it. What makes a sentence a tongue twister? It’s hard to say. If you visit Mexico, remember to use the word “mucho.” It means a lot to them. There are more hydrogen atoms in a single molecule of water than there are stars in the solar system. To whoever discovered the number zero: Thanks for nothing. View this post ▶
In the late 17th century, natural philosopher Isaac Newton was deeply uneasy with a new scientific theory that was gaining currency in Europe: universal gravitation. In correspondence with a scientific contemporary, Newton complained that it was “an absurdity” to suppose that “one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum.” The scientist who proposed this preposterous theory was Isaac Newton. He first articulated the idea in his widely acclaimed magnum opus Principia, wherein he explained, “I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses […] It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained.” Newton proposed that celestial bodies were not the sole sources of gravity in the universe, rather all matter attracts all other matter with a force that corresponds to mass and diminishes rapidly with distance. He had been studying the motions of the six known planets–Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus–and by expanding upon the laws of planetary motion developed by Johannes Kepler about eight decades earlier, he arrived at an equation for gravitational force F that seemed to match decades of data: Where m1 and m2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between their centers of mass, and G is the gravitational constant (~0.0000000000667408). But this is only an approximation; humanity may never know the precise value because it is impossible to isolate any measuring apparatus from all of the gravity in the universe. Fellow astronomers found that Newton’s theory seemed to be accurate–universal gravitation appeared to reliably forecast the sometimes irregular motion of the planets even more closely than Kepler’s laws. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted Isaac Newton to make him Sir Isaac Newton (though this honor was due to his work in politics, not for his considerable contributions to math or science). In the century that followed, Newton’s universal gravitation performed flawlessly. Celestial bodies appeared to adhere to the elegant theory, and in scientific circles, it began to crystallize into a law of nature. But in the early 19th century, cracks began to appear. When astronomer Alexis Bouvard used Newton’s equations to carefully calculate future positions of Jupiter and Saturn, they proved spectacularly accurate. However, when he followed up in 1821 with astronomical tables for Uranus–the outermost known planet–subsequent observations revealed that the planet was crossing the sky substantially slower than projected. The fault was not in Bouvard’s math; Uranus appeared to be violating the law of universal gravitation. Newton’s theory was again called into question in 1843 by a 32-year-old assistant astronomer at the Paris Observatory, Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier had been following the Uranus perturbations with great interest, while also compiling a painstaking record of the orbit of Mercury–the innermost known planet. He found that Mercury also departed from projections made by universal gravitation. Was universal gravitation a flawed theory? Or might undiscovered planets lurk in extra-Uranian and intra-Mercurial space, disturbing the orbits of the known planets? Astronomers around the world scoured the skies, seeking out whatever was perturbing the solar system. The answer, it turned out, was more bizarre than they could have supposed. Continue reading ▶
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Window collisions and cats kill more birds than wind farms do, but ornithologists say turbine impacts must be taken seriously. Scientists are testing a range of technologies to reduce bird strikes — from painting stripes to using artificial intelligence — to keep birds safe. Read more on E360 →
This article is excerpted from Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life, by Matthew Wisnioski (The MIT Press, 2025). Imagine a point-to-point transportation service in which two parties communicate at a distance. A passenger in need of a ride contacts the service via phone. A complex algorithm based on time, distance, and volume informs both passenger and driver of the journey’s cost before it begins. This novel business plan promises efficient service and lower costs. It has the potential to disrupt an overregulated taxi monopoly in cities across the country. Its enhanced transparency may even reduce racial discrimination by preestablishing pickups regardless of race. aspect_ratio Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life, by Matthew Wisnioski (The MIT Press, 2025).The MIT Press Carnegie Mellon University. The dial-a-ride service was designed to resurrect a defunct cab company that had once served Pittsburgh’s African American neighborhoods. National Science Foundation, the CED was envisioned as an innovation “hatchery,” intended to challenge the norms of research science and higher education, foster risk-taking, birth campus startups focused on market-based technological solutions to social problems, and remake American science to serve national needs. Are innovators born or made? During the Cold War, the model for training scientists and engineers in the United States was one of manpower in service to a linear model of innovation: Scientists pursued “basic” discovery in universities and federal laboratories; engineer–scientists conducted “applied” research elsewhere on campus; engineers developed those ideas in giant teams for companies such as Lockheed and Boeing; and research managers oversaw the whole process. This model dictated national science policy, elevated the scientist as a national hero in pursuit of truth beyond politics, and pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into higher education. In practice, the lines between basic and applied research were blurred, but the perceived hierarchy was integral to the NSF and the university research culture that it helped to foster. RELATED: Innovation Magazine and the Birth of a Buzzword The question was, how? And would the universities be willing to remake themselves to support innovation? The NSF experiments with innovation At the Utah Innovation Center, engineering students John DeJong and Douglas Kihm worked on a programmable electronics breadboard.Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah In 1972, NSF director H. Guyford Stever established the Office of Experimental R&D Incentives to “incentivize” innovation for national needs by supporting research on “how the government [could] most effectively accelerate the transfer of new technology into productive enterprise.” Stever stressed the experimental nature of the program because many in the NSF and the scientific community resisted the idea of goal-directed research. Innovation, with its connotations of profit and social change, was even more suspect. To lead the initiative, Stever appointed C.B. Smith, a research manager at United Aircraft Corp., who in turn brought in engineers with industrial experience, including Robert Colton, an automotive engineer. Colton led the university Innovation Center experiment that gave rise to Carnegie Mellon’s CED. The NSF chose four universities that captured a range of approaches to innovation incubation. MIT targeted undergrads through formal coursework and an innovation “co-op” that assisted in turning ideas into products. The University of Oregon evaluated the ideas of garage inventors from across the country. The University of Utah emphasized an ecosystem of biotech and computer graphics startups coming out of its research labs. And Carnegie Mellon established a nonprofit corporation to support graduate student ventures, including the dial-a-ride service. Grad student Fritz Faulhaber holds one of the radio-coupled taxi meters that Carnegie Mellon students installed in Pittsburgh cabs in the 1970s.Ralph Guggenheim;Jerome McCavitt/Carnegie-Mellon Alumni News Carnegie Mellon got one of the first university incubators Carnegie Mellon had all the components that experts believed were necessary for innovation: strong engineering, a world-class business school, novel approaches to urban planning with a focus on community needs, and a tradition of industrial design and the practical arts. CMU leaders claimed that the school was smaller, younger, more interdisciplinary, and more agile than MIT. Dwight Baumann. Baumann exemplified a new kind of educator-entrepreneur. The son of North Dakota farmers, he had graduated from North Dakota State University, then headed to MIT for a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, where he discovered a love of teaching. He also garnered a reputation as an unusually creative engineer with an interest in solving problems that addressed human needs. In the 1950s and 1960s, first as a student and then as an MIT professor, Baumann helped develop one of the first computer-aided-design programs, as well as computer interfaces for the blind and the nation’s first dial-a-ride paratransit system. Dwight Baumann, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Entrepreneurial Development, believed that a modern university should provide entrepreneurial education. Carnegie Mellon University Archives The CED’s mission was to support entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of the innovation process when they needed space and seed funding. It created an environment for students to make a “sequence of nonfatal mistakes,” so they could fail and develop self-confidence for navigating the risks and uncertainties of entrepreneurial life. It targeted graduate students who already had advanced scientific and engineering training and a viable idea for a business. Carnegie Mellon’s dial-a-ride service replicated the Peoples Cab Co., which had provided taxi service to Black communities in Pittsburgh. Charles “Teenie” Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art/Getty Images A few CED students did create successful startups. The breakout hit was Compuguard, founded by electrical engineering Ph.D. students Romesh Wadhwani and Krishnahadi Pribad, who hailed from India and Indonesia, respectively. The pair spent 18 months developing a security bracelet that used wireless signals to protect vulnerable people in dangerous work environments. But after failing to convert their prototype into a working design, they pivoted to a security- and energy-monitoring system for schools, prisons, and warehouses. Wadhwani Foundation supports innovation and entrepreneurship education worldwide, particularly in emerging economies. Wharton School and elsewhere. In 1983, Baumann’s onetime partner Jack Thorne took the lead of the new Enterprise Corp., which aimed to help Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurs raise venture capital. Baumann was kicked out of his garage to make room for the initiative. Was the NSF’s experiment in innovation a success? As the university Innovation Center experiment wrapped up in the late 1970s, the NSF patted itself on the back in a series of reports, conferences, and articles. “The ultimate effect of the Innovation Centers,” it stated, would be “the regrowth of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the American economic system.” The NSF claimed that the experiment produced dozens of new ventures with US $20 million in gross revenue, employed nearly 800 people, and yielded $4 million in tax revenue. Yet, by 1979, license returns from intellectual property had generated only $100,000. “Today, the legacies of the NSF experiment are visible on nearly every college campus.” Critics included Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who pointed to the banana peelers, video games, and sports equipment pursued in the centers to lambast them as “wasteful federal spending” of “questionable benefit to the American taxpayer.” And so the impacts of the NSF’s Innovation Center experiment weren’t immediately obvious. Many faculty and administrators of that era were still apt to view such programs as frivolous, nonacademic, or not worth the investment.
The timing of benefits matters to families, and doesn't change costs for governments
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ. The post How Much Energy Does It Take To Think? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
