Reading and your brain / Your old Slack chats are for sale / Can married men have friends?
A new Cambridge review in Psychological Medicine pulls together years of research on reading for pleasure. It links reading to better attention and memory, fewer mental health problems, and a lower risk of dementia, though most of the evidence shows a link rather than proof. Also: failed startups are selling their old Slack messages and emails to AI companies. One shutdown service says it has handled nearly 100 deals in the past year, and experts doubt the promise that the data is anonymous. And a TikToker’s advice that married men should avoid close friendships with other women has viewers split. Plus a couple struck by lightning, delivery robots accused of scanning faces, a startup tapping an underwater volcano, and Mariah Carey’s legal win.
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20 Oct 2026
Having a baby is too expensive, say 4 in 5 parents / A mom let her 5-year-old collect goose feathers and was charged with neglect / 160-million-year-old sea monster vomit found
A University of Michigan Mott Children’s Hospital national poll of 2,027 parents finds 81% say having a baby costs more than it should, with 40% of parents of children under 3 reporting they are struggling financially or just getting by, and only 14% saying they used none of the cost-cutting strategies listed. Karyann Parkinson, a law school graduate pregnant with her fifth child, let her 5-year-old walk a half-mile to collect goose feathers at a nearby pond in their gated Williamsburg, Virginia neighborhood — and was placed on the child abuse and neglect registry, convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and given a six-month suspended jail sentence. And paleontologist Dirk Knaust, who spent 30 years examining rock cores for Norwegian energy company Equinor, identified centimeter-sized clumps of shells, worm tubes, and plant bits in samples from 160 million years ago as fossilized plesiosaur vomit — the first such identification ever made. Plus knitted traffic cops, shark-bitten boat survivors, a candidate who won city council on funny signs, and a lucky South Carolina lottery stop.
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19 Oct 2026
One soda a week changes kids’ brains / A whale carried a 19th-century harpoon for over 100 years / A radioactive jet is aimed at Earth
A King’s College London study of 9,632 children ages 9 to 11 in the ABCD Study found that even one caffeinated drink per week — mostly soda — was linked to smaller cortical surface area across 22 brain regions, with more caffeine linked to less sleep, and both factors associated with more mental health problems six and eighteen months later. A 2007 discovery getting renewed attention: Iñupiat hunters in Alaska harvested a 50-ton bowhead whale and found a fragment of a 19th-century bomb lance embedded near its shoulder blade — a weapon designed to explode inside a whale, manufactured between 1879 and 1885, that the whale had carried for over a century after surviving the original strike. Scientists estimate the whale was 115 to 130 years old at death. And astronomers have confirmed the first known microblazar in our galaxy — a stellar black hole called IRAS 18293-0941, hidden behind a thick dust veil 12,000 light-years away, shooting a plasma jet directly toward Earth at 75% the speed of light. Scientists say there is no danger. Plus a 99-year-old wing-walker, a brewery ghost, the Andy Warhol fraud sentence, and a front-yard Egyptian treasure.
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