Big Bucks Shrinking Butts
Hollywood’s Box Office Boom Comes With 248 Million Missing Tickets
By Brooks Barnes and Christine Zhang
Hollywood’s summer — by its accounting — was a triumph for the ages. Ticket revenue was not only the highest since 2013, but the second highest of all time.
Just don’t look too closely at the math.
The movie industry ranks box office results by the raw dollar total, without adjusting older figures to account for rising ticket prices. It is the simplest method and, not incidentally, the most flattering.
But when you do an apples-to-apples comparison, translating older box office totals into today’s dollars, Hollywood’s summer loses some of its shine.
Live Tuna
Scientists Find That 96 Percent of Delicious Tuna Is Infected With Parasitic Worms
Did that just… move?
By Joe Wilkins
For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.
Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.
That’s not an exaggeration. According to a new report published in the journal Ocean and Costal Research and flagged by ScienceAlert, a whopping 96 percent of a recent load of tuna was infested with gut-busting worms.
E.T. Detritus
Is There Alien Debris on the Moon? Some Scientists Plan to Find Out.
Researchers want to explore the idea that microscopic particles shed by alien civilizations have accumulated on the lunar surface, making it an archive of extraterrestrial technology.
Imagine an alien civilization that runs on dazzling technologies far more advanced than our own. Picture city-size starships, planet-wide mines or swarms of solar panels that harvest energy directly from a star.
As these aliens go about their otherworldly business, the erosive forces of space wear down their infrastructure, loosening tiny bits of debris that detach and drift into the cosmos. If the civilization collapses, its remains degrade even faster. Clouds of particles might be unleashed into the galaxy, akin to the microplastics in Earth’s oceans, sprinkling countless worlds with the detritus of an extraterrestrial society.
GoonDuel
We’ve Reached the Goonstate of Gambling Advertising
Nazis, Adam Tate, Bonnie Blue and the nadir of attention-grabbing content
BY MINH TRAN
I’ve never been much of a gambler. In 2022, when FanDuel launched in New York and was dishing out promotions too good to be true, I tried signing up, ran into an error while entering my personal information and never signed up again. Aside from the occasional poker night, game of pool or on-the-spot bet on a Knicks game, I’ve managed to steer clear of a pastime that currently seems to be part and parcel of American life.
There’s never been a better time to be a gambler. In the olden days, you used to have to drive to the casino, the racetrack, your local bookie or underground cockfight to risk it for the biscuit. These days, the options are endless and all within palm’s reach. Advancements in technology and how we receive and process information mean you can bet on almost anything without ever leaving your bed. Online sportsbooks like FanDuel, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, and online casinos like Stake are all vying for your dollars and attention with marketing strategies correlated with how above-board they are. The sportsbooks are the most regulated and normalized, and have found their way into almost all mainstream sports media.
Mercury Nearing
A pair of spacecraft draw closer to Mercury after nearly decade-long voyage
BY MARCIA DUNN
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Two Mercury-bound spacecraft left their mother ship behind on Thursday and headed down the home stretch of their nearly decade-long voyage to the solar system’s smallest and closest-to-the-sun planet.
The linked European and Japanese spacecraft separated as planned from their cruiser, but controllers had to wait two anxious hours to receive confirmation via radio signals. The crucial operation was broadcast from the European Space Agency’s control center in Germany, more than 124 million miles (200 million kilometers) away.
“It’s a brilliant moment,” said lead project scientist Geraint Jones.
If all goes well, the conjoined spacecraft known as BepiColombo will enter orbit around Mercury in November and split from each other in December to map and study the entire planet from different altitudes. As of Thursday, the spacecraft still had 2 million miles (3.3 million kilometers) to go before reaching its destination.
ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)
This organ will play one composition until 2640. It’s redefining how slowly music can be played
BY STEFANIE DAZIO AND DAVID KEYTON
HALBERSTADT, Germany (AP) — A small organ in eastern Germany is the headliner of the world’s slowest concert. It has been playing the same piece of music by composer John Cage at a glacial pace for nearly 25 years.
