- ‘It changed the world’: 50 years on, the story of Pong's Bay Area origins - ”Computer Space never quite took off into the stratosphere, but the two aspiring entrepreneurs knew they were on to something… Atari created a new game that was as captivating as it was simple — and that would effectively launch the modern video game industry to the world. Aiming for a name that was catchy and succinct, the innovators at Atari simply called it Pong.” A look back at the origins of the game that started it all
- Room-Temperature Superconductor Discovery Meets With Resistance - ”A paper in Nature reports the discovery of a superconductor that operates at room temperatures and near-room pressures. The claim has divided the research community.” The research group responsible has form for dubious claims, so the supposed breakthrough may not be all it seems.
- The mice with two dads: scientists create eggs from male cells - ”Proof-of-concept mouse experiment will have a long road before use in humans is possible.” Are they suggesting that one day, two men will be able to give birth to a mouse?
- Finding Audrey Amiss - ”Living in and out of psychiatric hospitals, the artist Audrey Amiss documented her everyday life in a striking visual diary… Archivist Elena Carter writes about finding Audrey as she catalogued and cared for her collection, and how we understand a life through the material that is left behind.” Among other things, Audrey collected wrappers from things she'd bought, which she pasted into scrapbooks. This was the last page filled before her death in 2013.
- Decades without man: rewilding of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone benefits endangered birds - ”The accident at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 was one of the worst nuclear disasters that ever happened… The people who once called this region home had to move away, the farmland was abandoned, and drainage canals were locked to prevent the spreading of wildfires and contaminated water. But the retreat of the population did not mean that all life had left the area. Nature took its chance and began to reclaim the territory, at its own will and pace.” Our loss is various species of eagles' gain
- The Hidden Mathematics of Crowds: How Pedestrians Inadvertently Self-Organize - ”Have you ever pondered how people, without having a discussion or even giving it a second thought, instinctively form lanes when walking through a crowded area? A new theory, developed by mathematicians at the University of Bath in the UK and led by Professor Tim Rogers, explains this phenomenon.” The full paper is at Science: Lane nucleation in complex active flows
: - How to draw with a Spirograph - The stationers of Present & Correct bought and scanned this 1967 book
- Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the first great war for your thumbs - Keyboard historian Marcin Wichary on various attempts to get your thumbs to do more: ”We all know the story of the Thumb Wars of the 2000s: the skirmish between BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android… But there was another, lesser known battle centered around using thumbs for typing. It happened 15 years earlier, on much larger keyboards, and through the twists of fate it happened to involve a few people with big egos who came out of Apple Computer, Inc.”
- The cat that ate Thomas Hardy’s heart - ”I shall break all the rules of narrative and give you the punch line first. The heart of Thomas Hardy was eaten by a cat.” Can it be true? Apparently so, if the various sources Frank Smyth found for this peculiar tale are correct
- Architecture d'entraînement - From photographer Eric Tabuchi, a collection of photographs of training towers at French fire stations.
Happy invoicing!
