[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul features a photo essay made by Evan Panagopoulos in the course of a hurried three-hour visit to the Socialist Modernist and modern highlights of 20th century Kiev architecture.
• Bad Astrronomer Phil Plait notes how the latest planet found in the Kepler-47 circumbinary system evokes Tatooine.
• Centauri Dreams looks at tide and radiation, and their impacts on potential habitability, in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
• Citizen Science Salon looks at how the TV show Cyberchase can help get young people interested in science and math.
• Crooked Timber mourns historian David Brion Davis.
• The Crux looks at how the HMS Challenger pioneered the study of the deeps of the oceans, with that ship’s survey of the Mariana Trench.
• D-Brief looks at how a snowball chamber using supercooled water can be used to hunt for dark matter.
• Earther shares photos of the heartbreaking and artificial devastation of the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil.
• Gizmodo shares a beautiful Hubble photograph of the southern Crab Nebula.
• Information is Beautiful shares a reworked version of the Julia Galef illustration of the San Francisco area meme space.
• io9 notes that, fresh from being Thor, Jane Foster is set to become a Valkyrie in a new comic.
• JSTOR Daily explains the Victorian fondness for leeches, in medicine and in popular culture.
• Language Hat links to an interview with linguist Amina Mettouchi, a specialist in Berber languages.
• Language Log shares the report of a one-time Jewish refugee on changing language use in Shanghai, in the 1940s and now.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the horror of self-appointed militias capturing supposed undocumented migrants in the southwestern US.
• Marginal Revolution reports on the circumstances in which volunteer militaries can outperform conscript militaries.
• At the NYR Daily, Christopher Benfey reports on the surprisingly intense connection between bees and mourning.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw, responding to Israel Folau, considers free expression and employment.
• The Planetary Society Blog shares a guest post from Barney Magrath on the surprisingly cheap adaptations needed to make an iPhone suitable for astrophotography.
• Peter Rukavina reports on the hotly-contested PEI provincial election of 1966.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what the discovery of helium hydride actually means.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little praises the Jill Lepore US history These Truths for its comprehensiveness.
• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing divergences in demographics between different post-Soviet countries.
• Arnold Zwicky starts with another Peeps creation and moves on from there.