My fence needed a permit. Sixty-nine gas turbines did not.

🔥 Most Enraging

Startups with venture money are more likely to end up in fraud cases

Researchers in Toronto compared American startups that took venture money with those that did not, and found the venture-backed ones were likelier to end up facing fraud charges. One of the researchers says the problem is not only the founders but the people setting unreasonable expectations of high growth, and that investors help it along by continuing to fund founders already accused of fraud. The money asks for a number, and somebody produces a number.

😩 Most Exhausting

An AI reads your sleeping brain and tells you how old it really is

Researchers put the overnight brain recordings of seven thousand people through a machine that returns a brain age, and found that if yours runs ten years ahead of your real one, your risk of dementia goes up by about forty percent. It held after they adjusted for education, smoking, weight, exercise and genetics. The first author's summary was that there is no magic pill. So there is now a number for how old I am on the inside, and nothing to be done about it.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

A 42-year-old theory about childhood weight may have been measuring nothing

In 1984 a French researcher noticed that a child's body mass index falls to a low around age four and starts climbing again around six, and called it the adiposity rebound. For forty-two years it has been treated as an early warning sign for obesity. Someone has now measured two thousand four hundred children by waist-to-height ratio instead, and the fat does not rebound at all. The climb is muscle. Four decades of alarm about a number that was rising for a perfectly good reason.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

Ohio police hunted a wild cat and found somebody's escaped pet

Police in Olmsted Township went out on a report of a wild cat loose in a residential neighborhood and found a Savannah cat, which is a house cat crossed with an African serval, and which had got out of somebody's house. It ran into the woods. Officers, sheriff's deputies and the owner then spent a while failing to catch it with a snare. The most dangerous animal in Olmsted Township turned out to be a pet with a serval somewhere in the family.

▸ A new alloy is up to ten times stronger than steel and still bends — Engineers at Purdue took cobalt-aluminum, which normally shatters, and built it up in thin sputtered layers until it was between six and ten times as strong as structural steel and could still be squashed fifteen percent out of shape without cracking. They want it for turbine blades and jet engines. Strong and flexible at the same time is a trick I have never once pulled off.

▸ A beagle ate 2.4 pounds of gummy worms and has no regrets — A three-year-old beagle called Scooter got into an entire bag of what Australians call jelly snakes and was rushed to an emergency clinic, where they induced vomiting on account of the sugar and got all two point four pounds back. Her sibling Jada was treated as a precaution and brought up exactly one jelly snake. The clinic posted that Scooter rated the experience ten out of ten and would do it again.

▸ A process turns unsorted plastic waste into hydrogen and traps most of the carbon — Chemists at UCLA and Ewha Womans University in Seoul found that cooking mixed plastic with sodium hydroxide gives you hydrogen at over ninety percent purity without having to sort the plastic first, and the carbon comes out as a solid instead of going up the chimney. Over three quarters of the carbon stays locked in. The reaction runs three to four hundred degrees cooler than the usual method. Somebody has finally found a use for the tub the yogurt came in.

Fine. A woman at John Wayne Airport in California filmed a man limping across the tarmac and put it online. He is James Blair, sixty-four, a Navy veteran who has worked there as a fuel mechanic since 2006, and he was still out there on ruined knees because his wages were paying for his mother's hospice care. Strangers sent him more than a hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars, across six thousand separate donations. He has bought himself a bed. He said he had believed in God without really meaning it, and that he means it now. I am not going to add anything to that.