[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes new evidence that the Pathfinder probe landed, on Mars, on the shores of an ancient sea.
• The Crux reports on tholins, the organic chemicals that are possible predecessors to life, now found in abundance throughout the outer Solar System.
• D-Brief reports on the hard work that has demonstrated some meteorites which recently fell in Turkey trace their origins to Vesta.
• Colby King at the Everyday Sociology Blog explores sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s concept of social infrastructure, the public spaces we use.
• Far Outliers reports on a Honolulu bus announcement in Yapese, a Micronesian language spoken by immigrants in Hawai’i.
• JSTOR Daily considers the import of the autobiography of Catherine the Great.
• Language Hat reports, with skepticism, on the idea of “f” and “v” as sounds being products of the post-Neolithic technological revolution.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen is critical of the idea of limiting the number of children one has in a time of climate change.
• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections reflects on death, close at hand and in New Zealand.
• Strange Company reports on the mysterious disappearance, somewhere in Anatolia, of American cyclist Frank Lenz in 1892, and its wider consequences.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel identifies five types of cosmic events capable of triggering mass extinctions on Earth.
• Towleroad reports on the frustration of many J.K. Rowling fans with the author’s continuing identification of queer histories for characters that are never made explicit in books or movies.
• Window on Eurasia has a skeptical report about a Russian government plan to recruit Russophones in neighbouring countries as immigrants.
• Arnold Zwicky explores themes of shipwrecks and of being shipwrecked.