One of those days when the first article suddenly goes behind a firewall and I have to hunt around for something else. Good job I don't have any work to do 
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- The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds - ”Occasionally in a game I'll look up and I'll notice the clouds… I wanted to know more about all this stuff. I wanted to know about clouds, and why they should bewitch us. And I wanted to know if all the skies I'd been looking at in games made sense. So, following the impulse of every good cloudspotter, I went straight to the top.” "The top" is Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which has been mentioned here a couple of times over the years
- Electric ‘Ripples’ in the Resting Brain Tag Memories for Storage - ”New experiments reveal how the brain chooses which memories to save and add credence to advice about the importance of rest.” Bad news for insomniacs
- The origin of the cockroach: how a notorious pest conquered the world - ”Genomic analysis suggests the common kitchen vermin spread from Europe to the world. But it wasn’t originally found in Europe.” The full paper is online: Solving the 250-year-old mystery of the origin and global spread of the German cockroach, Blattella germanica.
- Rare 'exo-Venus' with Earth-like temperature discovered - ”Astronomers have made the rare and tantalising discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet 40 light-years away that may be just a little warmer than our own world.” Another one where all the gnarly details are available: Gliese 12 b, a temperate Earth-sized planet at 12 parsecs discovered with TESS and CHEOPS
- The Underground Catacombs of L.A.'s Lizard People - ”One of the more colorful urban legends of L.A. is that of the Lizard People, an advanced race of humans who created an underground city here some 5,000 years ago. According to the story, incalculable riches and gold tablets with the origins of human civilization carved into them were just waiting to be discovered by some savvy treasure hunter.” Sadly, they turn out to be people who worship lizards, rather than Gorn-like entities.
- the summer camp cook, the cat photo, and other stories of long-running coworker grudges - Ask A Manager invited stories of workplace grudges, and there are some very strange people out there: ”During a standard interdepartmental spat over window blinds, one of the other managers became so offended by our manager’s love of sunlight that she locked him in the building during a fire drill.”
- How Cheap's Your Local Spoons? - ”We obtained drinks prices from every Wetherspoons in the UK using the Wetherspoons mobile ordering app.” Might come in handy if you're travelling to a strange town
- Consider the Consequences - ”'Consider the Consequences'', originally published in 1930 was written by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins and is the earliest known published work of fiction that offers branching paths. This style of fiction would go on to give rise to Choose Your Own Adventure books, Infocom text adventure games, and of course, the incredibly popular field of modern Interactive Fiction. ” There's a playable version on the page
- BASIC turns 60: Why simplicity was this programming language's blessing and its curse - ”Since the 1960s, BASIC has introduced countless beginners to computer programming. Here's how the language got started, the paths it cleared for Windows and Apple, and where you can still find it today.” The last time I wrote anything significant in BASIC was on the Acorn Archimedes in the mid-1990s
- Photographer’s Rare Images Reveal Everyday Life in North Korea - No censorship, but a dedication to photographic excellence led his guides to check his photos every day: ”The guides consistently reviewed my images and requested specific deletions. When asked about deleting non-military content, they stressed a dedication to excellence: ‘We only want you to take the best pictures possible – please try to take only good pictures.’” These Pyongyang schoolgirls remain unimpressed.
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