Health

She thought the homemade meal was a green flag. Then he told her what it was protecting.

A thoughtful gesture, a confident explanation, and one small anatomical problem.

Alexandra Sedlak had been seeing a guy for about a month, and it was going well. Thoughtful, attentive, the works. Then he leveled up: he invited her over and cooked her dinner himself. Even better, since she's health-conscious, he'd designed the whole meal specifically around her health. Reader, that is a green flag.

So they sat down, and he proudly explained that the meal was designed for her prostate health. She asked if he meant his prostate. No, he assured her. Hers. In this story by Adam Albright-Hanna, Sedlak recounts the whole slow ride from touched to confused, and it's even better in her telling.

Her final ruling: "I am dating a dummy. But he is my little dummy, and no one can take that away from me ever."

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And what did we learn?

In yesterday's issue, we shared the strange science of how sugar pills and sham surgeries trigger real healing.

And we asked what "placebo" literally means in Latin? Just 12.3% of you knew the weirdly on-the-nose translation is “I shall please.” A full third of you guessed “Empty promise,” and you know, I can see how you got there.

• I shall heal (22.0%)

• I shall please (12.3%) ✅

• Sweet nothing (31.8%)

• Empty promise (33.9%)

Science | Courtesy of Upworthy

Science

This cemetery's busiest residents aren't resting in peace

Cornell scientists ran the numbers, and even they didn't believe them.

East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York, has been a quiet final resting place since the 1800s. It's also, as Erik Barnes reports, sitting on top of one of the largest bee aggregations ever recorded: an estimated 5.56 million miner bees, burrowed beneath the headstones. For scale, a typical honeybee hive holds about 30,000.

Locals have spotted bees rising from the grounds since 1935, but nobody grasped the scale until a Cornell team set up traps and did the math. "I was completely floored when we did the calculations," said entomologist Bryan Danforth, who's seen plenty of big bee colonies in his day. None of them came within a country mile of this one. It's the kind of number that makes giraffes doing arithmetic feel almost normal.

So why would millions of bees pick a cemetery, of all places, to call home? The researchers have a theory, and it says as much about us as it does about the bees.

On September 1, 1878, Emma Nutt reported for work in Boston and became the world's first female telephone operator. The job existed because the previous arrangement was going badly. Telephone exchanges were staffed by teenage boys, who had been perfectly good at tapping out telegraph messages but turned out to be a catastrophe at talking to live human beings. They were impatient, they pulled pranks, and they swore at the customers.

Alexander Graham Bell hired Nutt away from a telegraph office to try something different. It worked almost immediately. She was patient, her voice was calm, and the complaints stopped. A few hours later her sister Stella clocked in as the world's second female operator. Emma earned $10 a month for a 54-hour week, and stayed on the job for more than three decades.

By the end of the 1880s, nearly every operator in the country was a woman, and by 1930 there were roughly 235,000 of them. The friendly voice on the other end of the line is now a global industry, and it began when one company grew tired of its employees cursing at strangers.

💬 From the group text…

My arms cramped up about halfway through watching this. She keeps hyping herself up about her strength but, young lady, the courage!

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