Bit warm, isn't it? For reference, it's 35°C here, but by keeping the windows shut and the curtains drawn, I've managed to keep it down to a veritably frigid 27.8° inside 
Happy invoicing!
- I Reported on Avalanches for 15 Years. Then I Triggered a Huge One. - ”After kicking off an enormous slide on a familiar backcountry run in Colorado, our writer was forced to reconsider his relationship with skiing.” Oops
- Ah, another lovely summer day where the sky is filled with puffy clouds of molten rock - And you thought it was warm out today: ”These alien worlds orbiting other stars can have weather entirely unlike our own, and some that orbit very close to their host stars — so they’re hot — can literally have clouds made of tiny droplets of molten rock. We know this because we’ve detected them.”
- Mass and Angular Momentum, Left Ambiguous by Einstein, Get Defined - ”Surprising as it may sound, 107 years after the introduction of general relativity, the meanings of basic concepts are still being worked out.”
- The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson - ”On July 4, 2012, researchers at CERN in Switzerland announced that they had discovered the Higgs boson, ending a nearly 50-year hunt for this elusive particle. To mark the decennial of the announcement, the editors of Physics Magazine have mapped the history of the Higgs as told through stories from our archive.” Everything you ever wanted to know about the subatomic particle, from the American Physical Society.
- Bomb Sight - HT to Halo Jones for this site which maps bombs that fell on London in World War II: ”The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the maps available to citizen researchers, academics and students. They will be able to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period.”
- How Indigenous Sea Gardens Produced Massive Amounts of Food for Millennia - ”By focusing on reciprocity and the common good—both for the community and the environment—sea gardening created bountiful food without putting populations at risk of collapse.” OK if you like oysters.
- New research into why woodpeckers don’t get concussions busts a popular myth - ”Check out almost any popular science article about woodpeckers and you'll likely find some mention of why the birds don't seem to suffer concussions, despite energetically drumming away at tree trunks all day with their beaks. Conventional wisdom holds that the structure of the woodpecker's skull and beak acts as a kind of built-in shock absorber, protecting the bird from injury. But a new paper published in the journal Current Biology argues that this is incorrect and that woodpecker heads behave more like stiff hammers than shock absorbers.” You can read the full paper if you like, including video and animations: Woodpeckers minimize cranial absorption of shocks.
- Antimemetics Division Hub - To my surprise, it was over a year ago that I linked to the short story Lena by qntm, about the uploaded neural image of a human brain. Here's a novel-length story by them, with contributions from collaborators, about a secret organisation battling a threat to humanity that cannot be remembered, and thus cannot be studied or known about: ”How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.” (At least some of this material has now also been published as a book, but I think it works really well as hyperlinked text.)
- It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives. - HT to vetran for this excellent project: ”There are some tings that should be possible, so just have to be tried. [Action Retro] has a great video showing just such an escapade, the creation of a large RAID 0 array using a pile of USB floppy drives. Yes, taking one of the smallest and most unreliable pieces of data storage media and combining a load of them together such that all the data is lost if just one of them fails.”
- Lost Film Rolls of the Fall of the Soviet Union Developed 26 Years Later - ”Australian photographer Dean Sewell spent 15 months in Russia after the breakup of the former USSR. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he was suddenly reminded that he still had more than two dozen undeveloped B&W film rolls from 1996 to 1997. Sewell managed to find the film and get them developed, and the resulting images are an amazing time capsule from the early days of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.”
Happy invoicing!
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