Nobody would say whose job the rotting fish sauce was, so a town smelled it for twenty years

🔥 Most Enraging

Florida is spending EV charger money on landing pads for air taxis

Florida is taking nearly two hundred million dollars allocated for electric car chargers and using it to build thirty-two landing pads for flying taxis. The state says private companies have the charging covered, though Florida has fewer chargers per car than the national average. The pads are going at golf courses, luxury apartment buildings, and airports. The aircraft seat four. The money for the thing regular people plug into is now for the thing that lands at the golf course.

😩 Most Exhausting

A 4,000-year-old city got more equal as it got richer

Archaeologists measured house sizes across Mohenjo-daro and found that as the city got wealthier, the gap between the biggest houses and the smallest narrowed, until it was no wider than the gap in a farming village. No palaces. No royal tombs. No statues of anybody. They spent the money on drainage and street layout instead. Four thousand years ago, in the Indus Valley, they looked at a surplus and built a sewer for everyone. I have watched what we do with a surplus.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

We may have been listening for aliens on the wrong frequencies

For decades the search for alien radio signals has concentrated on a narrow band around 1.4 gigahertz, on the theory that anyone broadcasting would pick the obvious spot. A researcher in Manchester points out the millimetre bands above it are almost entirely unsearched. She also went back through the old surveys and found they covered about six million stars, not the two hundred and eighty-eight thousand everyone assumed. So we have listened to far more of the sky than we knew, on the one frequency we picked for them in advance.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

An iguana burst out of its box and cleared a FedEx store

A man in Memphis went to a FedEx store to collect his new pet iguana, and the staff asked to see inside the box marked live animal. He opened it. The iguana, named Titan, went straight over the counter and the employees ran. He had expected it to play dead. Instead it came out, in the owner's words, ready for all the smoke. I have never in my life been ready for all the smoke.

▸ Why there are so many dead bumblebees on the sidewalk — A zoologist explains the bumblebees you find on the pavement in summer. A worker lives four to six weeks, and the hive carries its dead outside to keep disease down, so some of those bodies are just the arithmetic of a short life. The rest is heat, pesticides, and nowhere left to feed. European wild bee species at risk of extinction went from seventy-seven in 2014 to a hundred and seventy-two. You can revive a struggling one with sugar water, so now I will be stopping for every bee on the pavement.

▸ A daily multivitamin helped older adults stay independent — Sixteen thousand people over sixty were followed for three years, and the ones taking a daily multivitamin reported doing better at the ordinary business of the day: dressing, bathing, the stairs, the chores, without having to sit down partway. Not disease prevention. Just function. The researchers were careful to say it is no substitute for a decent diet, and that this has not been peer reviewed yet. I have been taking one for years on no evidence at all, so this is a nice change.

▸ Fifteen pigs got loose on a New Jersey road — Animal control and the state police were called out to Route 565 in Frankford Township at twenty to nine in the morning because about fifteen pigs were loose and, in the official phrasing, creating a hazard for motorists. The owner turned up and helped. Everyone got home. The shelter's statement afterwards was mostly a polite request that people stop filming the pigs while driving past them, which tells you what the actual hazard was.

Fine. The UN's food agency published its annual report this week, and the share of people in the world who do not have enough to eat has fallen below eight percent for the first time since the pandemic. Seven point eight. Southeast Asia has gone from 11.6 percent to 5.1 since 2010. Africa is still the hard part, above twenty percent in places, and the report says so plainly rather than burying it. But the number has now gone down three years running. I have spent a long time assuming these numbers only move one way. I would like it noted that I was wrong.