[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes how variable gravity is on irregular asteroid Bennu.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on how the European Southern Observatory has charted the Magellanic Clouds in unprecedented detail.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares a collection of links looking at the Precambrian Earth.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the late 1950s race to send probes to the Moon.
• Gizmodo shares some stunning astronomy photos.
• JSTOR Daily reports on the saltwater roads, the routes that slaves in Florida used to escape to the free Bahamas.
• Language Log looks at some examples of bad English from Japan. How did they come about?
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money rejects the idea of honouring people like Condoleezza Rice.
• Marginal Revolution considers the idea of free will in light of neurology.
• Corey S Powell at Out There interviews James Lovelock on his new book Novacene, in which Lovelock imagines the future world and Gaia taken over by AI.
• Window on Eurasia notes the water shortages faced by downstream countries in Central Asia.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Architectuul shares photos from a bike tour of Berlin.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on new evidence that exocomets are raining on star Beta Pictoris.
• Larry Klaes at Centauri Dreams reviews the two late 1970s SF films Alien and Star Trek I, products of the same era.
• D-Brief reports on Hubble studies of the star clusters of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Bruce Dorminey shares Gemini telescope images of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov).
• The Dragon’s Tales shares video of Space X’s Starhopper test flight.
• Far Outliers notes the import of the 13th century Norman king of England calling himself Edward after an Anglo-Saxon king.
• Gizmodo notes that not only can rats learn to play hide and seek, they seem to enjoy it.
• io9 notes the fantastic high camp of Mister Sinister in the new Jonathan Hickman X-Men run, borrowing a note from Kieron Gillen’s portrayal of the character.
• Joe. My. God. notes that Guiliani’s soon-to-be ex-wife says he has descended from 911 hero to a liar.
• Language Log looks at the recent ridiculous suggestion that English, among other languages, descends from Chinese.
• The LRB Blog looks at the brief history of commemorating the V2 attacks on London.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the practice in Saskatchewan of sterilizing First Nations women against their consent.
• Marginal Revolution suggests that farmers in Brazil might be getting a partly unfair treatment. (Partly.)
• The Planetary Society Blog explains why C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) matters.
• Window on Eurasia notes that, for the first time, immigrants from Turkmenistan in Belarus outnumber immigrants from Ukraine.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait looks at Westerlund-1, a massive star cluster with many bright stars in our galaxy.
• Centauri Dreams notes a finding that giant planets like Jupiter are less likely to be found around Sun-like stars.
• D-Brief notes how, in a time of climate change, birds migrated between Canada and the equator.
• Bruce Dorminey lists five overlooked facts about the Apollo 11 mission.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that the US House of Representatives has approved the creation of a US Space Corps analogous to the Marines.
• JSTOR Daily considers tactics to cure groupthink.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, looking at the experience of Hong Kong, observes how closely economic freedoms depend on political freedom and legitimacy.
• Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society Blog explains his rationale for calculating that the Apollo project, in 2019 dollars, cost more than $US 700 billion.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the star R136a1, a star in the 30 Doradus cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud that is the most massive star known to exist.
• Window on Eurasia notes how Circassians in Syria find it very difficult to seek refuge in their ancestral lands in the North Caucasus.
• Arnold Zwicky looks, in occasionally NSFW detail, at the importance of June the 16th for him as a date.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul writes</u about the pioneering women architects of the United Kingdom.
• Bad Astronomy reports on a marvelous mosaic assembled by amateur astronomers of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Caitlin Kelly at the Broadside Blog notes how college debts in the United States hinder social mobility.
• The Crux considers how the antibiotic-resistant fungus C. auris can be treated.
• D-Brief looks at the archaeological studies of graves in the forest islands of Bolivia that have revealed remarkable things about the settlement of ancient Amazonia.
• Far Outliers looks at how U.S. Grant built a pontoon bridge across the James River in Virginia.
• Gizmodo notes the big crater created by Hayabusa 2 in the surface of Ryugu, suggesting that body’s loose composition.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how the plan of Denmark to build a border fence to protect its pig populations against wild boars might be flawed.
• Language Hat looks at the South Arabian languages, non-Arabic Semitic languages spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the growing role of women in the American labour movement.
• James Butler at the LRB Blog writes about the new urgency of the Extinction Rebellion in this era of climate change and threatened apocalypse.
• Marginal Revolution considers a paper claiming that intergenerational social mobility in much of Canada is no higher than in most of the neighbouring United States.
• The NYR Daily examines the democracy of Indonesia.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at how a particular reading of international law was used in Bolivia to justify a violation of the national constitution.
• Peter Rukavina shares an insightful map looking at the election results from PEI. One thing brought out by the map is the strength of the Greens across the Island.
• The Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle looks at the useful Ontario shrub of leatherwood.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes the discovery of carbon-60 buckyballs in the far reaches of our galaxy by Hubble.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that the president and the prime minister of Ukraine are both Jews.
• Towleroad notes the new video by Willie Tay, a Singapore music star who was dropped by his label for being gay and has responded by coming out and releasing a video for his song “Open Up Babe”.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the Ingermanlanders, also known as Ingrians or Ingrian Finns, a Finnic people in the hinterland of St. Petersburg who suffered horrifically under Communism.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell looks at how computers, originally imagined to function in certain specific ways, are being reimagined and reused in ways which do not quite suit them (and us).
• Arnold Zwicky finds a stock photo used to represent art stolen by the Nazis and uses it to explore issues of recovery and loss and mistake.

