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Daily Bafflements

• NPR reports that the roots of today’s urban beekeeping trend run deeper than previously thought. According to a new study in Nature, humans have been keeping bees for honey and beeswax for nine thousand years.

• The startup world is abuzz lately about Theranos, the healthcare upstart founded by Elizabeth Holmes, one of the nation’s youngest women billionaires. Valued at $9 billion, the company’s stated mission is to make laboratory testing affordable for everyone. Though Theranos currently offers a menu of lab tests for under ten dollars, the technology used to achieve this has been kept top secret, even after the Wall Street Journal questioned its efficacy last month. Outside scientists have not been able to test the company’s methods and only heavily redacted FDA documents have been made public.

• In a recent interview with Guernica, political cartoonist Ted Rall talked about his new graphic biography, Snowden. Of his subject, Rall drew comparisons between the government-worker-turned-fugitive and Europeans living under Nazi occupation: “with the NSA, why was it that, out of all those people who saw all those files, so few people stepped forward? There’s something fucked up when you have to be one in a million to do the right thing.”