A rare chord change on Wednesday — from seven notes to eight — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt.
It was a historic moment inside the medieval Burchardi Church, in Halberstadt, Germany, that reflected the past, present and future of the project, as well as those who are following its — albeit very slow — progression.
Citroen PLR
Michelin Built This Freakish 10-Wheeled Citroen to Test Truck Tires at 110 MPH
This is the Trojan Horse of the car world.
Ten tons, 700 horsepower, and 11 tires actually touching the ground. The Citroen PLR is one of the most unique vehicles the world’s ever seen, and it’s also been called many names throughout the years. Whether you know it as the Mille Pattes, the Citroen Centipede, or the Michelin test car, the absolute absurdity of this French masterpiece remains the same.
The official name for this custom Citroen is Poids Lourd Rapide, which roughly translates into “fast truck” in English. It was built by a team of Michelin engineers in 1972 as a testbed for the company’s commercial vehicle tires, and while you might think that having 10 visible wheels means that the vehicle would be able to test a number of tires at once, you’ve fallen for Michelin’s Trojan Horse. Inside is a contraption used to test even larger tires, and the surrounding shell is merely nothing more than a safeguard for the driver.
Bibliolabyrinths
from School of The Unconfirmed on Substack
Bibliolabyrinths & eating (over) books
All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our own country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remotely from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.
from The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells, 1885
Friday night, circa 1980-something, and I (Peco) am hurtling down the highway in an apple red manual-shift Volkswagen Rabbit. I loved that car, which my father would later crash during a wicked storm my mother warned him about. But he never listened, and they got t-boned in an intersection with my baby niece in the backseat. Miraculously they got off with only slight injuries, but the Rabbit ended up like a karate-chopped Coke can.
Weeks. That’s how long it took me to learn stick in that car, repeatedly stalling it on the circular gravel driveway of the timber-walled country home where we lived. When I did finally master it, I relished the sense of being an extension of the vehicle, right hand on stick, left hand on wheel, feet dancing between gas, brake and clutch. I was part of a machine, but rather than making me less human when I drove it, it made me somehow more.
Mr. Packard’s Little Garage
THE GARAGE WHERE SILICON VALLEY BEGAN
By Christopher DeMuth
The 1960s and 1970s were decades of busy, bossy, Washington-centered government: Great Society programs. Wage-and-price controls. New national departments of Education and Energy. New agencies regulating health, safety, environmental quality, civil rights, and much else.
Most of those initiatives fell radically short of their promises, and many of them made matters worse.
As federal spending surged, the United States experienced “stagflation,” combining high inflation and high unemployment. By 1980 the “misery index” topped 20 percent—13.5 percent inflation plus 7.2 percent unemployment.
Even in the face of these impositions, the economy chugged along respectably. Gross Domestic Product doubled between 1960 and 1980, averaging 3.6 percent growth annually despite four recessions.
A critical driver was new-and-improved technology. Commercial jet airline service appeared in the early 1960s, speeding business and personal travel. The price of a five-minute coast-to-coast telephone call, measured in today’s dollars, fell from about $40 in 1960 to $2 in 1980.
But technology, to achieve its promise in full, required skilled technologists with a spirit of enterprise and a taste for adventure. These it found in California’s Santa Clara County, which would soon be known as Silicon Valley.
Best Supporting City
How L.A. stopped being Hollywood’s leading star
by Stacy Perman
It was a television show tailor made for Los Angeles: a highly anticipated Netflix crime drama about a team of ex-special forces operators who outsource their skills to criminals in the city.
The production was backed by a prominent indie studio and had a critically acclaimed lead actor attached. And with a budget of more than $100 million and a crew of 350, the series seemed like a shoo-in for California’s film tax and TV credit.
