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In certain dialects of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, the word for ‘four’ sounds very similar to the word for ‘death’1. Consequently, the number 4 is considered by many people in East Asian nations to be unlucky. It is not unusual for buildings in that region to skip the number 4 when labeling floors, much in the same way 13th floors are omitted in some parts of the world2. In Hong Kong, at least one skyscraper avoids the proper numbering for floors 40-49. Four is the smallest positive non-prime number3. It is the only natural number where one can get the same result by multiplying its square roots (2×2), or adding them (2+2). Four happens to be the only number that has the same number of letters as its actual value4. The four color theorem tells us that four is an adequate number of colors for any two dimensional map–no two bordering regions would need to share a color. Four is the number of bonds that a carbon atom can make, which is why life can exist, a quality known as tetravalency. Fear of the number four is known as tetraphobia, and anyone suffering from it has almost certainly stopped reading by now, or at least uttered some four-letter words. It’s no secret that direct donations to Damn Interesting have been on a downward trend in recent years, so we are aiming to diversify. To that end, we’ve made something new, and it’s called Omiword. Continue reading ▶
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 ▶
More in science
An updated evolutionary model shows that living systems evolve in a split-and-hit-the-gas dynamic, where new lineages appear in sudden bursts rather than during a long marathon of gradual changes. The post The Sudden Surges That Forge Evolutionary Trees first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Millions of people worldwide have reason to be thankful that Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist decided not to practice medicine. Although qualified as a doctor, he chose to invent medical equipment instead. In 1949, while working at Elema-Schonander (later Siemens-Elema), in Stockholm, he applied for a patent for the Mingograph, the first inkjet printer. Its movable nozzle deposited an electrostatically controlled jet of ink droplets on a spool of paper. Rune Elmqvist qualified to be a physician, but he devoted his career to developing medical equipment, like this galvanometer.Håkan Elmqvist/Wikipedia Elmqvist demonstrated the Mingograph at the First International Congress of Cardiology in Paris in 1950. It could record physiological signals from a patient’s electrocardiogram or electroencephalogram in real time, aiding doctors in diagnosing heart and brain conditions. Eight years later, he worked with cardiac surgeon Åke Senning to develop the first fully implantable pacemaker. So whether you’re running documents through an inkjet printer or living your best life due to a pacemaker, give a nod of appreciation to the inventive Dr. Elmqvist. The world’s first inkjet printer Rune Elmqvist was an inquisitive person. While still a student, he invented a specialized potentiometer to measure pH and a portable multichannel electrocardiograph. In 1940, he became head of development at the Swedish medical electronics company Elema-Schonander. Before the Mingograph, electrocardiograph machines relied on a writing stylus to trace the waveform on a moving roll of paper. But friction between the stylus and the paper prevented small changes in the electrical signal from being accurately recorded. Elmqvist’s initial design was a modified oscillograph. Traditionally, an oscillograph used a mirror to reflect a beam of light (converted from the electrical signal) onto photographic film or paper. Elmqvist swapped out the mirror for a small, moveable glass nozzle that continuously sprayed a thin stream of liquid onto a spool of paper. The electrical signal electrostatically controlled the jet. The Mingograph was originally used to record electrocardiograms of heart patients. It soon found use in many other fields.Siemens Healthineers Historical Institute By eliminating the friction of a stylus, the Mingograph (which the company marketed as the Mingograf) was able to record more detailed changes of the heartbeat. The machine had three paper-feed speeds: 10, 25, and 50 millimeters per second. The speed could be preset or changed while in operation. RELATED: The Inventions That Made Heart Disease Less Deadly An analog input jack on the Mingograph could be used to take measurements from other instruments. Researchers in disciplines far afield from medicine took advantage of this input to record pressure or sound. Phoneticians used it to examine the acoustic aspects of speech, and zoologists used it to record birdsongs. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, scientists cited the Mingograph in their research papers as an instrument for their experiments. Today, the Mingograph isn’t that widely known, but the underlying technology, inkjet printing, is ubiquitous. Inkjets dominate the home printer market, and specialized printers print DNA microarrays in labs for genomics research, create electrical traces for printed circuit boards, and much more, as Phillip W. Barth and Leslie A. Field describe in their 2024 IEEE Spectrum article “Inkjets Are for More Than Just Printing.” The world’s first implantable pacemaker Despite the influence of the Mingograph on the evolution of printing, it is arguably not Elmqvist’s most important innovation. The Mingograph helped doctors diagnose heart conditions, but it couldn’t save a patient’s life by itself. One of Elmqvist’s other inventions could and did: the first fully implantable, rechargeable pacemaker. The first implantable pacemaker [left] from 1958 had batteries that needed to be recharged once a week. The 1983 pacemaker [right] was programmable, and its batteries lasted several years.Siemens Healthineers Historical Institute Like many stories in the history of technology, this one was pushed into fruition at the urging of a woman, in this case Else-Marie Larsson. Else-Marie’s 43-year-old husband, Arne, suffered from scarring of his heart tissue due to a viral infection. His heart beat so slowly that he constantly lost consciousness, a condition known as Stokes-Adams syndrome. Else-Marie refused to accept his death sentence and