Next week's links will feature longer days for readers in the northern hemisphere. Earth's, that is.
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| Image by NASA and J.P.L. Panoramas, via the NYT |
A beautiful photo essay with images from the Curiosity rover's twenty eight months on Mars (which, if you're curious, is 833 Martian days, or sols).
Starting in 1947 the Wonder Woman comic included a four-page centerfold in every issue, entitled “The Wonder Women of History;" take a peek at a 1949 edition that featured Annie Jump Cannon, an astronomer and human computer who cataloged around 500,000 stars! The New Yorker also recently ran a piece on the history of the comic series.
Using DNA extracted from 17th- and 18th-century parchment, scholars from Trinity College Dublin, the University of York, and the Borthwick Institute for Archives have collaborated to determine which flocks of sheep sacrificed their skins for the paper. Their work was recently published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and contributes to the history of agriculture, as well as the material practices and dating of textual material.
City got you down? Maybe you have Newyorkitis, a serious (if satirical) turn-of-the century diagnosis.
Historians! Do you have anything to submit to the Oxford University Marginalia group?
Atlas Obscura has a fascinating story about a South Carolina family whose home was struck in 1958 by a (thankfully faulty) nuclear bomb that had fallen out of an American aircraft flying above.
Physiologists and neuroscientists are still struggling to define define what, exactly, is fatigue.
Elisabeth Holmes, the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world, wants to test your blood.
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein is on this week's Radiolab, on "buttons" (and, as always on his blog).
And a long piece on the rolling time bomb that is America's oil-by-rail transportation system: rotting wooden bridges that are a century old, overworked and underresourced regulators, and a reliance on the industry for policing itself. Oh, and the railcars themselves keep blowing up.
As Paul Volcker said, self-regulation holds the same relationship to regulation as self-importance holds to importance.
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