Feisty otters, perfect cookies, and a rare bird heist

...plus 7 more things I discovered this week

Author

Leonie Mercedes
October 24, 2025

Hello, friends! Here are 10 things I didn’t know last week:

1. In 2009, a music student stole nearly 300 rare bird specimens from the Natural History Museum at Tring. The heister was keen on making fly-fishing lures, and had read that the birds’ feathers could fetch a pretty penny. “He broke into the Natural History Museum, toting a large suitcase, gloves, and a glass cutter,” writes Bob Grant in Nautilus, “[making] off with 299 bird specimens, mostly males of tropical species… with vivid feathers.”

2. Breathing through the bum is well on its way to becoming a reality. The Ig Nobel-winning method of delivering oxygen through the rectum has been shown to be safe in its first ever human clinical trial. It’s hoped the method could help those who struggle to breathe through their lungs.

3. Due to how its proteins coagulate, more egg yolk in cookie dough will make for a fudgier cookie. Professional food nerd J. Kenji López-Alt baked 1,526 articles of the baked good to crack the formula for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. In a gloriously detailed piece for Serious Eats, he writes that when cooked, “egg yolk forms a tender protein coagulum that can keep cookies tender and fudge-like”. brb, just going to whip up another batch. For science.

4. America’s bald eagle population – which reached fewer than 500 nesting pairs in the ’60s – began to recover after the ban of DDT. DDT is a pesticide that was used in the years after the Second World War to control mosquitoes. Bald eagles would absorb the chemical through the contaminated fish they ate, which weakened the shells of their eggs and seriously curbed their ability to reproduce. The 1972 ban of DDT, along with measures to protect the birds’ habitats, dramatically changed their fortunes for the better. There are now more than 70,000 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the US.

5. Back in 2004, it took about a year to install a gigawatt of solar power capacity. Now it takes just a day.

6. Straight after blowing his admission interview for Columbia College at the age of 15, Isaac Asimov spotted Albert Einstein before following him around a museum. He writes in The Subatomic Monster:

“I stopped off in a museum to recover, for I had no illusions as to my chances after that interview… But wandering in a semi-dazed condition through the rooms, I saw Albert Einstein, and wasn’t so dead to the world around me that I didn’t recognise him at once.

From then on, for half an hour, I followed him patiently from room to room, looking at nothing else, merely staring at him. I wasn’t alone; there were others doing the same. No one said a word, no one approached him for an autograph or for any other purpose; everyone merely stared. Einstein paid no attention whatever; I assume he was used to it.”

8. Many vipers bite their targets within 0.1 seconds of lunging, faster than most mammals will startle. For a study published yesterday, researchers took 100 high-speed videos of various snake species striking fake prey, finding that the serpents take down their prey in three different ways. When coaxing the snakes to strike, “I flinched a couple of times,” study co-author Silke Cleuren said in a statement.

9. Metal vocalists contort their vocal tracts in ways that may protect their singing equipment. Clinical speech-language pathologist and self-described metalhead Amanda Stark is studying the singers’ throats to work out how they create their devil-summoning sounds. Her work could go on to help vocal coaches, as well as those suffering from vocal disorders.

Thanks for coming! See you next week x