Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDXLIII

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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDXLIII

That flaming orb in the heavens is at it again. Best to dodge the rays in favour of assorted gubbins online:

When a cold case is solved, why can’t internet sleuths move on? - A group of Redditors spent over a decade trying to identify a man who'd killed himself in a hotel room. "Communities form around these cases as users try and unearth new information. But, most of the time, nothing they do makes a difference. These cases don’t get solved, but they do provide a way for people to indulge in their morbid curiosity about unsolved mysteries."
It Was All a Dream - I know nothing and care less about Association Football, but this autobiographical piece by Raheem Sterling is excellent. "So can I trust you? Can I tell you my story, and will you really listen? If you read certain papers, maybe you already think you know me. Maybe you think you know my story, and what I care about. But do you really?"
High-wire: a vertiginous ride in Chiatura’s Soviet-era cable cars - "Chiatura, a once-booming mining town in western Georgia, won’t strike you as a quintessential tourist destination. The city’s only landmark is the Mgvimevi monastery, set on the edge of a natural cave. Chiatura’s main attraction, however, is “Stalin’s rope road”, a network of cable cars built in the 1950s to transport workers to the manganese mines in the mountains."
Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital - Those whacky Mexica: "Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed. Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did."
To Believe is to Feel: When a Mysterious Epidemic Isn’t So Mysterious - What links US diplomats in Cuba in 2016 and the Chinese city of Guangzhou this month, and schoolchildren in the Chinese village of Fuhu in 2004? "To people who study mass psychogenic illnesses, the parallels are clear and there is little mystery involved. The key difference is that when this happens in a school, the consequences are minor. When it happens in an embassy, there are geopolitical costs."
Asteroid Ryugu starts to come into focus - "The Japanese Space Agency mission Hayabusa 2 has been traveling through the solar system for well over three years, chasing down a dark rock called Ryugu. And now, after all that time and distance, it's just 240 kilometers from its target." And as of about half past seven this morning, it's just 40km away
When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong - "A recent mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world." There won't be any ambulances for the first settlers…
Researchers find last of universe's missing ordinary matter - That thing about only two-thirds of the non-dark matter being accounted for is no longer true: "To pin down the missing third, the researchers used the radiation emanating from a distant, ultra-bright black hole called a quasar. That lost matter exists as filaments of oxygen gas at temperatures of around 1 million degrees Celsius that lie in the space between galaxies, said CU Boulder’s Michael Shull, a co-author of the study."
Radar images show large swath of Texas oil patch is heaving and sinking at alarming rates - Texas is learning that taking lots of stuff out from underground can have effects on the surface, as mining communities could have told them: "Radar satellite images show significant movement of the ground across a 4000-square-mile area—in one place as much as 40 inches over the past two-and-a-half years, say the geophysicists."
A Brief History of Soviet Sci-fi - "While they are now regarded as singular masterpieces of world cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker descended from a long tradition of science-fiction filmmaking from behind the Iron Curtain… Cult-film aficionado Todd Brown offers a tour of some of the less-famed but no less fascinating examples of Soviet sci-fi."