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My kettle has started making a noise I can only describe as opinionated.
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A co-author of power posing says she no longer believes it
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In 2016 Dana Carney, one of the three authors of the original power posing study, posted a statement on her faculty website: I do not believe that power pose effects are real. I have read that sentence many times, and it still surprises me.
The idea came from a 2010 paper in Psychological Science by Carney, Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap, and it reached a vast audience through Cuddy's TED talk, which had been viewed more than 36 million times by 2016. Standing in an expansive pose, the claim went, could make people feel more powerful and more willing to take risks.
Carney explained that as evidence came in, including failed replications such as one by a team in Switzerland, her views had updated to reflect it. She also said that, looking back, she and her colleagues had engaged in some data dredging, which in my field means searching through results until something looks significant.
Cuddy disagreed. She said she still had confidence in the effects of expansive postures on how powerful people feel, and pointed to other labs that had reported similar results. What I respect here is that the disagreement happened in public, with names attached, which is how a field is supposed to correct itself.
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The Post-it Note began with a glue that was too weak
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In 1968 Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, was trying to make a strong adhesive. Instead he made one that stuck lightly and peeled away easily, which nobody had asked for. He spent about five years meeting colleagues at 3M, looking for anyone who could use it.
The use arrived in a church choir. His colleague Art Fry kept losing the scrap-paper bookmarks in his hymnal, because they fell out whenever he opened the book. A bookmark that stuck without tearing the page was exactly what the weak glue could do.
The product was first called Press n' Peel, and the 1977 market tests had such mixed results that 3M nearly stopped producing it. Then in 1978 the company handed out free samples in Boise, Idaho, and about 90 percent of people who tried them said they would buy them. Post-it Notes went on sale across the United States in 1980.
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Iceland found its first wild mosquitoes in October 2025
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Until October 2025, Iceland had never recorded mosquitoes within its borders. Then, at dusk on October 16, an insect enthusiast named Björn Hjaltason noticed an unfamiliar fly on a ribbon soaked in red wine at a farm in Kjós, just north of Reykjavík.
He wrote that he immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected it. It was a female. He trapped two more after that. Iceland's Natural Science Institute confirmed they were Culiseta annulata, a large mosquito found across Europe and in other Nordic countries: two females and one male.
The institute said the mosquitoes most likely arrived with freight. The find comes as the Arctic warms at more than double the global average rate. For a country that had gone its entire recorded history without them, three insects on a wine-soaked ribbon are a surprisingly big deal.
That leaves Antarctica as the only place in the world believed to have no mosquitoes at all.
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Teflon was found in a gas cylinder that seemed empty
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In 1938 Roy Plunkett, a chemist at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory, was on his first assignment there: researching new chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants. He had stored a gas in a cylinder, and when he opened the valve, nothing came out. Yet the cylinder weighed exactly the same as before.
So he and his colleagues opened it up. Instead of gas, they found a white powder. That powder became Teflon. Plenty of chemists would have blamed a faulty valve and moved on.
Its first serious job was a long way from the kitchen. The new material helped meet the requirements of the gaseous diffusion process in the Manhattan Project, the wartime programme to build the atomic bomb. Teflon pots and pans were invented years later.
I find it pleasing that the most important observation in the whole story was a man noticing that an empty cylinder was too heavy.
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Twitter reportedly called the first hashtag something for nerds
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On August 23, 2007, a designer named Chris Messina tweeted a suggestion: how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp. The idea was simple: put the symbol in front of a word, and everyone using it would be part of the same conversation. It was the first hashtag, and the reply from Twitter itself was not encouraging.
According to what Messina later told The Wall Street Journal, Twitter's response was that these things are for nerds and that the idea would never be widely adopted. Users adopted it anyway. That autumn, during a devastating fire in San Diego County, people began tagging updates with #sandiegofire, which let anyone follow the news as it happened.
In 2009 Twitter gave in and made hashtags official, adding links so that clicking one instantly searched for every other tweet using it.
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The Teflon cylinder is my pick for dinner today.
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