[NEWS] Five D-Brief links: T-rex, hallucinations, LIGO, bacteria, Magellanic Clouds

• D-Brief notes new evidence that the biggest Tyrannosaurus was the oldest one.
• D-Brief notes a new study suggesting that hallucinations are the responses of the body to a lack of sensory stimulation.
• D-Brief notes that LIGO has resumed its hunt for gravitational wave sources.
• D-Brief notes that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be found in abundance at wastewater treatment plants.
• D-Brief notes a new effort to enlist human eyes to detect stellar clusters in the Magellanic Clouds.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Ryan Anderson writes at anthro{dendum} about how the counterhistory of Vine Deloria transformed his thinking.
• Architectuul notes some interesting architectural experiments from the post-WW2 United Kingdom.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes the distinctive dustiness of Large Magellanic Cloud globular cluster NGC 1898.
• The Big Picture shares photos from the worldwide student walkout on climate change.
• Corey Robin writes at Crooked Timber about ethics in economics.
• The Crux points its readers to the space art of Chesley Bonestell.
• D-Brief considers the possibility that the distinction between the sounds “f” and “v” might be a product of the soft food produced by the agricultural revolution.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a new study suggesting there might be fifty billion free-floating planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.
• Gizmodo considers the self-appointed archivists of obscure information on the Internet.
• Information is Beautiful shares an informative infographic analyzing the factors that go into extending one’s life expectancy.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that the American system simply cannot be expected to contain the fascist impulses of Donald Trump indefinitely.
• Marginal Revolution considers the future evolution of a more privacy-conscious Facebook.
• The Planetary Society Blog considers the nature of the skies of mini-Neptunes.
• Drew Rowsome reviews the Kirsten McKenzie horror novel Painted.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel considers the possibility that the Milky Way Galaxy, despite having fewer stars than Andromeda, might be more massive.

[NEWS] Five science links: ancient humans, animal minds, green Asia, generation starships, SN1987A

• Quanta Magazine notes that the deep learning offered by new artificial intelligences can help pick out traces of non-homo sapiens ancestry in our current gene pool.
• This sensitive article in The Atlantic examines the extent to which consciousness and emotion are ubiquitous in the world of animals.
• NASA notes evidence of the great greening of China and India, associated not only with agriculture in both countries but with the commitment of China to reforestation projects.
• Mashable examines the fundamental brittleness of closed systems that will likely limit the classical generation starship.
• SciTechDaily notes new observations of SN 1987A revealing a much greater prediction of dust than previously believed.

[NEWS] Five D-Brief space links: 65803 Didymos, Mars, Charon, V883 Ori, LHA 120-N 180B

• D-Brief looks at the exciting Hera mission planned by the European Space Agency to binary asteroid 65803 Didymos in 2026, some years after a NASA experiment there.
• D-Brief notes that the CubeSats brought to Mars with the InSight mission have gone silent.
• Can features of the surface of Charon be explained by a subsurface ocean escaping and flooding? D-Brief considers.
• D-Brief reports that the ALMA radiotelescope has found clouds of organics around young star V883 Ori.
• D-Brief looks at the massive jet, dozens of light years long, issuing from a young star in the nebula LHA 120-N 180B in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

[NEWS] Five space science links: Planet Nine, Ultima Thule, Orion Nebula, Sag A*, SN 1987A

• This article by Shannon Stirone at Longreads takes a look at the long, lonely search for Planet Nine from the top of Mauna Kea.
• Universe Today shares a high-resolution photograph of Ultima Thule.
• Universe Today explains how the new crop of young stars in the Orion Nebula disrupt the formation of other stellar bodies.
• Phys.org shares this amazing photograph of Sagittarius A* at the heart of our galaxy.
• The shockwaves from Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud, Universe Today notes, are still crashing into the neighbouring interstellar medium, revealing more secrets to astronomers.

[NEWS] Five space science links: red dwarfs, zombie stars, LMC, M94, dark matter

• Evan Gough at Universe Today, looking at a study of nearby young red dwarf AU Microscopii, points to findings suggesting that red dwarfs quickly lose volatiles like water in their protoplanetary disks, leaving their worlds sterile.
• Paul Sutter at Universe Today looks at zombie stars, white dwarfs which underwent Type 1a supernovas which did not totally destroy them.
• The SCMP notes a new study suggesting that the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, will collide with our galaxy in a mere 2.5 billion years.
• IFLScience notes that nearby spiral galaxy M94 is unusually lacking in satellites, leaving interesting hints about the nature of dark matter and its distribution.
• New models of dwarf galaxy formation suggest dark matter can be heated, driven away from a galaxy’s core by–for instance–active star formation. Scitech Daily reports.