What I Found Interesting: April 29, 2026

A self-cleaning house, 60-foot long octopuses, and the longest bridge in Finland are a few of the interesting stories I’ve enjoyed in the past month.

I hope you enjoy them, too!

What I Found Interesting

• If you’re wondering whether plant species knowledge by people in western countries has decreased over the years, a study in Marburg, Germany with 1,558 people showed no decrease.

  The first plant knowledge study was done in 2002, where study participants were asked to identify 15 common wild plants in Germany. The second study was conducted in 2022/23.

  What I found interesting, but not surprising: knowledge increased with age and women knew more than men.

• Who wouldn’t want a self-cleaning house? Personally, I’d be happy with a self-cleaning kitchen.

  Frustrated with fig jam smeared on a wall by her children, Frances Gabe, who hated cleaning, grabbed a garden hose and blasted the jam off with water.

  Which inspired her to design prototypes in each of the rooms in her home to clean the room automatically. And the dog got clean too.

  The runoff water from the whole system channeled outside through the doghouse, washing the dog on its way to the garden.

• Did you know giant octopuses during the age of the dinosaurs may have been as large as 60 feet long, the size of a semitrailer truck?

  That’s what Hokkaido University paleontologists Yasuhiro Iba and Shin Ikegami discovered when they used their digital fossil mining technique to study fossil jaws of octopus relatives.

• Whoa. I need to remember this story next time I complain about our cold southeast Michigan winters.

  A Canadian man from Taloyoak, Nunavut survives three days in blizzard with no food or shelter – then wins volleyball tournament.

• If you’re a Windows user, did you know about the built-in Robocopy file transfer tool?

  Robocopy stands for robust file copy. Created in 1996 and used by system administrators, command-line Robocopy is faster and more comprehensive than xcopy or copy.

  That was the time period I was a software release coordinator.

  Wish I knew about Robocopy back then; it would have saved so much time for our software releases I coordinated with teams in the United Kingdom and Germany.

• Helsinki officially opens Finland’s longest and highest bridge. The almost 1,200 meter bridge is the longest bridge in the world open only to pedestrians, bicycles, and trams.

  Currently only pedestrians and cyclists can use the bridge; trams won’t begin operation until 2027.