Now December is here, it's more than seven years since I had a heart attack for the first time since November 27 2010 
Happy invoicing!
- The Good Traitor - A tale of journalistic repression: ”The Nazis feared journalist Carl von Ossietzky so much they sent him to a concentration camp. Could winning the Nobel Peace Prize save his life?”
- ‘Maya blue’: The mystery dye recreated two centuries after it was lost - Resurrecting a colour: ”A ceramicist in Mexico retraces his Maya roots to recreate a long-lost pre-Hispanic pigment for the first time in more than two centuries.”
- Wearing A Salmon On Your Head Is Back In Fashion For Orcas, After A 37-Year Break - Turns out whales have retro tastes: ”As anyone who follows fashion knows, certain trends like indie sleaze and cargo pants can come back around after a long and quite deserved break. Orcas, it seems, are not immune. After a 37-year break, killer whales have once again been spotted wearing dead salmon on their head.”
- Ryugu asteroid sample rapidly colonized by terrestrial life despite strict contamination control - Life always finds a way: ”Researchers from Imperial College London have discovered that a space-returned sample from asteroid Ryugu was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms, even under stringent contamination control measures.”
- A Single Small Map Is Enough For A Lifetime - Finding adventure close to home with an Ordnance Survey map centred there: ”It showed an area totaling just 20 square kilometers, a tiny place. The map was divided into 400 individual grid squares, outlined in light blue — a single square kilometer each… Each week, I decided, I would explore one of those squares in detail, doing my best to see everything there, to walk or cycle every footpath and street, and to learn as much as I could along the way.”
- The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear? - Tess McClure visits places where nobody lives anymore: ”Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria.”
- How Outdoor Gear Has Changed Since 1978 - Chris Townsend on the evolution of stuff for walkers and their ilk: ”Aah, the good old days! Gear was gear then, none of this soft fluffy stuff. And it was lighter, and tougher. So goes the ageing walker, sitting in the corner of the bar smelling slightly of dead sheep and mildewed cotton. But what gear were walkers using in 1978? And was it as good as the stuff we use now?”
- Charting Nonsense-Land - Mike Sowden’s Everything is Amazing newsletter about the Grauniad’s renowned April Fool’s Day joke of 1977: ”This map headed a special travel feature about the world’s least-known newly independent island republic, San Serriffe… This tiny nation, ‘grouped roughly in the shape of a semicolon,’ was a remarkable scoop, and judging from the size of the feature (7 pages!), the newspaper clearly knew it.”
- The forgotten story of how IBM invented the automated fab - Chips with everything: ”In 1970, Bill Harding envisioned a fully automated wafer-fabrication line that would produce integrated circuits in less than one day. Not only was such a goal gutsy 54 years ago, it would be bold even in today’s billion-dollar fabs, where the fabrication time of an advanced IC is measured in weeks, not days.”
- Warmth and Mystery Emanate from Illustrations by Myriam Wares - ”The Montréal-based artist layers themes like the natural sciences, technology, mythology, and contemporary social issues through a surrealist lens. Her rich illustrations… invite viewers into enigmatic, introspective worlds of wonder.” This illustration was for a Quanta article about neutrino research
Happy invoicing!
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