LOOSE CHANGE: APRIL 27, 2025

Society's move to cashless payments may have had an unintended positive side effect, surgeons say - fewer children needing operations or procedures to remove swallowed coins.

The Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) experts looked back over hospital records in England since the Millennium.

Procedures to remove foreign objects, including coins, from children's throats, airways and noses saw a "significant decline", of almost 700 cases by 2022.

Historically, coins had accounted for over 75% of objects swallowed by under-sixes, they told a medical journal.

According to the UK Payments Markets Survey, cards began outstripping cash in 2012.

And that is when the researchers say a decade-spanning drop in patient cases began.

To read the complete article, see:
Big drop in child surgery for swallowed objects (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr52g1pjznno)

Medieval scribes filled volumes called bestiaries with illustrations and descriptions of fantastic creatures. The manuscripts containing representations of these animals also depended on a menagerie of beasts: The covers of these and other volumes were fashioned from the skins of calves, goats, sheep, deer, pigs and, in some macabre instances, humans.

Most of these hides were shorn before they were turned into book bindings. But one set of medieval manuscripts from northeastern France has a peculiar finish: Its weathered covers are covered in clumps of hair.

"These books are too rough and far too hairy to be calfskin," said Matthew Collins, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Copenhagen and Cambridge University and an author of the new study. But identifying the source of the shaggy leather has proved difficult.

While these furry tomes would seem at home in Hogwarts library, they were originally made in the scriptorium of Clairvaux Abbey, a hub for an order of Catholic monks, the Cistercians. The abbey, founded in 1115 in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, was home to one of the largest monastic libraries in medieval Europe.

To read the complete article, see:
The Skin on Mysterious Medieval Books Concealed a Shaggy Surprise (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/science/medieval-books-hair-binding.html)

I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk, where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn's then dean of students, opened the line as a resource for students and then as a service to the public. For just as long, students who sit there have been answering any question asked of them—or at least tried their best.

A day's worth of calls to Foy would look a lot like someone's browser history: What is cefuroxime prescribed for? What's the average cost of an acre of land in Texas? What's the cheapest property in New Jersey? How much is Elon Musk worth? What's the customer service phone number for Costco? How much is a ticket to the Super Bowl? What is watercress? What is that weird smell? Are AirPods Pro 2 waterproof? What do I do if there's a snake in my house?

About 13 million people in the US and 2.6 billion people globally don't use the internet, whether for reasons of availability, desire, cost, or religion. Some may have it but don't feel confident using it. To their callers, who dial from all over the world, these students are the internet. And lucky for callers, these students are remarkably non-judgmental when it comes to the questions they're asked.

To read the complete article, see:
The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing (https://oxfordamerican.org/oa-now/the-alabama-landline-that-keeps-ringing)

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