February seems to be going on for a long time this year, so here's some light reading to take your mind off it 
Happy invoicing!
- Inside Ukraine’s Wartime Salons - Ukrainians won't let Russian attacks come between them and their manicures: ”On January 2, like many Kyiv residents that morning, salon owner Ludmila Chepizhko woke up to the terrifying sounds of missiles and drones overhead… The blast — early enough in the morning that staff hadn’t arrived yet — blew out the glass facade of the salon at a time when temperatures in Kyiv dipped far below freezing. Chepizhko was back in business the next day.”
- Electric Eels’ Shocking Ability To Alter The Genetics Of Nearby Animals - ”Electric eels are truly amazing creatures. They can produce enough electricity to run a kitchen dishwasher or to light up your Christmas tree, but now we’ve found that their electric pulses can also alter the genetics of nearby aquatic creatures.” There's got to be a superhero origin story in there
- The life and gruesome death of a bog man revealed after 5,000 years - Prehistoric people got around: ”He was born more than 5,000 years ago into a community of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who probably lived in northern Scandinavia as their ancestors had for millennia. But Vittrup Man spent his adult life across the sea in Denmark among farming communities, whose ancestors came from the Middle East.”
- Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history - Historians are moving from the archives to the labs: ”Advances in fields such as spectrometry and gene sequencing are unleashing torrents of new data about the ancient world – and could offer answers to questions we never even knew to ask.”
- The Megaflood that Created the Mediterranean - ”The Mediterranean Sea didn't exist 6M years ago. It had dried up into a series of salty lakes. Then a megaflood filled it in a matter of months, killing everything in its path.” Tomas Pueyo presents a collection of animations showing how the Atlantic broke in to the Med, sweeping all before it
- Navy of Drones - For a country without a navy, the Ukrainians have done a real number on the Black Sea Fleet: ”Within one year, the Ukrainian Navy developed a small fleet of marine drones – the modern equivalent of ‘fire ships’ of the past – that has achieved an historical first: the defeat of a surface fleet by autonomous vessels. This article examines how Ukraine’s ‘Navy of drones’ realised the improbable.”
- Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective - ”According to his memoirs, Eugène-François Vidocq escaped from more than twenty prisons (sometimes dressed as a nun). Working on the other side of the law, he apprehended some 4000 criminals with a team of plainclothes agents. He founded the first criminal investigation bureau — staffed mainly with convicts — and, when he was later fired, the first private detective agency.” The remarkable origins of modern detectives.
- Recovering the Lost Aviators of World War II - ”When Manown’s plane went down that morning, it was traveling at least 300 miles an hour. If anybody inside had survived the initial hit, they would have had little time to react, much less to escape… Manown and his crew were understood not to be alive, but they were not declared dead, either. And unless their remains were somehow found, there would be no formal recognition of their demise—no bodies to prepare for burial, no funerals to attend, no graves to visit.”
- Reverse-engineering an analog Bendix air data computer: part 4, the Mach section, Inside the mechanical Bendix Air Data Computer, part 5: motor/tachometers - A double feature for those missing their Ken Shirriff fix: ”The Bendix Central Air Data Computer (CADC) is an electromechanical analog computer that uses gears and cams… The rotating gears are powered by six small servomotors, so these motors are in a sense the fundamental component of the CADC.”
- ‘A picture of hell’: inside the UK’s nuclear reactors – in pictures - ”Armed with a Geiger counter, Michael Collins was given access to multiple power stations across the UK – he found them tranquil, beautiful and sinister.” This is one of the reactors at Sizewell B.
Happy invoicing!
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