We all have a. Maybe it’s in the back of your closet, hallway, basement, or garage. Maybe it’s clearly labeled, or maybe it’s actually ruined by water damage. It’s a box – more precisely, a box full of objects once cherished and now, less forgotten than… enduring. I have several of these boxes, but one in particular has been taking up space since my partner and I moved in together. It’s full of loose, often unlabeled video game cartridges. We don’t even own a video game player.

This is an adapted version of Reverse Daily newsletter of Monday, May 23, 2022. Subscribe for free and learn something new every day.

It turns out there’s a generation of real gamers out there who are more traumatized by the video game cartridge than I am irritated by the pile of them taking up valuable space in a tiny New York apartment. Read about this hidden story and more in today’s news Reverse Daily. Good week!

Living in the reefs of the Red Sea, Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins love to rub against certain corals, which can help them fight infections. Their habits are a lesson in why you might want to incorporate exfoliation into your daily grooming routine.

For Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, rubbing against corals can be like showering. Rubbing behaviors in dolphins have only been documented a handful of times and are not well understood.

But researchers writing this week in the journal iScience report that a routine coral scrub seems to be a way for these dolphins keep their skin healthy. For the study, the researchers dived into the depths of the northern Red Sea and collected samples of the corals favored by bottlenose dolphins.

Turns out they’re pretty picky – dolphins only rub against certain gorgonian corals (pictured above), leather corals, and Ircinia sponges.

Go further.

Cartridges are sturdy little imps by design. A story of technological progress and sour grapes. A format intended to take players to vast new worlds but also to survive while sitting down.

Jerry Lawson is considered one of the fathers of video game cartridges. Born in 1940, he idolizes George Washington Carver. Lawson’s grandfather was a physicist, but being brilliant didn’t get you very far when you were black and lived in pre-civilian America. Instead, he was a postman.

Lawson’s own father was a dockworker who flipped through science magazines in his spare time. Jerry’s parents were determined to fuel his interests in technology, putting him in better schools and filling his childhood with gadgets and radio kits. He sought the potential denied to his family.

Lawson joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970, taking him to San Francisco where Silicon Valley was in turmoil. Before Fairchild publicly began assembling a gaming business, Lawson was hoarding parts at home, building an arcade cabinet from scratch in his garage. Called demolition derbyhe tested the game at a pizzeria in Campbell, California in 1973.

His work ultimately transformed the home game forever.

Recently, authorities have observed an increase in monkeypox virus cases around the globe. On Wednesday, Massachusetts public health officials announcement there has been one confirmed case in the state, making it the first confirmed case of the virus in the United States this year. On Thursday night, health officials in New York announced they were investigating a possible case of monkeypoxalthough this remains to be confirmed.

As its name suggests, monkeypox belongs to the same family of viruses as smallpox, although it is generally much less transmissible and much less severe than smallpox.

William Schaffner, infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical School, says Reverse the virus is usually found in small mammals in regions with tropical climates.

“Once in a while it gets into primates, which is why the name monkeypox,” he says. “And of course it can also affect people. It can be passed from person to person but not easily, you need very close and usually quite sustained interpersonal contact, touching, kissing, etc.

Here’s what you need to know.

The plates, taken before Sputnik launched in the 1950s, show satellite-like objects near Earth. A new study looks at the potential reasons.

“We found an image where nine stars were there, and they disappeared. And they’re not here half an hour earlier, and they’re not here six days later,” says Beatrice Villarroel, postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. “And you wonder, ‘Is this real? “”

There is no readily available astronomical explanation for what these light vanishing points, which the researchers call transients, could be. The dots could be flaws in photographic emulsions or image artifacts from when astronomers first scanned the plates. But in a series of recent papers, Villarroel and a small team of astronomers have been probing more seriously the possibility that lightning could be something more exciting – extraterrestrial objects.

Go further.

About this newsletter: Do you think it can be improved? Do you have a story idea? Want to share a story about the time you met an astronaut? Send these thoughts and more to [email protected].

• On this day in history: On May 23, 1701, my countryman and legendary buccaneer Captain William Kidd, was executed for piracy. Kidd was born in Greenock, which is in Renfrewshire, Scotland and very close to my home as well. Curiously, Kidd also found himself in New York, trying to strike it rich. After his death in 1701, some of his buried loot was found off Long Island.
• Song of the day: “Video gamesby Lana Del Rey