pierre lorangerWORLD WIDE WEIRD
Bed on Arrival
Quality sleep is import-
ant, and investing in a
good mattress can help.
But in 2016, New Yorker
Karan Bir recognized a
potential loophole—
mattress returns. For
over a year, he slept
on a rotating series of
free trial mattresses,
sourced from online
companies with
money-back guaran-
tees. Bir realized he
could hack the system
by simply returning his
purchases within 100
days. By the time he
bid a bed adieu, he’d
ordered another to
take its place. Enough
brands offered refunds
that he could go years
without actually paying
for one. He gave up
after he moved to an
elevator-less building,
however—lugging a
mattress up or down
several flights of stairseach time wasn’t some-
thing he was willing to
lose sleep over.Intern-Planetary
Sensation
Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-
old high school student
from New York state
interning at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight
Center in Maryland,
went far beyond his
summer job description
when he helped dis-
cover evidence of a
new planet. Even more
impressive? He did it
only a few days into the
job, when he noticed a
pattern in NASA’s data
on light coming from
two faraway suns. The
pattern suggested an
object moving in front
of them. The object
turned out to be TOI
1338 b, a gas giant simi-
lar in size to Saturn,located about 13,000
light years away from
the earth.Scented Protest
United States Customs
and Border Protection
staff near the southern
U.S. border are coming
up against an unlikely
foe: a flock of vultures.
Legislation that forbids
the killing of these
migratory birds means
the vultures roost where
they see fit. But their
excretions—including
the birds’ corrosive
vomit—seem to have
damaged a Texas radio
tower. Online com-
menters claim the
birds are protesting the
mistreatment of many
migrants detained at
the U.S. border. What-
ever their motivation,
the vultures sure know
how to make a stink.BY Alex Manleyreader’s digest
80 may 2020