Scientists checked, and even my dreams are just me again

🔥 Most Enraging

Apple is trying to build smart glasses that spy on people a little less rudely

Apple is working on a pair of smart glasses, and the selling point is that they will spy on everyone a little less rudely than the other brands do. No face-scanning, they promise, no strangers reviewing your footage. Which is fine, except the glasses still have a camera aimed at whoever you are talking to. It is the courteous version of a world where everyone is filming everyone. I would rather nobody wore the camera at all, but that boat left without me.

😩 Most Exhausting

Why Jupiter has several giant moons but Saturn has only Titan

Scientists worked out why Jupiter has a whole set of big moons and Saturn has just the one, and it comes down to young Jupiter having a stronger magnetic field, which cleared a safe lane and kept its moons from wandering off and getting lost. Saturn, weaker, lost all of them but Titan. So even the planets keep the ones they can hold onto and misplace the rest. I understand the arrangement. I have lost track of most of what I started with, too.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Snapchat now broadcasts what you're listening to in real time

Snapchat has added a feature that broadcasts, on a map, in real time, exactly what song you are listening to, so everyone you know can watch it play. Their head of music called it a way of bringing friends closer. It is opt-in, thank goodness, which is the only reason I will die never having used it. Some of us play the same four albums in private on purpose. The privacy was the entire point.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

A man juggled flaming torches on a unicycle and burned off his own eyebrows

A man in Idaho set a world record juggling flaming torches on a unicycle, and lost both his eyebrows doing it, because it turns out pedaling forward blows the fire straight back into your face, which no rulebook thought to mention. He described himself going in as brimming with unearned confidence. There is a sentence I have felt in my bones and never had the nerve to write down about myself. He has the singed eyebrows to prove it, and I do not.

▸ These insect submariners survive depths that should crush them — There is a lake fly larva in Africa that dives two hundred meters down every single day, into water with no oxygen and enough pressure to flatten most things, using two little air sacs it inflates and deflates by changing its own acidity. Billions of them do it, on schedule, to hide from the fish. A speck of a bug has better diving gear than the navy. I get a head cold from a window left slightly open.

▸ A 500,000-year-old elephant bone hammer shows ancient humans were master toolmakers — Archaeologists in England took another look at a lump of fossil dug up back in the nineties and realized it was a tool, a five-hundred-thousand-year-old hammer made of elephant bone, used to sharpen stone blades. Half a million years ago somebody chose the rare bone on purpose because it worked better. They were planning ahead before we were even us. I cannot plan far enough ahead to defrost anything for dinner.

▸ A family's dog turned up 642 miles away, five years after he ran off — A family in Nebraska got their dog back five years after he ran off, when he turned up at a truck stop in Indiana, six hundred and forty miles from home. Nobody knows where Chong spent those five years or how he got two states over. He is not saying. But he is home now, older and mysterious and entirely unbothered. I would love to know his story. I suspect it is better than mine.

Fine. A woman in China named Liu Defang, seventy-one years old, who only learned to swim a few years ago, after she retired, heard a commotion by the river and saw a man going under, and went straight in after him. He was half her age and panicking, which is the hardest kind to pull out of the water, and she got a float to him and hauled him back to shore anyway. Then she went home and did not tell her family, for fear they would worry. Seventy-one, learned to swim on a whim in retirement, and used it to drag a drowning stranger out of a river. I am going to sit with that one for a minute.