[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes J0045, once thought to be a star in Andromeda and but recognized as a binary black hole a thousand times further away.
• Centauri Dreams notes the longevity of the Voyager mission.
• D-Brief notes that some worms can thrive in a simulacrum of Mars soil.
• The Dragon’s Gaze notes an ambitious effort to try to detect a transit of Proxima Centauri b. Did the researchers pick something up?
• Hornet Stories links to a report suggesting HIV denialism is worryingly common in parts of Russia.
• Language Log reports on an apparently oddly bilingual Chinese/Vietnamese poster. Where did it come from?
• The LRB Blog reports on how Tunisian Anouar Brahem fused jazz with Arabic music on his new album Blue Maqems.
• The Map Room Blog links to a lecture by John Cloud on indigenous contributions to mapmaking in Alaska.
• The NYR Daily looks at the grim position of Theresa May in Brexit negotiations.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer considers what would have happened if the Americas had not been populated in 1492. How would imperialism and settlement differ?
• Roads and Kingdoms notes some of the architectural legacies–houses, for instance–of Basque settlement in the American West.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes three conundrums that neutrinos might be able to solve.
• Window on Eurasia notes why Russia is hostile, despite its program of merging federal units, to the idea of uniting Tatarstan with Bashkortostan.
• Using an interwar map of Imperial Airways routes, Alex Harrowell illustrates how the construction of globalized networks can make relatively marginal areas quite central.