Frost on the roofs out the back this morning. Better stay in the warm and cheering glow of your monitor
Happy invoicing!
- Utqiagvik Alaska & the North Slope: Welcome to the Land - Adam Karlin travels to the most northern region of the USA: ”At a local gas station, where a gallon of unleaded ran $6 — Utqiagvik receives all its supplies by air, including petroleum, even though it’s near some of the largest oil wells in the world — the owner handed me a pistol when I got out to work the pump. A bear had been seen prowling nearby. When I raised my eyebrows, his response was simple: ‘They’ll eat you.’”
- Does Io Have a Magma Ocean? - ”Future space missions will further our knowledge of tidal heating and orbital resonances, processes thought to create spectacular volcanism and oceans of magma or water on other worlds.”
- Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death - A brief history of the use of arsenic-based dyes: ”Our scene opens in a Paris workshop. It was the year 1859, and Dr. Ange-Gabriel-Maxime Vernois had come to visit this poorly lit space. He walked among the tables, stopping here and there to examine the hands of the ateliers. Under their chewed-down, yellowed nails, around their ragged cuticles, up their sore-laden arms, and in the creases of their elbows he found caked the same brilliant green dust. It was arsenic-laced dye, emerald-hued and blisteringly poisonous.”
- 2019 Photomicrography Competition - The entries in Nikon’s annual contest: this submission by Daniel Smith Paredes and Dr. Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar is titled “Alligator embryo developing nerves and skeleton”.
- What Came First: Inflation Or The Big Bang? - Turns out the notion that the universe started with the Big Bang is (probably) wrong; Ethan Siegel explains why (ironically, in a column named “Starts with a bang”): ”Today, all we can see within the Universe extends for some 46 billion light-years in all directions, and scientists can trace this origin back to a hot, dense, more uniform and more rapidly expanding state. Like many theorists, you might be tempted to extrapolate this back even farther, to an arbitrarily hot and dense state: a singularity. But that temptation is the root of most of our misunderstandings surrounding the birth of the Universe. The Big Bang wasn't the beginning, after all. Instead, that honor goes to cosmic inflation, and everyone should understand why.”
- Death Valley’s Park Service Wants Them Gone. But Are Wild Donkeys Really the Enemy? - Donkeys: good or bad? ”At first glance, the burro problem seems like a cut-and-dried example of ‘invasion biology’… But for Erick Lundgren, a biologist at the University of Technology Sydney studying their ecological impact, the burros of Death Valley represent a remarkable case study in resilience and potential adaptation, and are part of a far more nuanced debate about how novel ecosystems can evolve under our noses.”
- The Book of Dreams - I’ve featured scans of Argos catalogues before (the 1985 catalogue in 2011, and a more extensive collection exactly five years ago) but this is the motherlode: every Argos catalogue, from 1974-5 on. One forgets how big a thing gold carriage clocks were in the early 1980s (covers: 1979-80, 1981-82, and 1984-5)
- Using Quantum Computers to Test the Fundamentals of Physics - Working out where things change from weird to “normal”: ”How can things that obey the classical laws of physics—such as a pitched baseball or a bumblebee in flight—be composed of parts that are subject to quantum rules at minute levels? That is one of the deepest questions in modern physics. In pursuit of an answer, recent research—with funding from the High Energy Physics program at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science—should help shed light on how the classical world emerges from the underlying quantum one.”
- How to make strontium: Collide two neutron stars and stay *way* back - ”On 17 August, 2017, astronomers detected an event they had long suspected could happen but had never seen before: the catastrophic merger of two neutron stars… This explosion also seemed to solve a major mystery in astronomy: The creation of r-process elements. We see lots of elements like barium, gold, silver, platinum, and so on in the Earth, and we know they must be made in some sort of hugely explosive event, but how, exactly?”
- South Wales in The 1970s - ”In the 1970s Robin Weaver was a newspaper photographer in South Wales. When he wasn’t covering hard news or local events for his paper, he liked to photograph the people and everyday scenes he came across. For years his photographs remained in his private collection but then, 40 years on, he revisited his old negative files.” This is Butetown, aka Tiger Bay, in 1974.
Happy invoicing!
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