But last month, shortly before filming was set to begin, producers were stunned to learn the film didn’t make the cut based on a formula the state uses to rank projects by the number of jobs they produce and their spending levels. After two applications for a tax credit had been rejected, they opted to shoot the series in New Jersey, where it was much easier to qualify for film incentives.
“We were shocked,” said a producer on the project who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. “This is the birthplace of entertainment. “It shouldn’t be so hard to shoot here.”
Deep Dark Oxygen
The Mystery of Dark Oxygen
Scientists once thought that life-sustaining oxygen existed only near Earth’s surface. Then they detected it deep underground.
In March, I accompanied an international team of scientists on an expedition to one of the deepest places that humans have ever visited, a few hours outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Before sunrise, we drove to the entrance of the Moab Khotsong gold-and-uranium mine, joining a line of workers who were relieving the night shift. Security was tight; for years, mining companies have struggled to keep out illegal miners called zama-zamas, who sneak underground and collect ore at great danger to themselves. When guards finally cleared us and our gear, we walked through rotating gates into what resembled a suburban office park. At its center was a boxy concrete tower—a mine shaft that would carry us nearly two miles down into the earth.
Mo’ Veggies
The World’s Vegetables Are Vanishing, And It’s Quietly Wrecking Our Diets
Most of us aren’t eating anywhere near enough vegetables, and we’re suffering the health consequences.
Meanwhile, we’re also growing fewer and fewer varieties of vegetables, adding to the declining diversity in our diets.
A new report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by an international team of nutrition, agriculture, and botany experts suggests embracing vegetable biodiversity could be key to improving our own health, and that of our planet.
Double Nickels On the Dime
Minutemen proved destined for punk-rock greatness on Double Nickels On the Dime
Time Capsule: The San Pedro trio’s classic 1984 double album is among the genre’s greatest feats, one that’s impossible to replicate or overrate.
By Abby Jones
Johnny Knoxville knew “Corona” would be a perfect theme song for Jackass when he suggested it to his friends and co-creators, Jeff Tremaine and Spike Jonze. They arrived at a consensus quickly: All three of them were already fans of the Minutemen, the San Pedro, California-bred trio whose short lifespan left an indelible mark on American punk. Over a decade since their untimely disbandment following the death of founding guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt heard that a crew of skateboarders, stunt performers, and general pranksters wanted to use “Corona”—a rowdy cowpunk highlight of their 1984 masterpiece Double Nickels On the Dime—to introduce their upcoming MTV series. Watt could barely tolerate the clips they’d sent him, but he was charmed nonetheless. “What I liked about it was they were really doing this shit, this was not fake,” he said in 2022. “I can’t watch that crap, y’know. But that’s why I let them use the song.”
Electric Armageddon
The machines that keep America alive are failing. We forgot how to replace them
We’ve finally admitted that electricity is as essential as water, but we did so too late to avoid disruption
For 20 years, electricity was the most boring business in America, and our industry built its whole infrastructure strategy around the assumption that things would stay that way.
The numbers tell the story. From 2010 to 2020, U.S. electricity consumption fell by roughly 1%. LEDs, efficient motors and tightening appliance standards quietly cancelled out the electricity used by every new subdivision, factory and data hall, and then some. Demand was flat, and planners treated this as a permanent fact of life rather than as what it actually was: an intermission.
No-growth industries make choices that are perfectly rational, yet corrosive. You don’t fund apprenticeships when there’s no new capacity to staff. You don’t keep spare metallurgical know-how on the payroll when nobody’s ordering. You don’t recruit ambitious 25-year-olds into a sector whose pitch is “stable, essential, and never going anywhere.”
Flock On Your Face
‘Pervert glasses’: Backlash against Meta’s smart glasses grows
By Queenie Wong
Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit, but the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget “pervert glasses.”
The social media giant dominates the market for smart glasses, which allow people to capture photos and videos, listen to music, take phone calls and ask questions to an artificial intelligence assistant.
Some people are using the glasses — which look like a pair of regular spectacles — to record people without their knowledge and publish the videos on social media.
