On the first Monday of my holiday last week, I came down with a cold, picked up from going to a meeting in London the week before. Slightly recovered by midweek, I went away to a wedding, and returned with either a different, worse cold or a relapse of the original. The moral of the story is, don't go to places and meet people. We have the Internet now, so stick with that 
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- The heiress at Harvard who helped revolutionize murder investigations — and the case she couldn’t forget - ”Frances Glessner Lee didn’t want to be known as a ‘rich woman who didn’t have enough to do.’ In her 60s, she became a pioneer of forensic science.” This is the third time Lee has appeared here, but the previous articles (in June 2014 and December 2022) mainly focused on her innovative crime scene dioramas while this one goes into more depth about her life and character
- The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change - At last, a use for Thorium-229: ”An ultra-precise measurement of a transition in the hearts of thorium atoms gives physicists a tool to probe the forces that bind the universe.”
- Poliovirus that infected a Chinese child in 2014 may have leaked from a lab - ”The exact source of that virus is unclear, as is the route by which it infected the child, and the authors are careful not to point fingers. But the paper underscores the fact that accidental releases of poliovirus are remarkably common.” Now they tell us
- Safety and Seaplanes - ”Floatplanes are ubiquitous on the coast and indispensable for remote communities, but they don’t need to follow the same regulations and reporting as commercial airlines. How do you keep pilots and passengers safe?” Unsurprisingly, some of this training seems to be very similar to that undertaken in connection with helicopters by friends of mine who’ve worked on offshore oil and gas rigs.
- A day in the life of the world’s fastest supercomputer - ”In the hills of eastern Tennessee, a record-breaking machine called Frontier is providing scientists with unprecedented opportunities to study everything from atoms to galaxies.” Nothing in there about it running Doom yet but I daresay it’ll happen
- Can You Outsmart a Raccoon? - ”Recent studies show just how tricky these trash pandas can be, from opening locks to nabbing DoorDash orders.” There’s a link in there to an entertaining story about the city of Toronto’s ongoing battle to devise a lock for bins that the racoons can’t get past
- The Long Shadow of Soviet Sabotage Doctrine? - Don’t get fooled again: ”Thanks to recent discoveries in the Czech Security Service Archive, we are now able to reconstruct the doctrine that informed the Soviet Bloc’s way of sabotage for much of the 20th century and draw parallels with the myriad suspected sabotage attacks we have seen in Europe and the United States since the Russian invasion of Ukraine… The sabotage operations we are seeing play out today seem to mimic Moscow’s Cold War doctrine in important ways.”
- The Golden Age of Offbeat Arctic Research - We covered some of the stupid nuclear experiments in the frozen north a few weeks ago, but of course there were many other stupid things going on: ”The craft went uphill fine, but going downhill was another matter because it had no brakes. Unsurprisingly, the Carabao — its namesake a Philippine water buffalo — proved to be unsuited for ice travel.”
- LiveATC.net - ”Listen to Live ATC (Air Traffic Control) Communications.” Just that: a bunch of live feeds of ATC comms from around the world
- The Marvelous Madness of Aloïse - ”Aloïse Corbaz lived a life outside the margins. Institutionalised, alone, and without any training, her deeply individual artworks were both a product of and a comment on her struggles with mental illness… She used unconventional materials like toothpaste, flower petals, and scraps of paper to create her vibrant, intricate works, and her art features a fantastical blend of romanticism and surrealism, often depicting regal figures and grandiose love scenes.” Jean Dubuffet and André Breton admired her work, bringing her wider recognition.
Happy invoicing!
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