Here’s this month’s selection of links to items you may have missed.
Science, Technology, Natural World
Would you like to fly round the moon? If so, then NASA are giving away free flights for your name on their upcoming Artemis I mission.
Cosmologist Katie Mack talks about spotting and combating physics falsehoods online.
Researchers have found the huge and mysterious Hiawatha crater in Greenland to be 58 million years old.
Zoologist Lucy Cooke is waging war on Darwin’s prevailing view of the dominance of males and their benefit from promiscuity. Two articles, the first from the Guardian, the second from New Scientist [£££].
Palaeontologists have described a ten-limbed ancestor of modern octopuses, and named it after Joe Biden.
The largest ever family tree of humanity reveals our species’ history, where we originated and how we spread across the world. [£££]
The Eden Project in Cornwall have succeeded in getting their nutmeg tree to fruit for the first time since planting in 2001.
There’s a new drive to produce the red dye cochineal industrially without having to squash thousands of insects.
Health, Medicine
Here’s an interesting article about the work to identify which flu strains to put in this year’s vaccine – and some of the people who spend their lives trying to spot the emerging strains. [LONG READ]
And now another pair of articles, this time looking at the long-term, but haphazard, effect of Epstein-Barr virus, which is responsible for glandular fever. Again the first is from the Guardian, and the second from The Atlantic. [LONG READS]
Environment
One American academic has demonstrated that by just redesigning both homes and industrial processes it is possible to use almost no external power – and overall it is the cheapest solution! And yes, he has actually done it, and lives in the house.
An iconoclastic letter in New Scientist suggesting that as we’ve paved over much of our world we would do well to rip it up and plant trees instead. [£££]
History, Archaeology, Anthropology
1700 years ago a Roman boat sank in shallow waters just off Mallorca on the Spanish coast. Archaeologists are now retrieving the amazingly well preserved cargo.
In what shouldn’t be a surprise the teams restoring Notre Dame in Paris have found early tombs and a lead sarcophagus under the cathedral’s floor.
Medievalist Dr Eleanor Janega goes looking at non-written communication in Norwich.
And here’s Eleanor Janega again, this time looking at medieval attitudes to semen and female sexuality.
Despite our misogynistic view, there were female composers in the Renaissance. Now more of the ground-breaking work of Maddalena Casulana has been pieced together and performed.
Now not quite up to date … An expedition has found the surprisingly intact wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance off coast of Antarctica.
London
IanVisits takes an opportunity for a look inside London’s Ukrainian Cathedral.
IanVisits has also managed a sneak preview of London’s new Elizabeth line railway (aka. Crossrail).
Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs
Comedian David Baddiel talks about his life-long love of cats. [LONG READ]
Meanwhile a forensic pathologist wishes that a legacy of Covid lockdown is that we change the way we talk about death.
Japan may also need a new narrative as their so-called “killing stone” has split in two, releasing superstition and allegedly a nine-tailed fox. In two stories there’s the usual media-hyped look in the Guardian; however the Japanese think the media have the story wrong as Hiroko Yoda writes on Twitter.
And finally one of the great British train journeys which is high on my bucket list … the longest journey on a single train from Aberdeen to Penzance. I actually want to do Thurso/Wick to Penzance, with Kyle of Lochalsh, Fort William and Mallaig thrown in. I’m not holding my breath in the hope of ever doing it.