The users secretly videotape and share what happens when they try to pick up women. Now, a growing number of people are worried they could be covertly recorded at the gym or even during sex.
Zombie Apocalypse (for real)
THE CITIES THAT SAID YES TO DRUGS
Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a “zombie apocalypse.”
Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched.
I walked around the block to the Hoa Mai playground, named for a Vietnamese flower that signifies rebirth. City workers had installed gates to keep drug users away, but at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, I counted 27 people smoking drugs and nodding off. No children were in sight.
Half a mile to the south, in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, I visited a 10-acre park named after the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal. It has a playground and the remnants of an apple orchard, and at night you can peer downtown and see the city lights. As I arrived, a drug user squatted next to a child’s slide and relieved himself. Others had set up tents and colonized the park pavilion, where they heated fentanyl on tinfoil and inhaled the fumes with glass pipes. A few went old-school and injected it.
Hackie Face
Suspicion Grows About OpenAI’s Tale About Its Rogue Hacker AI
“Loudly proclaim how dangerous AI is, and investors will hear how powerful it is.”
By Joe Wilkins
Last week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI issued what seems like a frightening memo about an “unprecedented cyber incident” involving cutting-edge AI models breaking loose and hacking another company.
As the AI lab tells it, a group of next-generation AI models — including one that hasn’t even been disclosed to the public yet — had busted out of their secure testing environment and into a production database owned by the machine learning startup Hugging Face.
“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted, seemingly backing the story. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”
FlockGPT
Is This the Future We Really Want?
By Ned Ryun
There is probably a camera on a pole at the entrance to your neighborhood. You’ve probably stopped noticing it. It is small, solar-powered, unremarkable, and it photographs every car that passes: yours, your neighbor’s, your teenager’s. And it reads the license plate, logs the time, and files the record in a national database. The company that owns it is called Flock Safety. Founded in 2017, valued at $7.5 billion, it now operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, and its network scans roughly 20 billion vehicles a month.
Twenty billion. Each month. For perspective, there are about 290 million registered vehicles in the United States, which means the average American car is photographed, catalogued, and made searchable hundreds of times every year. Not because of a federal, state, or local warrant, not by court order, but by a subscription service your city council approved in the middle of tedious meeting never covered by any news organization and attended by a few bored citizens.
And the license plates were just the beginning.
GD01
The Robots Cometh
Spectators typically leave a UFC fight with ringing ears and a sheepish resolve to get back to the gym. Wang Xingxing went straight to his laboratory.
“I thought I could make a bigger robot for boxing competitions,” says Wang, the founder and CEO of Hangzhou-based humanoid-robotics firm Unitree. “Then I thought, Why not do an even bigger one that can actually carry a human inside?”
The upshot of Wang’s creative fervor is the GD01, which Unitree bills as the world’s first mass-produced, transformable mecha robot. Standing 9 ft. tall and weighing half a ton, it can transport a pilot in its torso-mounted cockpit, walk on either two legs or four, and wield fists powerful enough to knock down walls. Heavy-duty mechanical hinges connect titanium-alloy limbs to a protective casing of carbon fiber, enabling smooth, deliberate strides on brutish red legs.
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES – GoodReads Best Books of the 21st Century
Controversial 2003 Memoir Named a ‘Best Book of the 21st Century’ By Goodreads
The scandal caused the author to be dropped by his literary manager and lose a 7-figure two-book deal.
American author and memoirist James Frey burst onto the literary scene in 2003 with his memoir titled A Million Little Pieces. The book is marketed as a story of addiction, crime, mental health, rehab, and eventual sobriety, detailing Frey’s recovery at 23 from drug addiction and alcoholism. The memoir goes through Frey’s time in a facility and a 12-step program, and the different characters he meets on his journey of recovery.
Upon its publication in April of 2003, A Million Little Pieces was selected to be a part of Oprah’s Book Club, skyrocketing sales. The memoir shot to the number-one paperback non-fiction book slot on Amazon, and it topped The New York Times Best Seller list for fifteen straight weeks at the time.