searched for an alternative. After reading a newspaper article about an experimental implantable pacemaker being developed by Elmqvist and Senning at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, she decided that her husband would be the perfect candidate to test it out, even though it had been tried only on animals up until that point. External pacemakers—that is, devices outside the body that regulated the heart beat by applying electricity—already existed, but they were heavy, bulky, and uncomfortable. One early model plugged directly into a wall socket, so the user risked electric shock. By comparison, Elmqvist’s pacemaker was small enough to be implanted in the body and posed no shock risk. Fully encased in an epoxy resin, the disk-shaped device had a diameter of 55 mm and a thickness of 16 mm—the dimensions of the Kiwi Shoe Polish tin in which Elmqvist molded the first prototypes. It used silicon transistors to pace a pulse with an amplitude of 2 volts and duration of 1.5 milliseconds, at a rate of 70 to 80 beats per minute (the average adult heart rate). The pacemaker ran on two rechargeable 60-milliampere-hour nickel-cadmium batteries arranged in series. A silicon diode connected the batteries to a coil antenna. A 150-kilohertz radio loop antenna outside the body charged the batteries inductively through the skin. The charge lasted about a week, but it took 12 hours to recharge. Imagine having to stay put that long. In 1958, over 30 years before this photo, Arne Larsson [right] received the first implantable pacemaker, developed by Rune Elmqvist [left] at Siemens-Elema. Åke Senning [center] performed the surgery.Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Images Else-Marie’s persuasion and persistence pushed Elmqvist and Senning to move from animal tests to human trials, with Arne as their first case study. During a secret operation on 8 October 1958, Senning placed the pacemaker in Arne’s abdomen wall with two leads implanted in the myocardium, a layer of muscle in the wall of the heart. The device lasted only a few hours. But its replacement, which happened to be the only spare at the time, worked perfectly for six weeks and then off and on for several more years. Arne Larsson lived another 43 years after his first pacemaker was implanted. Shown here are five of the pacemakers he received. Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Images Arne Larsson clearly was happy with the improvement the pacemaker made to his quality of life because he endured 25 more operations over his lifetime to replace each failing pacemaker with a new, improved iteration. He managed to outlive both Elmqvist and Senning, finally dying at the age of 86 on 28 December 2001. Thanks to the technological intervention of his numerous pacemakers, his heart never gave out. His cause of death was skin cancer. Today, more than a million people worldwide have pacemakers implanted each year, and an implanted device can last up to 15 years before needing to be replaced. (Some pacemakers in the 1980s used nuclear batteries, which could last even longer, but the radioactive material was problematic. See “The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries.”) Additionally, some pacemakers also incorporate a defibrillator to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm when it gets too far out of sync. This lifesaving device certainly has come a long way from its humble start in a shoe polish tin. Rune Elmqvist’s legacy Whenever I start researching the object of the month for Past Forward, I never know where the story will take me or how it might hit home. My dad lived with congestive heart failure for more than two decades and absolutely loved his pacemaker. He had a great relationship with his technician, Francois, and they worked together to fine-tune the device and maximize its benefits. And just like Arne Larsson, my dad died from an unrelated cause. An engineer to the core, he would have delighted in learning about the history of this fantastic invention. And he probably would have been tickled by the fact that the same person also invented the inkjet printer. My dad was not a fan of inkjets, but I’m sure he would have greatly admired Rune Elmqvist, who saw problems that needed solving and came up with elegantly engineered solutions. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2025 print issue. References There is frustratingly little documented information about the Mingograph’s origin story or functionality other than its patent. I pieced together how it worked by reading the methodology sections of various scientific papers, such as Alf Nachemson’s 1960 article in Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica, “Lumbar Intradiscal Pressure: Experimental Studies on Post-mortem Material”; Ingemar Hjorth’s 1970 article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, “A Comment on Graphic Displays of Bird Sounds and Analyses With a New Device, the Melograph Mona”; and Paroo Nihalani’s 1975 article in Phonetica, “Velopharyngeal Opening in the Formation of Voiced Stops in Sindhi.” Such sources reveal how this early inkjet printer moved from cardiology into other fields. Descriptions of Elmqvist’s pacemaker were much easier to find, with Mark Nicholls’s 2007 profile “Pioneers of Cardiology: Rune Elmqvist, M.D.,” in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, being the main source. Siemens also pays tribute to the pacemaker on its website; see, for example, “A Lifesaver in a Plastic Cup.”
Back in the dawn of the 21st century, the American Chemical Society founded a new journal, Nano Letters, to feature letters-length papers about nanoscience and nanotechnology. This was coincident with the launch of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and it was back before several other publishers put out their own nano-focused journals. For a couple of years now I've been an associate editor at NL, and it was a lot of fun to work with my fellow editors on putting together this roadmap, intended to give a snapshot of what we think the next quarter century might hold. I think some of my readers will get a kick out of it.
Episode five of the Works in Progress podcast is about why China outbuilds America
Animals of all kinds mix and mingle in underground burrows, offering troubling opportunities for diseases to jump species. Read more on E360 →
