Fat bears, clean pigs, and plants that smell like alarmed ants

Hello, friends! Here are 10 things I discovered this week:

1. Seamstresses with a day job in bra-making assembled the Apollo spacesuits. When NASA needed pressure suits that would protect Neil and Buzz against the harsh environment of the Moon, Playtex, maker of girdles and other assorted undergarments, won the contract. The skills of the seamstresses, pattern cutters, and makers of the company’s sewing room floor – all women – would be crucial for piecing together the wearable life support systems. “To meet NASA’s exacting standards,” writes Kassia St Clair in The Golden Thread, “seams could deviate no more than 1/64 of an inch.”

2. After an “extraordinary” run of salmon, Fat Bear Week has fallen earlier this year. See the bears’ magnificent transformations and cast your vote for the best.

3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea that the human soul weighs 21 grams is based on a pretty dubious experiment. Turns out, weighing people at the point of death is a tricky business.

4. There’s a “superclean” farm in China where pigs are raised for their transplantable organs. Mary Roach, who visited the farm when researching her book Replaceable You, related this observation to reporter Rachel Feltman on Science Quickly: “The pigs are tested for 40 different bacteria and viruses and fungi. Everything is disinfected every three days. The food gets irradiated. I mean, it’s an amazing operation. And then you look at the screen, and, like, there’s a pig taking a crap.”

5. The life of Ötzi the Iceman, in Playmobil.

6. A man measured the average speed of his fingernail growth for 35 years. William B. Bean, who was posthumously honoured at the 2025 Ig Nobel ceremony last week, started his observations in 1941. He published his findings from the first decade in this 1952 paper, and would continue to publish updates until 1980.

7. This plant attracts pollinators by making itself smell like half-eaten ants. This particular species of dogbane, only named last year, mimics the scent ants give off as an alarm call to their anty brethren when they’re under attack.

8. Taylor Swift is helping researchers work out why our accents may change during our lives. Swift’s southern twang has faded during the course of her career, presenting a rich case study for researchers looking to work out how a person’s dialect may change with time. She’s “essentially been followed around with the microphone most of her adult life,” says audiologist and study author Matthew Winn.

9. This tinker reverse engineered San Francisco’s parking ticket system to help drivers avoid cops.

10. Tomorrow is a mathematically beautiful date. Whether you write it the right way (27/09/2025) or the insane way (09/27/2025), we can all enjoy that tomorrow’s date is a perfect square. Write the date down without the slashes, and you get either 27,092,025, which is 5,205 squared, or 9,272,025, which is 3,045 squared. Maths explainer (and my new favourite person) Howie Hua breaks it down in this video.

Thanks for coming! See you next Friday x