Silk is one of the strongest natural fibers on earth. Spider silk is stronger, but extremely hard to produce commercially. We learned about the first bulletproof vest that was made of silk and failed because it was biodegradable, but that very property makes silk a great tool for medical care, like sutures that do not have to be removed. Scientists have figured out how to purify silk down to its essential fibroin protein that can be reshaped for many uses.  

Imagine a vaccine that could be delivered in a simple patch. The underside contains many tiny needles made of silk protein that pierce only the very top layers of the skin, and these remain after the patch is removed. Those tiny silk needles are embedded with the vaccine, which is released into the body as the silk degrades. Furthermore, embedding the medicine into the silk protein preserves it, so these vaccine patches can be stored at room temperature for years until they are needed. Larger silk needles can be used to deliver cancer drugs to a tumor without affecting the healthy tissue around it.

Silk can also be used to make support mesh used in surgery that never has to be removed after the patient heals. It can even be used as a biodegradable wrapper to keep food fresh. There are a host of other possible uses for purified silk protein you can read about at Works In Progress. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: RG72)

Many authors publish literary works under a pen name, to made their name easier to pronounce or remember, or to avoid being judged by past works, or, like yours truly, just to keep their professional life separate from their private life. It was a different story for Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. He took different pen names, or what he called "heteronyms," as completely different personalities, and wrote from the viewpoint of each personality. In other words, Pessoa created characters and then inhabited them, writing as if he were in the character's body, even if the writing itself wasn't about the character. It was a habit he picked up as a child, to unleash his creativity without revealing too much of himself. The strangest part of the story was that no one knew that these different writers were all one person until Pessoa passed died! Pessoa's unpublished writings were discovered after his death in 1935, revealing him to be 70 different authors.

Today is March the first, and if we were in ancient Rome, that would come with a "Happy New Year!" greeting. A couple of days ago, we learned that in the Roman calendar, they just doubled February 24th to have a Leap Day. That seems confusing and nonsensical, but you haven't heard the half of it. The Roman Empire had a real time trying to come up with a workable calendar. See, early calendars were decreed by absolute rulers instead of by astronomers and mathematicians, so correcting any anomaly was a political risk.

Ancient calendars only had ten months (304 days) because no one did any agricultural work in the midwinter. Yes, those days existed, but they just weren't counted. In 731 BC, King Numa Pompilius decreed two new months, but that only brought the calendar up to 355 days. No problem, they just added another month when needed, but that didn't work so well, either. A few hundred years later, the harvest festival was falling in springtime, so something had to be done. That fell to Julius Caesar in 46 BC. He created a new calendar for only one year that aimed to set everything straight, but it ended up being 445 days long!

That long year helped to set the calendar right by the seasons, but it wasn't perfect. In another few hundred years, it again had to be adjusted again. Read about the Roman attempts to create a calendar that made sense at BBC Future.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Leomudde)

The earth is surrounded by a cloud of space debris. We have been launching things into space for more than 60 years, and they usually just stay up there long after their job is done. They do fall apart and collide with each other, so that we have tiny pieces of metal, plastic, and paint orbiting the earth and posing danger to spacecraft and other satellites. Yeah, we've managed to even pollute space. So what can we do about it? Many ideas have been proposed, but they are difficult and expensive, and may be dangerous. But what about space lasers? Vox explains how lasers would work, and the pros and cons of launching such a program to deal with space debris. What could possibly go wrong?

Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner studied the language of the Gullah Geechee residents of coastal Georgia in the 1930s. He recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song in another language that she was taught by her grandmother. No one knew what the song said, or where it came from, but it had been passed down through Dawley's family from her grandmother Catherine, who was kidnapped in Africa and enslaved on a coastal rice plantation in America in the early 1800s. A student from Sierra Leone recognized the lyrics in the recording as being of the Mende language.

Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala took a recording of Dawley's song to Sierra Leone. His colleague, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, searched through villages in that country to find anyone who might recognize the song. In 1990, she finally found one woman, Baindu Jabati, in an isolated village called Senehun Ngola, who sang a song she learned from her grandmother. It was the same song. Her family had preserved it for hundreds of years.

Since the song contains about 50 words, it’s “almost certainly the longest text in an African language ever preserved by an African American family,” says Opala. “By comparison, [Roots author] Alex Haley was led to his roots in the Gambia by about five or six words in Mandinka.”

