Live! from 3,000m under the sea, levitation, and foraging for sugar highs

Hello, friends!

Did you have this when you were a child?

The library would give you a little card at the top of the summer holidays, and on the card there were six boxes, one for each week before back to school.

Each week you’d borrow a book to read over the next seven days, and when you returned the book – having read it, of course – you’d get a stamp in a box on your card. Six weeks, six stamps, a sense of accomplishment I don’t think I’ve ever felt since.

This summer I’ve decided to revive this tradition, to give some shape to my summer (I’m working all the way through!) and get some books actually read, like, cover to cover, rather than the odd chapter here and there.

I’m starting with Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour, a look at the cultural history of 75 different colours and pigments. One such shade is isabelline, a dark yellow said to be named for a 17th century sovereign who vowed not to change her underwear until her husband returned from the Siege of Ostend.

The Siege of Ostend went on for three years.

Anyway, coming up:

🍟 why having fries with ketchup is about to feel problematic

🫖 where to spot a teapot in the sky tonight

💡 the 19th century woman we have to thank for brake pads

Let’s go!

read all about it

Tomatoes may be the mother of potatoes: “Dipping fries into ketchup just got a little more mind-bending,” writes Katherine J. Wu in this look at the genetic history of everyone’s favourite tuber. A blueprint for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, if we did those for vegetables. (The Atlantic)

Baby born from an embryo frozen more than 30 years ago: Lindsey and Tim Pierce, the baby’s parents, “adopted” the embryo from a woman who created it in 1994. Lindsey says her family and church family think “it’s like something from a sci-fi movie”. She continues: “We thought it was wild… We didn’t know they froze embryos that long ago.” (MIT Technology Review)

Male leopard seals sing nursery rhymes… for hours: “Leopard seal songs have a surprisingly structured temporal pattern,” says Lucinda Chambers, lead author of the study. “When we compared their songs to other studies of vocal animals and of human music, we found that their information entropy – a measure of how predictable or random a sequence is – was remarkably close to our own nursery rhymes.” (Discover)

🎥 Deepsea livestream: Discover the strange and beautiful creatures living more than 3,000 metres under the sea in this livestream of Argentina’s Mar del Plata Canyon. (Schmidt Ocean)

that time when…

Bertha Benz took the first ever road trip (5 August 1888)

On a summer morning in 1888, Bertha Benz packed her teenage sons into an early motor car and hit the road, on what would be the first ever long-distance car journey.

Still sleeping soundly, and completely oblivious, was her husband Karl. They’d pushed the car out of his workshop and away from the house before starting it up, so they wouldn’t wake him.

The plan was to drive from their home in Mannheim to Bertha’s mother’s in Pforzheim, a 60ish-mile journey, and back again. But everything was new – it would be years before garages or petrol stations appeared on the route.

She solved problems on the way as they arose, using her hat pin to unclog a blocked fuel pipe and a garter to fix the ignition. When the brake blocks wore out, she got a cobbler to fit leather strips to the brakes, effectively inventing brake pads.

To gas up, they stopped at a chemist for ligroin, a solvent that worked as a fuel for the proto-car.

This literal trailblazer’s journey is immortalised in the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.

what’s happening this week?

Your agenda for Monday 4 August – Sunday 10 August.

All times are BST, and all sky views are from London.

look around you

🔭 in a sky near you: Spy a little teapot. If you’ve got a good view of the southern horizon, look just above it for the teapot-shaped asterism in Sagittarius at about 10pm, when the spout will be pointing roughly towards a waxing Moon. No rush on this one, it’ll be pouring one out in this location at about this time for the rest of the month.

👀 closer to Earth: Keep noses out for honeysuckle. The yellow and white trumpets of this climbing plant, seen in woodlands, hedgerows, and some fancy front gardens, are pumping out their sweet scent in the evenings, a come hither signal for pollinating moths.

But wait, there’s more: Roughly a million years ago I was introduced to the bead of super-sweet nectar that lives inside each of these flowers, which can be extracted by gently pulling the pistil through the bloom’s bottom. This was a magical moment for 8-year-old me (that I‘m hoping the moths forgive me for). If you have kids or are kid-adjacent, consider sharing this mind-blowing moment with them.

online talks and events

No online talks or events I could find this week either. 😞

Instead, please enjoy this clip of a levitating counter whizz round a magnetic track:

we need answers

Last week I asked:

He’d discovered that the bubbles in champagne, when tasted, are actually marvellous and not a defect. Dom Perignon is the monk said to have made this suspiciously poetic remark in an exciting moment of discovery, though this is likely bollo.

until next week…

When Marie Cordery was born under unusual circumstances in 1924, newspapers reported that she’d been christened Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor. Why?

Answer comes next week. See you then! x