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.

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

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.

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.

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 Mi

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting Things with JC #1756: "What Happens When You Skip Sleep?" – Stay awake long enough and adenosine signaling increases sleep pressure while caffeine can temporarily block the feeling of it. Attention, judgment, and memory become less reliable.

Interesting Things with JC #1755: "How Do Dogs Know How to Herd?" – A Border Collie can crouch, stare, and move around sheep before learning herding commands. Selective breeding reshaped parts of the canine hunting sequence into herding behavior.

Interesting Things with JC #1754: "Jose Alberto Gutierrez" – Bogotá garbage collector José Alberto Gutiérrez keeps pulling discarded books from the trash until his home becomes a free library and the books begin reaching communities across Colombia.

Interesting Things with JC #1753: "Charlie" – The name is very common today, but it kept changing as it passed through different languages.

Interesting Things with JC #1752: "The Blind Man" – A blind man’s eyes are touched, and he begins to see people, but they look like trees walking around. His eyes are touched again, and his vision becomes clear, leaving a moment when what he sees is real but incomplete.

Interesting Things with JC #1751: "The Wasps That Know Your Face" – Northern paper wasps recognize individual nestmates by their faces. Change a familiar face, and the colony responds with aggression until it learns who that face belongs to.