Interesting Things with JC

Interesting Things with JC #1781: "The Carnyx" – Celtic warriors raised bronze carnyxes nearly 10 feet high, blasting sound through open animal jaws above the battlefield. One surviving boar head had a hinged jaw and movable tongue that could rattle as it played, while seven carnyxes later found at a Gallic sanctuary showed the same instrument belonged beyond war.

Interesting Things with JC #1780: "The Hoover Dam Angels" – Visitors rub the bronze toes of Hoover Dam's 30-foot angels for good luck, unaware that the floor beneath them contains a star chart designed to reveal the dam's dedication date thousands of years in the future. The figures stand above an astronomical record that accounts for the slow wobble of Earth's axis.

Interesting Things with JC #1779: "The Encryption Keys Inside the Camera" – Hackers examine a stolen Flock camera and find an encryption key stored inside the device. Recordings meant to remain protected after theft become accessible, including approximately 1.6 million images and more than 27,000 video clips.

Interesting Things with JC #1778: "The Waffle House Hero" – James Shaw Jr. is trapped inside a Waffle House as a gunman fires through the restaurant, then the shooting stops. Shaw rushes the gunman, grabs the hot rifle barrel with his bare hand, wrestles the weapon away, and later turns the attention on him into more than $240,000 for the victims’ families.

Interesting Things with JC #1777: "Your Mind Controls Your Age" – Adults who viewed their own aging more positively lived an average of 7.5 years longer in a long-running Yale study. Across other studies, people who felt younger also walked faster and declined less over time, while researchers continue to examine how expectations about aging interact with behavior, health, and longevity.

Interesting Things with JC #1776: "Ellen Langer - Counterclockwise" – In 1979, elderly men entered a retreat rebuilt as 1959 and were told to live as though twenty years had disappeared. Days later, researchers measured changes.

Interesting Things with JC #1775: "The Signal Einstein Thought We Might Never Hear" – Two LIGO detectors register the same gravitational-wave signal seven milliseconds apart as two black holes merge 1.3 billion light-years away. The signal lasts about two-tenths of a second, while the instruments measure changes smaller than the width of a proton after decades of attempts failed to detect one.

Interesting Things with JC #1774: "Uncle Sam Day" – Samuel Wilson is supplying beef to American troops in barrels marked “U.S.” when people begin connecting the initials with the Troy businessman they call Uncle Sam. The nickname spreads beyond the barrels, becomes a name for the U.S. government, and eventually turns Wilson’s September 13 birthday into an officially designated Uncle Sam Day.

Interesting Things with JC #1773: "The Clock Behind Instant Replay" – Two instant-replay feeds showing the same moment can reach officials milliseconds apart. Every step through processing, switching, transmission, encoding, and decoding can add hidden latency, so replay has to determine when each frame actually occurred instead of trusting when it arrived.

Interesting Things with JC #1772: "Staten Island Remembers" – At Staten Island’s Postcards memorial, 274 individual plaques face across New York Harbor toward the place where the Twin Towers once stood. Many families represented there received no identifiable remains, making the waterfront memorial the closest thing they had to a gravesite, while a second memorial records first responders who died...

Interesting Things with JC #1771: "Debut of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" - The original Fresh Prince theme was much longer. In the video for the opening, Will packed and then flew first class, landed in LA and met his ride before there was ever a famous cab. Most of that trip was left on the cutting room floor!

Interesting Things with JC #1770: "When a Parasite Rewires Behavior to Spread Itself" – Infected Texas field crickets were sterile or producing barely moving sperm, but they kept mating, and infected males courted females sooner than healthy males. The virus was disrupting the immune signals that normally slow courtship during illness while still spreading through sexual contact.

Interesting Things with JC #1769: "Football Brain Injury Cover Up" – Dr. Bennet Omalu found CTE in Mike Webster’s brain, and the NFL’s concussion committee challenged the published finding and called for its retraction. More former players were diagnosed after death, and twelve years later researchers found CTE in 110 of 111 donated brains from former NFL players.

Interesting Things with JC #1768: "The Science of Jealousy" – Jealousy can fire before there is proof: attention shifts, suspicion locks in, and the brain starts tracking details and possible rivals. The threat may not be real, but the alarm already is.

Interesting Things with JC #1767: "The Spider-Man of Paris" – A four-year-old boy hangs from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. Mamoudou Gassama climbs the building with his bare hands and reaches him in about 30 seconds.

Interesting Things with JC #1766: "Autistici/Inventati - The Network Behind the Network" – Autistici/Inventati runs encrypted email, private chats, websites and other infrastructure designed to make users harder to monitor. By 2026, violent radical groups and the PKK were among those using its services, while U.S. authorities say the collective screened applicants and provided access to groups it...

Interesting Things with JC #1765: "The FBI Surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr." – The FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. without a criminal charge and failed to establish that he or the SCLC was controlled by communists. The surveillance expanded into hotel microphones and private recordings, and FBI officials began using what they collected in efforts to discredit King and weaken his influe...

Interesting Things with JC #1764: "The Treaty of Paris" – Britain signs the Treaty of Paris recognizing all thirteen American states as “free sovereign and Independent States” and giving up its claim to govern them. The United States controls its own government and territory extending west to the Mississippi, while Britain agrees to withdraw its forces and deal with the new nation as an independen...

Interesting Things with JC #1763: "Looking for Quantum Gravity with Light" – Scientists are firing lasers through interferometers to detect quantum gravity without reaching the Planck scale. QUEST found nothing, now more sensitive experiments are looking for fluctuations hidden in the light.

Interesting Things with JC #1762: "The Man Who Guarded the Skies During the Cold War" – In 1975, Daniel “Chappie” James Jr. took command of NORAD as its radar and warning systems searched North America’s approaches for Soviet bombers and missiles. Thirty-two years after earning his wings at Tuskegee in a segregated military, he was now responsible for forces guarding the skies over the United Stat...

Interesting Things with JC #1761: "At the Space-Time Limit" – In 2026, researchers measured an electron moving through a barrier in less than a femtosecond while still seeing where it was at the scale of a single atom. The experiment pushes electron observation into times measured in attoseconds without losing the atomic-scale view.

Interesting Things with JC #1760: "The Greek That Stayed Behind" – Muslim families in Turkey still speak a form of Greek that survived the 1923 population exchange. Now fewer children are learning it, and researchers are racing to record the people who still speak it.

Interesting Things with JC #1759: "Gestalt Language Processing" – A child repeats a phrase they heard hours, days, or weeks earlier, sometimes using the same tone and rhythm. This delayed echolalia can communicate something, but Gestalt Language Processing makes a bigger claim: that some children learn language first as whole phrases and later break them into smaller pieces, an idea researchers st...

Interesting Things with JC #1758: "The Oxytocin Feedback Loop" – A dog holds its owner’s gaze, and oxytocin rises in the human. The owner then interacts more with the dog, whose oxytocin also rises, creating a feedback loop between gaze, behavior, and biology across two species.

Interesting Things with JC #1757: "The Tracking Device We Carry" – Your phone tracking everywhere you go once sounded like a conspiracy. Now smartphones routinely create location records through cell towers, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and apps.