☕️ 9 facts I learned this week
Hey folks! As you may have noticed, this newsletter has range. Today’s edition, for instance, takes us from a coffee house opened in 1654 to a survey of teenagers using chatbots for schoolwork. I hope you enjoy it and stay tuned for more weird facts soon!
Queen’s Lane Coffee House in Oxford has been serving coffee since 1654. Back then, “runners” moved from one coffee house to another, gathering the latest news and bringing it back to customers — like human wi-fi.
Global spending on astrology products and services could rise from $12.8 billion in 2021 to $22.8 billion by 2031.
Britain’s longest street name is Bolderwood Arboretum Ornamental Drive, in the New Forest, Hampshire. The shortest is Rye, in Puriton, Somerset, according to Christopher Winn’s Great British Street Names.
In 1900, Philip de László painted Pope Leo XIII at the age of 90. In 1933, he painted Princess Elizabeth of York, the future Queen Elizabeth II. As Craig Brown notes in A Voyage Around the Queen, the same artist painted a man born in 1810 and a woman who died in 2022, spanning 212 years.
With more than 1,500 km of cycle lanes, Paris now has a larger network than Amsterdam.
Cambridge has revived the botany course that helped shape Charles Darwin, using nearly 200-year-old teaching materials created by his mentor John Stevens Henslow.
54% of US students aged 13 to 17 said they had used a chatbot such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot for tasks including research for school assignments and solving maths problems.
In a survey of secondary school teachers in England, two-thirds said pupils were losing critical thinking skills, while many also said voice-to-text was making spelling feel unnecessary.
A study of tree rings in Stradivarius violins suggests that some of the instrument maker’s wood came from high-altitude forests in northern Italy’s Val di Fiemme.
And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend or ten. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.
Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).
Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.