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In addition to dogs, the US armed forces includes dolphins and seals employed by the US Navy.

Discovered via Joseph Noel Walker’s conversation with Palmer Lucky

Update: More on military dolphins and their role protecting the nuclear stockpile via Marginal Revolution.

Things I learned today, via Our World in Data: sex ratios at birth are slightly biased towards boy babies for biological reasons. The “natural” sex ratio is about 105 boys born for every 100 girls.

Why is this? Miscarriage rates are slightly higher for female babies than for male babies, although this varies by phase of the pregnancy.

So the next time you’re guessing a baby’s sex, the odds are in your favor if you guess it’s a boy!

As a share of the occupation, there twice as many female fighter pilots as there are male kindergarten teachers.

This is from Richard Reeves on the Ezra Klein Show

Not new but new to me; interesting never less. From Smithsonian Mag:

Archaeologists dug the beads up in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Now, a new study published in the journal American Antiquity asserts that the glass objects are among the oldest European-made items ever discovered in North America.

Per the paper, Michael Kunz of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Robin Mills of the Bureau of Land Management studied ten glass beads found at three sites along Alaska’s Brooks Range. The researchers used mass spectrometry carbon-dating to analyze trace amounts of twine discovered alongside three of the beads and date the artifacts’ creation to between roughly 1397 and 1488.

The beads provide evidence for overland trade networks reaching Alaska from the East (Siberia).