As of 2026, the book is still immensely popular among readers, with Goodreads ranking it as one of the “Best Books of the 21st Century.”
Bye-bye Books?
THE END OF READING IS HERE
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.
Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.
CavemanGPT
Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs
by JOSEPH COX
Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to the point answer. Think less “you’re right to push back, I was wrong,” and more “Hulk smash.”
Use of the caveman plugin is in direct response to the skyrocketing and unpredictable cost of AI.
The Tactile Generation
How we lost our sense of touch
Touchscreens made life frictionless. They also flattened our relationship with the physical world.
I was the kind of kid who dug holes, the deeper the better. I vividly recall the ecstasy of once splaying out my fingers in a bucket full of backyard dirt, a bliss punctuated only by a sudden burning sensation in my right hand that turned out to be my first-ever encounter with a fire ant.
The textures of my childhood loom larger in my memory than sights or sounds. My first paper cut, on a piece of sheet music, and the rush of cold water my older sister used to wash away the blood. The warmth of my mother’s hug and the tender squeeze of my grandmother’s hand in mine. The whoosh of air I’d get from barreling a scooter down a hill, and the pristine crunch of stepping out into a winter’s first snow.
This was the world where many of us grew up, one in which we felt our way toward understanding, sometimes playfully, sometimes a little painfully, sometimes both. To make a phone call, you once had to rotate a dial. Entering an apartment building meant turning a key inside a wobbly knob. Calculators and cameras used to be clunky, and writing was something you did with a pencil you sharpened yourself.
The Closest Frontier
First new open-ocean subsea research habitat in 40 years launched
The ocean floor is a vast source of potentially revolutionary scientific discovery – yet it remains largely inaccessible. For many marine scientists, they could only dream of living and working underwater. That changes now.
n this video, New Scientist CoLab partners with ocean engineering company DEEP to follow the deployment of Vanguard, the first open-ocean, ambient-pressure subsea research habitat built in over forty years. The site is Tennessee Reef off the coast of the Florida Keys. Vanguard will allow scientists and researchers to break free from the strict time limits of traditional surface diving. Featuring an integrated moon pool for entry and exit, it lets aquanauts camp out in the marine canopy of the ocean, embarking on daily 6-to-8-hour dives and processing scientific samples directly inside the habitat without bringing them to the surface.
Welcome to the new era of aquatic humanity.
The Golden Volcano
There’s a Volcano in Antarctica Spewing Gold Crystals Into The Atmosphere
Lava. Ash. Horrifying death.
All are known and expected outputs from an active volcano.
But one volcano deep in the farthest, frozen reaches of our planet marches to the beat of a slightly different drum.
On Ross Island in the Ross Sea, a deep bay in Antarctica, Mount Erebus fumes about 1,350 kilometers (840 miles) from the Geographic South Pole. The world’s southernmost active volcano, it bubbles with a permanent lake of blazing lava.
And in the gas constantly pouring forth from this gate to the underworld, scientists found microscopic particles of crystalline, elemental gold.
According to a 1991 research paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Erebus belches out about 80 grams (2.8 ounces) of microscopic gold dust per day, scattering it as far as 1,000 kilometers away – maybe even farther.
Hockney Gone
David Hockney, whose art celebrated sun-drenched Los Angeles, dead at 88
By Jessica Gelt and Barbara Isenberg
David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, died Thursday at his home in London. He was 88.
His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist Erica Bolton.
Calling himself “an English Los Angeleno,” Hockney immortalized the city’s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.
“Los Angeles will always be thought of by many people worldwide through the images that David created,” said Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of the modern art department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which holds more than 150 works by Hockney in its permanent collection. “But for me one of David’s greatest gifts was his ability to look at the world with wonder and joy in whatever medium he decided to work in. … He was fearless in his embrace of technology, and I think that enormous curiosity ran throughout his career, and continued to the end. He was involved in looking at art history and the future simultaneously.”
