I used to worry about the wings

🔥 Most Enraging

A company two months old just raised one point one billion dollars

An artificial intelligence company called River came out of stealth in June and has now raised one point one billion dollars. General Catalyst led the round, and Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek all put money in. What exists so far is a service that lets developers take open models and fine-tune them into private versions of their own. The founder's pitch is that one day your assistant will know you well and will be yours, not someone else's. I have condiments in my refrigerator older than this company.

😩 Most Exhausting

The molten iron under the Pacific turned around and nobody knows why

For years the settled reading of Earth's outer core was that most of the liquid iron down there was drifting slowly westward. In 2010 a wide region of it beneath the equatorial Pacific turned around, and has been moving eastward ever since, faster than it was ever going the other way. Nobody knows what caused it. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh pieced this together from European satellite readings and ground measurements going back to 1997, and say the surge has already begun to fade. The part of the planet that makes a compass work has moods.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

The meteorite that came through a New Jersey ceiling was carrying amino acids

In July 2024 something roughly the size of a heavy airline bag crossed the sky over New York in broad daylight, broke apart, and put a two-pound lump through the roof of a house in Hillsborough, New Jersey. The homeowner heard the crash, found the hole in his bedroom ceiling, smelled sulfur, put on gloves and gathered what he could into aluminum foil and glass jars. Analysis published this month found salty fluids, organic compounds and amino acids from a primitive asteroid. It was the only meteorite anyone recovered from that fall, and only because it came down through a roof.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

A pet goose honked until a Texas family woke up and found the barn on fire

Bert Gerber of Fort Bend County fell asleep in front of the television last week and was woken by the honking of the family's pet goose. He went outside and found flames coming out of the barn behind the house. He put them out with a garden hose and every animal in the barn got out unharmed. The goose is called Goosey and arrived in May because the Gerbers' daughter Elaine wanted him. The security camera caught all of it. A bird did the work of a smoke alarm and will be impossible to live with now.

▸ Someone was engraving grids onto ostrich eggshells sixty thousand years ago — More than sixty thousand years ago, people in southern Africa were cutting patterns into ostrich eggshells, which they used as containers for water. A team led from the University of Bologna measured the lines on fragments from two sites in South Africa and one in Namibia and found the same rules coming up over and over: parallel lines, right angles, grids, shapes rotated and repeated. Silvia Ferrara, who coordinated the study, calls it a visual grammar in embryo, and thinks the whole design was in the maker's head before the first cut.

▸ Thousands of years of potatoes left a mark on the people who ate them — Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes were the first to domesticate the potato, somewhere between six and ten thousand years ago, and it became the thing they lived on. Researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo have found that their descendants now carry more copies of the gene behind the saliva enzyme that breaks down starch than any other population on record. The selection appears to have begun around the time the potato took hold in the highlands. The potato got into the DNA.

▸ NASA did something irreversible to Voyager 2 to buy it another year — Voyager 2 is nearly fifty years old and loses about four watts a year as the plutonium in its generator decays. To free up power for its last three instruments, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory shut down a set of components that were still running. The systems are wired together so tightly that the project manager, Suzanne Dodd, said there would be no do-overs. It worked, and it buys at least one more year of data from out there.

Fine. Professional women's baseball is being played in this country again for the first time since 1954, which is when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League folded. The new one is the Women's Professional Baseball League. It has four teams, all of them playing in Springfield, Illinois, and it opened on the first of August with a thirty-game season that runs through September. In the opening game the LA Queens came from behind in the last inning to beat the NY Heights. The league's first home run went to Denae Benites, who also got a hit in every one of her four turns at bat and stole three bases. Seventy-two years is a long time between innings.