NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins gave up the Olympics to go into space

From Jessica Watkins at Atlas Obscura: "I joined the national team as a junior in college. At the time, rugby wasn’t in the Olympics, so the women’s national team was working toward the Rugby World Cup. Eventually, I was able to participate, and a little bit later on, while I was in grad school, I went back and trained with the team for the Olympics. Rugby sevens, a condensed version of the game, was added to the Olympics in 2016. Each team has seven players instead of 15, and you play for seven-minute halves instead of 40. But ultimately I decided to finish my PhD instead. At the time, I was in the fourth year of my PhD, and every chance I had I would drive down to the Olympic Training Center. It was about two-and-a-half hours each way. So, I had to make a decision. I wanted to be in the Olympics, but I had always dreamed of being an astronaut." 

Chuck Feeney gave away his $8 billion fortune and hardly anyone knew it was happening

From Effective Altruism: "Philanthropist Chuck Feeney died on October 9, at 92. He founded one of the largest private charitable foundations in history, giving away his entire fortune within his lifetime. He was almost obsessively secretive in his giving, and set a standard of seriousness which inspired the Giving Pledge. In 1982 he started The Atlantic Foundation, the first of The Atlantic Philanthropies. But there was no fanfare, because at the same time Feeney had decided his giving, and thus his role as the funding source for Atlantic, would be entirely anonymous. Atlantic Philanthropies would require that grantees do not disclose the source of their donation. To finance Atlantic, Feeney transferred his entire 38.75% stake in the Duty Free Stores chain to Atlantic in 1984. For more than a decade, even Feeney’s partner was oblivious to the transfer of ownership."

How our understanding of synesthesia has changed over the past two hundred years

From Richard Cytowic at the MIT Press Reader: "The first photograph of a synesthetic individual dates from 1872. It is of eight-year-old Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The philosopher Henry David Thoreau, a close family friend, wrote to Ellen’s father in 1845: “I was struck by Ellen’s asking me. … If I did not use ‘colored words.’ She said that she could tell the color of a great many words, and amused the children at school by doing so.” Professor Jewanski has also unearthed the first reported clinical case of synesthesia. It is in the form of an 1812 medical dissertation, written in Latin, by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs. As someone who experiences synesthesia involving more than one sense, Sachs cited examples of his “color synesthesia for letters of the alphabet, for tones of the musical scale, for numbers, and for days of the week."

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