Let's face it, you're never actually going to lay that patio, so stop feeling guilty about wasting the Bank Holiday and get reading instead
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- The Most Modern of Modern Sports - In the 1930s, Kenneth Cecil Gandar-Dower brought a new form of entertainment to London: ”Howard Sumpter, the veterinary surgeon and kennel manager at Hackbridge, had been told what to expect, though not why. Still, he was as awed as anyone when staff pried open the crates to reveal no fewer than 12 graceful, snarling specimens of Acinonyx jubatus—more commonly known as cheetahs… The cheetahs were so receptive to commands, Gandar-Dower declared, that Maharajas in India held formal cheetah races for entertainment—and now, he intended to bring this ‘most modern of modern sports’ to England.”
- The Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined - ”A decade’s worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.”
- Fossilized Human Poop Shows Ancient Forager Ate an Entire Rattlesnake—Fang Included - ”A 1,500-year-old chunk of fossilized human poop found at a former rock shelter in Texas contains evidence of an ancient hunter-gatherer who consumed an entire rattlesnake—including a fang.” This is why we now have McDonalds
- Back to the future: 1979-1989 - A great new online collection from the National Library of Scotland, just launched and destined to grow: ”1979 and 1989 are key years in recent history that book-end a fascinating decade of change. Through a series of essays, films, and other resources, this website takes you back … to the 1980s.” Synth pop, the Sony Walkman, unemployment: it’s all here
- This Woman From Medieval Iceland Lived With A Disfiguring Facial Anomaly - ”In a Medieval church cemetery in Iceland, archaeologists found hundreds of burials eroding from along the coast of a tiny island called Haffjarðarey. One woman's skull presented a unique puzzle: what was the cause of her disfiguring facial anomaly, and what was it like to live with it?” The evidence suggests that she was provided with special care by her community.
- Star with Strange Chemistry is from Out of Town - The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope has found a star that appears to have come from a different galaxy: ”Using the High Dispersion Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope, astronomers have discovered a star in the Milky Way Galaxy with a chemical composition unlike any other star in our Galaxy (Figure 1). This chemical composition has been seen in a small number of stars in dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. This suggests that the star was part of a dwarf galaxy that merged into the Milky Way.”
- Codex Atlanticus - ”The Codex Atlanticus is the largest existing collection of original drawings and text by Leonardo da Vinci.” The content is cool, but the design of the site is trendy and annoying; scroll down to find an “EN” button on the bottom right so you can read in English, then use the “Explore the Codex” link to get past the pseudo-Flash-intro to the actual content.
- RangerBot: Programmed to Kill - If you’re a crown-of-thorns starfish, the robot apocalypse is at hand: ”Australia’s Great Barrier Reef… is being eaten alive by millions of prickly, venomous sea stars known as crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS). But in a matchup befitting a sci-fi movie, scientists have developed a new robot to hunt and kill these sea stars—a murderous, autonomous underwater vehicle called RangerBot.”
- Conquering The Carolina Reaper Requires Self-Deceit, Milk, And A Lot Of Barf - Giri Nathan eats the Carolina Reaper, claimed to be the hottest pepper in the world: ”The heat of peppers is measured in Scoville heat units. An everyday jalapeño might clock in around 6,000; habaneros are closer to 350,000. The Reapers here for public consumption are billed at 1,560,000.”
- Monumental Almaty - ”From the 1960s-1980s, dozens of monumental artworks, in five main formats, were installed on buildings in Almaty, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. We've photographed and mapped every work in the city for our groundbreaking digital catalogs.”
Happy invoicing!
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