Below, a quick roundup of a few of the things I learned over the past few months. The International Labour Organisation has adopted the first binding global labour standards for gig workers. Backed by 406 members, the new convention sets protections for platform workers in ride-hailing, food delivery and other app-based jobs, including measures on occupational safety, minimum pay and protection from unjustified termination. The standards will need ratification by individual countries before enforcement can begin. (Reuters) A 23-year-old New Orleans man has become Louisiana’s first patient functionally cured of sickle cell disease. Daniel Cressy underwent gene therapy at Manning Family Children’s Hospital, where doctors say the disease is no longer active in his system after a 2-year process that involved collecting his cells, genetically modifying them in Scotland, and infusing them back into his body. (WAFB) A 1,600-year-old mummy discovered in Egypt has revealed something archaeologists had never seen before: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad used during embalming. The papyrus was identified as part of the famous “Catalogue of Ships,” one of the best-known sections of the ancient epic. (ScienceDaily) So far this year, an unusually high number of gray whales have been found dead on North America’s Pacific shore, likely from starvation caused by climate change. (Smithsonian Magazine) More than 50 restaurants and bars in L.A. now import ice cubes from Japan (LA Material) Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6. (Quanta) The story of Hilroy — the makers of the iconic multi-colored notebooks used by Canadian children for over a century — began in 1918 when the Canadian Pad and Paper Company was established by Roy Corson Hill in Toronto. Each Hilroy notebook takes 45 seconds to manufacture, and the company produces 14 million of the books each year. (Canadian History Ehx) Older adults who received the Shingrix shingles vaccine were 24% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over four years. Researchers estimate the difference could amount to roughly one dementia case prevented for every 17 people vaccinated. (BrownU) There was a 2,458% jump in US streams of Dolly Parton’s catalogue the day she died. Within 48 hours she was the most-streamed artist globally, with 79.7 million on-demand audio streams. (AP) In France, this summer’s drought and record heat produced champagne with higher alcohol content. (BBC) New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years. (Stanford) Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was written in part to help save the cathedral from demolition. (ArtNet)