Through this song, Amelia Dawley's family was traced to a specific area in Sierra Leone. Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, was 11 years old when the recording was made. She met Baindu Jabati in 1997, as seen above. Read how the preservation of a song in its original language led to the breakthrough in a family's history at Smithsonian.

(Image courtesy of Sharon Maybarduk)

The annual Dance Your PhD competition invites PhDs and graduate students to illustrate their dissertation with an interpretive dance video. Yes, it seems weird, but it's a lot of fun, and a great way to communicate science ideas to those who don't read dissertations. The contest has been going on since 2008, and we've covered it sporadically since then.

The winner for 2024 is Dr. Weliton Menário Costa of the Australian National University (ANU) for his video Kangaroo Time (Club Mix). It illustrates his paper "Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-Level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population." Costa illustrates the diversity in kangaroo personalities and how they interact in groups. Kangaroos are quite accepting of each other's differences, and get along well, at least until it comes time to battle for mates. But the Brazilian biologist had a leg up on the competition in that he is also a musician, under the name WELI. He wrote and produced the song "Kangaroo Time," which is available on his new EP Yours Academically, Dr. WELI. It has four songs and drops tomorrow. See a behind-the-scenes video here. -via Metafilter

February 29th is a day that only appears on calendars once every four years, which we call Leap Year. It makes up for the fact that a year is actually 365.25 days long. Why do we put that extra day in February? I used to think it was because February is the shortest month, but that raises the question of why February got shortchanged in the first place. The simple answer is because in ancient Rome, the calendar year began with March. That's why October has a name that means eight even though it's the tenth month. In the Roman calendar, February was the final month of the year, so the placement of Leap Day at the very end of the calendar makes sense.

Except the Romans had Leap Day on February 24th. They essentially had two February 24ths every four years, which was all kinds of confusing, especially if you had an appointment that day. You can thank medieval monks for adding a new day to the calendar, which had to be kept in February because of the calculations of the spring equinox. Read how all that came about at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

People love to gossip, and gossip about someone famous travels wider and is remembered longer than gossip about your neighbors. Some bizarre and totally made-up stories about royalty find new life in print (see any tabloid), and the tales grow larger and stranger as they are passed along until idle gossip becomes a full-blown conspiracy theory. However, the term "conspiracy theory" has inched beyond its original meaning of a secret group engineering something that has a perfectly normal explanation. These stories are more like gossip, alleged scandals, and tall tales that just won't go away.

Any time a monarch dies young, there will be rumors of murder. That happened when King William II died in a hunting accident in 1100, and again when James I died in 1625 after refusing the advice of his doctors. Illegitimate children are a favorite subject of gossip, because everyone likes to think of a hidden royal somewhere. We've all heard the rumor about Prince Albert Victor (pictured above), Queen Victoria's grandson, being Jack the Ripper. And if you can believe it, Charles III is a vampire. Sure, he's related to Vlad the Impaler, but so is all European royalty. Read up on ten stubborn conspiracy theories involving the British royal family at Mental Floss.

Korean YouTuber 아픈 니가 청춘 is 193 centimeters tall, or 6' 4". All his life, he's been the odd man out, with people staring at him and asking if he plays basketball. In this video, he goes to Netherlands, where the average man's height is the tallest on earth, just over six feet. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he is surrounded by men taller than he is. Many are two meters tall, which is 6' 6". He also discovers what normal accommodations for tall people are like. For example, he doesn't have to bend over to use a sink, and he can see his face in a bathroom mirror. He can stand up straight on a train! For contrast, he talks to an average-sized Korean woman who is also in Netherlands, and how she struggles with a world built for tall people. Those of us who are fairly average for our communities don't realize how much difference that makes. -via reddit

Many people keep journals of their lives for a variety of reasons, but through history, women could write in a diary to express ideas that wouldn't be accepted if she said them out loud. Sarah Gristwood's new book, released today, is called Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries. It is a collection of entries from women's diaries over the past 400 years. These personal musings include day-to-day events, but often delve into the feelings they experienced. There is joy, ambition, grief, misery, love, and transformation, but the most common theme over the entire project is frustration.

Beatrix Potter was an expert on fungus, but wasn't taken seriously in her day. Ada Blackjack was treated so badly on her Arctic expedition that she was relieved when the last man died. Florence Nightingale's family objected to her desire to become a nurse. Sophia Tolstoy wrote about the abuse she suffered from her husband Leo. The common theme is the inability to do anything about these problems. Gristwood read hundreds of women's diaries for her project, and she shares some of the more notable emotions she encountered in them at Smithsonian.

