Just because a certain person is trying to start World War III, that's no reason not to waste time reading this lot 
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- A Crushing Wave of Snow - ”Thirty-five years ago this July, an avalanche killed forty-three climbers on a mountain called Lenin Peak. I witnessed the disaster and have lived with the memories ever since. Here’s the untold story of mountaineering’s deadliest day.” Miguel Helft revisits a little-known disaster on the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
- Why the Moon shimmers with shiny glass beads - ”The Apollo astronauts didn’t know what they’d find when they explored the surface of the Moon, but they certainly didn’t expect to see drifts of tiny, bright orange glass beads glistening among the otherwise monochrome piles of rocks and dust.” New analysis of those beads has revealed more about the Moon's history of volcanic activity. Details are in the paper Lunar volcanic gas cloud chemistry: Constraints from glass bead surface sublimates.
- First Map Made of a Solid’s Secret Quantum Geometry - The quantum folk are trying to persuade everybody their stuff's real, again: ”Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous.”
- Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes - How guinea pigs' feet changed our understanding of evolution: ”Wright’s work with the guinea pigs would set him on a path that would ultimately lead him to depart with his contemporaries and to propose a radical new theory of evolution… For Wright, evolution was about how organisms leap between optimal states of adaptation, crossing dangerous valleys of low fitness in the process.”
- We’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s—only nobody knew - ”A 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China, belongs to a Denisovan, according to a recent study of proteins preserved inside the ancient bone… Thanks to the remarkably well-preserved skull, we finally know what the enigmatic Denisovans actually looked like.” Family reunion
- ACARS Drama - ACARS is used by aircraft for data communications with the ground, and often for various messages that don't need to go by voice. This bot picks up these messages: ”It’s fair to say that the overwhelming majority of messages transmitted are extremely routine and boring, contrary to the name of the bot — which to be honest, is part of the joke. So, you’ll mostly see things about asking for gate confirmations, reporting ‘snags’ with the aircraft, usually toilet or coffee maker related, but occasionally you’ll see reports of drunk passengers, fights onboard — you know, air travel things. That’s what makes it an interesting and fun project.” The message feed is also posted to Mastodon and Bluesky, and each message has a FlightRadar24 link so you can see where the plane that just ran out of toilet paper is
- Logistics - ”Is it possible to get to the source of the things we consume? In 2008, we came up with the idea to follow the reverse journey of a product… The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality. We wanted to convey it in the most direct manner possible in order to share the journey with others. That´s why we recorded the journey in real time and screen it in real time. 37 days and 37 nights, nonstop.” Unsurprisingly, this holds the record for the longest film ever made; should you have 37 days (and nights!) to spare, you can watch it all on YouTube, though they had to split it up a bit - into 107 parts, in fact. Here’s the first part
- It’s True: The JAWS Shark is Public Domain - ”A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.” Another case of publishers and movie studios messing up copyright
- The Man Who Beat IBM - Gareth Edwards is back with another of his epic sagas from the time of the microcomputer revolution, this time about the CEO of Compaq: ”When IBM tried to reclaim control of the PC market with proprietary technology, Compaq CEO Rod Canion decided to create an open standard and share it with competitors—effectively giving away ‘the company jewels’ to preserve innovation. Gareth explains how Canion's leadership style created both a beloved workplace culture and the backbone needed to face down the industry giant. Just think—if IBM had won, we might be living in a very different technological landscape.”
- The Big Picture 2025 - ”Now in its 12th year, the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Photography Competition celebrates some of the world’s best photographers and the year’s most striking images… Each photo, in its own way, inspires viewers to value and protect the remarkable diversity of life on Earth. Below, we present the winners and some of our personal favorites from this year’s competition.” Here, Georgina Steytler captures a mudskipper in its natural environment, skipping (it’s a male, so it’s not our mudskipper)
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