I'm off this week. Reports that I started my holiday with a flying visit to Paris at the weekend are completely unfounded 
Happy invoicing!
- The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist - ”Between 2022 and 2023, as many as 170 rare and valuable editions of Russian classics were stolen from libraries across Europe. Were the thieves merely low-level opportunists, or were bigger forces at work?” Jewellery theft is for amateurs
- Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle - It's not just about cranes: ”The amplituhedron, a shape at the heart of particle physics, appears to be deeply connected to the mathematics of paper folding.”
- Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him - HT to ladymuck for this interesting medical story: ”A 36-year-old man showed up to the emergency department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, severely unwell from a puzzling set of conditions. He had abnormalities in his lungs, intestines, blood, liver, and lymphatic system—and, of course, no single clear explanation. His case was such a riddle that a master clinician with an expertise in clinical reasoning was called in to help unravel it.”
- Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures - Aryn Baker discovers how easy gene editing is now: ”For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing tool — to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos. In addition to this, I’ll need the hand-eye coordination of a middling video game player, a stack of petri dishes and an insulated box.”
- The Secret Life of Horus - The saga of a mummy in Canada: ”A multidisciplinary team of researchers and a specialist from the Canadian Conservation Institute worked painstakingly to reconstruct what was left and restore some dignity to Horus. Sadly, the coffin’s inscriptions were too badly damaged for his actual name to be recovered. Somewhere along the way, he was nicknamed ‘Horus,’ after the falcon-headed son of Isis and Osiris… Horus lived between 300 and 200 BCE, during Ancient Egypt’s Greek or Ptolemaic period. He was a lector priest and scribe in the temple of Ptah, the creator god and patron of craftsmen whose sprawling temple complex stood in the ancient city of Memphis. He was the son of a man who had held the same titles before him, and he died young — likely between 25 and 30 — from unknown causes.”
- Let's Overanalyze Fun - “Fun-size” chocolate bars have a surprisingly litigious history: ”The term ‘Fun Size’ is trademarked, there was a lawsuit over it, and Mars once owned the trademark to ‘Fun,’ too.”
- Where nobody knows your name... - Joel Morris tries to identify the sources of the photos at the start of Cheers: ”This is all from various internet threads and message boards going back decades (and there are a lot of those) but I couldn’t find one thread with all the pictures on, and nothing with them side-by-side with the title cards from the show, so I thought I’d collect as many as I could find together, for fun.”
- Netherlandish Proverbs - A fun way to spend some time with Dutch art: ”In 1559 the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the panel Nederlandse Spreekwoorden including on it literal illustrations of more than a hundred Dutch language proverbs… We've created this interactive version of the analog painting so you can playfully discover the tons of popular wisdom buried on it. Enjoy!”
- 10 Sci-Fi Books Where Humanity Doesn’t Survive - Some light reading: ”The ways in which the universe could kill us are myriad. While some sci-fi authors claim that a hopecore future could still be in store, other cynical thinkers beg to differ. In these sci-fi books, humanity fails to achieve its lofty ambitions, and gutters out entirely. Whether it’s with a bang or with a whimper, one thing’s for sure: we’re doomed. These are 10 sci-fi books where humanity doesn’t survive, to remind you that as bad as things seem currently, it could always be worse.”
- Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966 - Speaking of the end of the world: ”These display screens would display signs of air attack against Canada and the United States… This is the nerve center which would give the first warning of attack, and the command post from which NORAD battle commanders would direct the defensive air battle.” These are some of the springs and dampers that protect the internal buildings from shockwaves caused by nuclear blasts
Happy invoicing!
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