¶Nintendo was founded on this day, September 23rd, in 1889, making the company 137 years old today. Nintendo originally produced a form of playing cards, Hanafuda, after Japan had banned most forms of gambling in 1882. The company turned to video games in the 1970s and 1980s, releasing Donkey Kong in 1981, which quickly established Nintendo as a leader of the nascent platform gaming industry.
In today's journal
Some discoveries arrive by patient calculation, others by idly scrolling satellite maps before a trip up north. Elsewhere, a humble building material learns to inhale a greenhouse gas, and a card maker born of a gambling ban celebrates a remarkably long winning streak.
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/2026/09/23 at 6:51 AM
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A strange circle on satellite maps turned out to be a 390-million-year-old impact crater (sciencedaily.com)
¶In 2024, Joël Lapointe was preparing for a trip to the remote Côte-Nord region when a circular feature near Lake Marsal caught his attention on online satellite imagery. He wondered whether the depression could have been formed by an impact and reached out to specialists in Europe and North America.
¶Lapointe’s inquiry helped prompt a group of French researchers to identify the lake area as the center of a potential 11th known impact structure in Quebec at a 2024 meeting of the Meteoritical Society. The possibility eventually drew the attention of Gordon Osinski, a planetary geologist at Western University who also directs the Impact Earth database.
¶Osinski was skeptical at first, but the possibility was intriguing enough that he organized an expedition to the isolated location in October 2025.
¶Researchers discovered shatter cones in numerous rock outcrops. These distinctive structures form under the intense pressures produced during an impact and provided compelling evidence that the feature was not volcanic after all.
¶I’ll never look at Google Maps the same way again. Citizen science FTW.
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/2026/09/23 at 10:15 AM
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This new concrete is stronger and pulls CO2 from the air (sciencedaily.com)
¶Potential applications include concrete pavements, highway parapet walls, and sewer pipelines. These structures could continue serving their traditional engineering functions while also capturing some carbon dioxide from their surroundings.
¶There’s likely a lot of research to be done, but this sounds promising.
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/2026/09/23 at 10:26 AM
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Some Was True publishes daily observations and commentary on everything from culture and history to sports and technology. You'll probably learn something each time you visit the site. And sources will be cited. The About page has more information about the background of the site and details on how content is organized.
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