Late this week due to an extremely busy day 
Happy invoicing!
- One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball - There's more to bowling balls than meets the eye: ”Bowling is easy to shrug off as a mere leisure pursuit—a boozy weekend pastime in which anyone with decent hand-eye coordination can perform well enough. But hardcore bowlers have a very different take on the sport: To them it’s a physics puzzle so elaborate that it can never be mastered, no matter how many thousands of hours they spend pondering the variables that can ruin a ball’s 60-foot journey to the pins… [Maurice Pinel is] the figure most responsible for transforming how bowlers think about the scientific limits of their sport.”
- Dinosaurs Evolved Flight at Least Three Times - ”Many animals crawl, slither, burrow, walk and swim, but comparatively few have the ability to take to the air. There’s something about evolving the ability to fly that’s more difficult than other ways of getting around. Yet, despite these challenges, dinosaurs didn’t just evolve the ability to fly once, but several times.” Riley Black on a new study into the evolution of feathered dinosaurs.
- World’s largest ‘explosion’ could have been caused by iron asteroid entering and leaving atmosphere - A new theory about Tunguska: ”Dr. Sergei Karpov, leading researcher at Kirensky Physics Institute in Krasnoyarsk and his peers, argue ‘that the Tunguska event was caused by an iron asteroid body, which passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and continued to the near-solar orbit’.”
- NASA's InSight Mars Lander Gets a Power Boost - ”The team behind NASA’s InSight Mars lander has come up with an innovative way to boost the spacecraft’s energy at a time when its power levels have been falling. The lander’s robotic arm trickled sand near one solar panel, helping the wind to carry off some of the panel’s dust. The result was a gain of about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol, or Martian day.”
- Web Badges World - ”Do you remember these tiny 80x15 buttons that used to adorn websites all over the internet long ago? Web badges were very popular when the internet was younger, when web standards had not yet matured and search engines were not yet well established.” And here are nearly 4,000 of them, with the promise of a generator to make your own coming soon
- For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes - ”On September 15, 1896, two locomotives crashed head on 14 miles north of Waco, Texas. The locomotives’ boilers exploded on impact, sending debris flying through the air for hundreds of yards, killing at least two spectators and maiming countless others. One man even lost an eye to a flying bolt. But no one ran from the calamity… That’s because the 40,000 or so people scattered along the tracks that September day knew the locomotives were going to crash and had paid to be there.” Had to make your own entertainment in those days
- The podcasting hype house from hell - ”Peter Vincer, the man behind the hype house and the CEO of HiStudios, gave me a lofty spiel ahead of the company’s launch in August 2019. He envisioned a global podcast network with influencers and athletes and shows that would become international hits… It was a bold ambition, but everyone in the podcast space pitches something. So after writing about HiStudios that summer, I didn’t hear or think much about them again. That is, until things started falling apart.” Another scam , or just another waste of venture capital?
- The Crystal Hunters of Chamonix - ”Climate change is melting the glaciers and permafrost of the Mont Blanc massif, revealing crystals hidden in pockets once covered in snow. Simon Akam tagged along on an expedition with one of the area’s most legendary hunters, a daring French alpinist who completes dangerous climbs to discover specimens worth tens of thousands of dollars.”
- A galactic archaeologist digs into the Milky Way’s history - ”The spiral arms wrapping around the galaxy’s center, its central bulge packed with stars and a gargantuan black hole, and its fainter, fluffy halo of stars farther out, as if our galaxy were cocooned within a stellar cotton ball… How did the Milky Way come to look this way?” Answers from Amina Helmi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands.
- Ukiyo-e - ”The Ukiyo-e.org database and image similarity analysis engine, created by John Resig to aide researchers in the study of Japanese woodblock prints, was launched in December 2012. The database currently contains over 213,000 prints from 24 institutions.” Surprised I haven’t included this one before, TBH, but it doesn’t seem to be in the archives This is Kirifuri Waterfall at Kurokami Mountain in Shimotsuke.
Happy invoicing!