David "Sandy" Gottesman had a friend back in the 1960s named Warren Buffet. Over the years, he invested money in Buffet's company and left the portfolio to grow. Meanwhile, Gottesman's wife Ruth taught in the pediatrics department at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. David died in 2022 after 72 years of marriage. He left his Berkshire Hathaway stock, now worth a billion dollars, to Ruth, telling her to "Do whatever you think is right with it." Yesterday the 96-year-old widow announced it would go to the medical school, with a stipulation on how it is to be used.

We are profoundly grateful that Dr. Ruth Gottesman, Professor Emerita of Pediatrics at @EinsteinMed, has made a transformational gift to #MontefioreEinstein—the largest to any medical school in the country—that ensures no student has to pay tuition again. https://t.co/XOy9HZLbfD pic.twitter.com/1ijv02jHFk

— Montefiore Health System (@MontefioreNYC) February 26, 2024

That amount of money ensures that the couple of hundred students admitted to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine every year will pay no tuition for as long as the institution remains in existence. Students who are graduating this spring will receive a refund on the 2024 spring semester. -via Fark

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This guy works way too hard to make his life simple. Pure nonsense, well done. His white pants stay clean while everything around him is dirty. He can't be bothered to brush his own teeth, but builds a stove with a hammer and chisel. And what's the deal with the toilet? But the parts you'll really remember are the video effects involving the chicken and the fish. Yeah, it's actually a rooster, but let's not quibble over details. The details are what makes this funny.

This is Hong Kong YouTuber GuiGe doing a parody of all those "rural life in China" videos. The sequence above is an excerpt from a much longer video called Mama Rong's Rural Life, featuring his mother. The weirdness of contrasting primitive and technical elements, the special effects, and the complete absurdity of it all will keep you watching. The song is "Aloha Heja He" by German singer Achim Reichel. -via reddit

The Thaua people of new South Wales, Australia, have always had a mystical relationship with killer whales, or orcas. They believe that after death, they are reincarnated as an orca. So is it any wonder that they learned to work together with the orcas to hunt whales? However, we don't know if the hunt came first or the beliefs. For centuries, Thaua people would sing to the orcas, and the orcas would herd baleen whales into Twofold Bay. Once trapped, Thaua hunters would kill the whales and harvest the meat, while giving the tender tongue to the orcas. This procedure was codified and passed on to each generation.

When European colonizers discovered how the Thaua hunted with orcas in 1844, they joined in and harvested whales successfully using the same method. But that only lasted so long. By the 1930s, orcas were rarely seen off the coast of TwoFold Bay, and the familiar families of the killer whales were dwindling to just a few members. The Thaua blame this on a few incidents when European whalers broke the code of the orcas. Read what happened to cooperative hunting with orcas at Amusing Planet.

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra (previously at Neatorama) has always made music with typewriters the old fashioned way: with manual typewriters, the ones that took real finger power to use and made loud noises. But now they've made a tiny step into the 20th century. They composed a new song for their submission to the Tiny Desk Concert series at NPR that uses electric typewriters! The song is titled "Selectric Funeral."

Still, these typewriters are far from new. I got a Selectric to take to college back in the 1970s, and it looked new compared to these machines. The "new" typewriters give the orchestra some flexibility in the sounds they make, with effects straight out of the 1960s. I love how one machine was equipped with a large bell to give it a "normal" carriage return sound. And having to repair something in the middle of a song is just the way you'd expect an electric typewriter to perform. -via Laughing Squid  

Through most of the 20th century, paleoanthropologists considered the birthplace of Homo sapiens to be in East Africa. Or maybe South Africa. That's where the oldest fossils were found, of both humans and their ancestors. But 21st century discoveries in Morocco, specifically from a site called Jebel Irhoud, suggest that modern man developed in Northwest Africa. Skulls excavated there date back around 300,000 years, much older than human skulls found elsewhere. But are they Homo sapiens? The facial features are modern, but the brain case is shaped a little differently. However, the same brain case shape is found in skulls from East Africa which were always considered Homo sapiens.

Who was there first? Humans could have traveled across Africa over time. There could have been many human species that interbred in different areas. But we have to acknowledge that the fossil record is scant, considering the geography involved, and just because we haven't found more fossils doesn't mean they aren't there. So at this time, we really don't know where humans evolved. Read about these recent discoveries and the questions they raise at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: © Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig (License: CC-BY-SA 2.0))