Hello.
I packed an extra pair of socks.
But stuff still happened.
So what's up?
A British museum worker did not quite get the memo.
Several items have gone missing from the storerooms at the British Museum.
This is surprising because normally stolen goods end up at the British Museum.
But apparently this one worker didn't get the memo and has since been fired and now
they're trying to recover the materials.
It was nothing like super notable.
It was like golden gems and stuff but nothing that was on display.
They were just keeping it for academic and research purposes but they still want it back.
They're putting together an independent security audit of their practices and they're
going to make a strike force to try to get all this stuff back.
I don't know.
That's the whole story.
Don't steal stuff.
England?
We're going to regrow teeth.
You thought you had teeth but now you're going to have teeth.
I'm a silly boy this morning.
Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine have discovered a way to
potentially regrow human teeth which is whack-a-doo.
Using stem cells which are the cells that can become any other kind of cells they were
able to actually convert those into a type of cell that secretes like tooth enamel.
Notably those types of cells are not typically present in human adults.
Once your teeth finish growing they go away so that your teeth don't just keep growing.
But if you've got tooth problems then like you might want some of that good good enamel
stuff.
And so grad student Ammar Al-Gadir published a paper saying hey yo this is a good first
step.
Like I said earlier this is not like this is not happening tomorrow.
It was like a proof of concept that they were able to take the stem cell and like make it
into this other cell.
Like they didn't know if they could do that at first and they did.
This is not a new treatment that you can get right now.
But in the world of dentistry this could be a pretty cool step towards a new future where
it's just like oh you got bad teeth?
We'll make up better now.
And with all of that out of the way I'm going to talk to you now about pangolins.
This is a pangolin appreciation space.
So pangolins they're like a mixture between an armadillo and an anteater and they've
got cool cool scales and they're good rolly boys.
But they're also endangered because they are prime targets for poaching and trafficking.
However a little known global pandemic called COVID-19 gave us a rare opportunity to disrupt
the pangolin trade.
I am not making this up.
An organization called the Wildlife Justice Commission has been working hard doing an
undercover sting operation to attempt to topple the pangolin trade.
The illegal pangolin trade.
The pangolin smugglers.
So pangolin traffickers were using normalized shipping containers to ship pangolin scales
right?
But when COVID hit it just sort of you know stopped the global shipping industry for a
bit.
And so it got a lot harder to get space in the shipping container and so they started
to get a bit desperate.
The Wildlife Justice Commission snuck in and posed as a buyer.
They actually sent in a woman who went undercover.
They specifically chose a woman because the hubris of these fucking traffickers they were
not as threatened by a woman as they would have been a man.
This woman went in and was like yeah I'm trying to buy some scales.
Let's talk about that.
And these dudes just gave up everything.
They were like oh yeah here's the scales that I have at this location.
It didn't really happen that fast.
It's been like a multi-year operation but now three out of four of their targets are
in jail and the fourth is on the run and they're actively closing in on him.
One of my favorite parts of this story aside from pangolins being very great are the nicknames
they gave to the traffickers.
It's just the right level of disrespect.
So they're going to name these guys right?
They gotta come up with code names.
One of them was named Big Mac because the person who had to come up with the name was
hungry at the time.
And so they're like okay we'll call him Big Mac because I want a Big Mac.
And then just as a kicker they named his accomplice Fries.
Big Mac and Fries are both in jail.
On this day in 1634 Urbain Grandier was executed after being charged with witchcraft.
I guess in this case it would have been sorcery or warlockery.
They did the thing that they did to witches.
Dude was crispy.
But how did we get here?
How did he get charged with witchcraft?
Let me tell you.
So he was a priest right?
And the local mother superior, the big big nun in charge, was apparently real into him.
She saw him from afar and was like ayo and she also apparently heard about his sexual
escapades.
And then he rejected her.
After that her and a bunch of other nuns accused him of bewitching them, sending a demon with
them to go do evil shit and seducing them with magic.
He was held and tried and some of the evidence in his trial was a literal signed document
that was claimed to be signed by both him and a demon.
I'm talking literally asmodeus.
So either he bewitched a bunch of nuns using a demon or they got something wrong somewhere
along the line.
But either way he's no longer with us.
Lightning round.
Scientists have successfully recreated music being listened to by people by scanning their
brains and running it through some AI.
Speaking of AI, chat GPT's financials are not looking super good and they're kind of
barreling towards bankruptcy.
X, formerly Twitter, has now made XPro, formerly TweetDeck, a paid only feature.
Tech YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips is really going through it right now.
What started with a business scandal has now escalated into really shitty workplace allegations.
Right-wing extremists have doxxed the people who were on the grand jury that indicted Trump
in Georgia.
And speaking of right-wing extremists, the CEO of Target said that they pulled their
Pride merch this year because they were caving to the violence of right-wing extremists in
their stores.
And finally for today, a quick note, I'm going to be taking next week off from Stuff
Keeps Happening, provisionally at least.
I'm taking a new medication and it's got like a multi-week onboarding process and I
don't quite know what kind of side effects I'm going to be dealing with yet.
So I'm going to wait and see what happens.
Bear with me, I'll still be around doing other stuff, but I'm not going to be doing
Stuff Keeps Happening until the end of next week.
I also have a new streaming schedule.
I'll be streaming on my Twitch every Monday from 2 to 5pm, every Wednesday from 5 to 9pm,
and every Saturday from 5 to 9pm.
So Monday afternoons, Wednesday evenings, and Saturday evenings, I will see you there.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content, and probably an update on when
I'll be back.
My name is Endeavorance, I'll be back when I'm back, probably in about a week.
Take care and be well.