Just piling these up here so they can be burned down tomorrow night, with an effigy of your least-favourite politician on top:
Happy invoicing!
- The Wild Ones - ”People said that women had no place in the Grand Canyon and would likely die trying to run the Colorado River. In 1938, two female scientists set out to prove them wrong.” The story of biologists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter's journey through the dangerous rapids of Utah and Arizona in search of cacti.
- Life is quantum - ”Weird quantum effects are so delicate it seems they could only happen in a lab. How on Earth can life depend on them?”
- The Fate of This Coral Species Rests in a Dark Room in Tampa - The endangered Atlantic pillar coral has been made to spawn in the lab for the first time: ”Under normal sea conditions, these sperm and eggs would meet just once a year in a precisely timed orgy that occurs just after the August new moon. But only 50 Atlantic pillar coral colonies remain in the waters off Florida, living too far apart for their reproductive cells to ever cross paths.”
- A 360° look at an 18th Century Kiln from the Boar’s Head Excavation Site - ”We are undertaking excavations of the Boar’s Head Playhouse in Whitechapel, London… The excavation of the site is exploring the remains of the Shakespearean-era playhouse which stood there, but has also led to some other fascinating discoveries, including an 18th Century kiln, which was used to make clay pipes.” Nice 3D model of the kiln to play with
- The IKEA Tarot - ”IKEA is a place of transition, a journey, a source of light and comfort, but also strife. Like the universe, IKEA feels infinite. The tarot is a way of finding understanding through symbols. What could be a better source of symbols than IKEA?” You can buy the deck, should you wish to use Swedish furniture assembly manuals for prognostication
- A Textbook Evolutionary Story About Moths and Bats Is Wrong - Yet another scientific fact is shown to be simple, obvious, and wrong: ”For 50 years, researchers have thought that moths evolved ears to detect the ultrasonic calls of attacking bats—but a new study shows that ears came first.”
- ALMA sees the twisted birth of a binary star system - The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has photographed a binary star system in the process of formation: ”As the two stars orbit each other, their gravitational influence on the disk around them changes, a little bit like the beaters of a mixer whipping up the material around them… It flows toward them in streamers, filaments, and as the stars move the filaments follow them.”
- Perceptions of Musical Octaves Are Learned, Not Wired in the Brain - A study of the Tsimané people of Bolivia show that their perception of music differs from that of subjects from the USA: ”Most studies about music perception examine people accustomed to Western music, so only a few enclaves like these remote Tsimané villages allow scientists to make comparisons across cultures… [The study] suggests that a feature of music most of us might consider to be intrinsic — the perceived organization of musical pitches into octaves — is a cultural artifact.”
- Collision liquified the 4th-largest asteroid, turning it into a dwarf planet - ”Some, like the dwarf planet Ceres, have seen their interiors restructured under the force of gravity while having their surfaces blasted by collisions. Smaller asteroids have experienced collisions that completely shattered them, leaving their debris' weak gravity to pull the pieces together into a rubble pile. Now, new images of the fourth-largest body in the asteroid belt, Hygiea, suggest it has a history that's somewhere between the two.”
- Over the Horizon - Arkadiusz Podniesiński visits the DUGA over-the-horizon radar near Chernobyl: ”The antenna is still one of the largest constructions of its type in the world and a true masterpiece of mechanical engineering. It towers majestically over the entire area and is visible from a distance of dozens of kilometers. When I climbed to the top of DUGA nearly 10 years ago, I was probably the first to do so since the disaster.” He used a drone this time to get these beautiful pictures of the antenna emerging from low cloud
Happy invoicing!