Pacifica Pier Going
The Pacifica Pier is becoming an historic artifact before our very eyes
by Chris Hunter
What many people are only learning now, in addition to the official name of the pier, is that it was built to carry a sewer outflow pipe from the Sharp Park Sewage Plant deep into the Pacific Ocean in 1973.
That purpose created what’s called an “enterprise fund” which paid for city maintenance of the pier itself. When Pacifica built a brand-new sewage plant 26 years ago and put it in the Rockaway Quarry, the city didn’t need that outflow pipe since the new water treatment plant directed its treated sewage into the ocean through the Rockaway Creek. The enterprise fund went to the Calera Creek Water Recycling Plant instead of the pier outflow system. Because it was more highly treated at the tertiary level, the new outflow could run directly into the ocean instead of being piped a half mile out. No other dedicated fund to maintain the pier was ever created, although various grants and public works budgets have helped to some degree. A $19 million repair need was identified in recent years, but was not funded.
After it was built, the concrete pier immediately became a very popular fishing and tourism destination, in addition to its municipal purpose. It’s free to fish and drop crab nets off the pier, so you can easily imagine how successful that lure became through the years. You need a fishing license to fish from the beach. In the 1990s, Pacifica saw more salmon catches than just about any public pier in the world. It made it into National Geographic in 1995 when a thousand salmon were caught in one day.
CODEX ATLANTICUS Completus
Leonardo’s ‘Codex Atlanticus’ Is Complete for the First Time in 400 Years
The Galileo Museum’s Leonardotheka 2.0 reunites the artist’s landmark manuscript with the 550 pages a 16th-century sculptor cut from it.
A 400-year-old act of editorial vandalism has finally been undone online. Florence’s Galileo Museum has reunited Leonardo da Vinci‘s Codex Atlanticus with more than 500 pages that were later cut from it, restoring for the first time the full sweep of the master’s largest surviving notebook.
Today, the museum launched Leonardotheka 2.0, adding the 550-odd pages Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni excised from the Codex Atlanticusin the late 16th century—now owned by the U.K.’s Royal Collection Trust—to the 1,119-page tome held by Milan’s Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus is the largest of over a dozen codices containing the thousands of pages of notes he made. Its contents, produced between the 1470s and Leonardo’s death in 1519, include some of the artist-engineer’s best-known inventions, like his flying machine and his harpsichord-viola.
Donkeys Are The Therapeutic Balls
Patients find help with therapy donkeys at psychiatric hospital near Paris
NEUILLY-SUR-MARNE, France (AP) — Therapy donkeys are helping patients with mental health conditions recover in a psychiatric hospital unit outside Paris that’s unique to France.
The 19th century farm buildings and wooded surroundings are a haven within the Ville-Evrard hospital complex in Neuilly-sur-Marne. On Friday, patients took the five donkeys for a walk and cared for them. Some confidently lifted their hooves to remove dirt. Many ended the session with a hug.
The couple behind the program say more scientific evaluation is needed of animal therapy, which is practiced around the world. They would like it to be formally recognized by the psychiatric community as a complementary form of care, citing their experience with patients and caregivers.
Pick’em Up, Drive’em Out.
To Sell Trucks, Break Out the Cowboys and Wrap Them in Old Glory
Americans — especially American men — love trucks, and high gas prices aren’t swaying automakers. Ram has a new line of fuel-guzzling muscle trucks, and some in-your-face ads to sell them.
By Roy Furchgott
With fuel prices stubbornly high, it would seem a bad time to unleash new gas guzzlers. But Ram, Stellantis’s badge for brawny pickups, has introduced a line of muscle trucks, betting that most buyers are more concerned about their manliness than the price of gas.
It’s not a bad bet. At the risk of turning off some, Ram knows its buyers: American men (mostly) whose taste — reflected in ads — runs toward the Ultimate Fighting Championship, comely cowgirls on mechanical bulls, a Guns N’ Roses soundtrack and unapologetically large, loud trucks.