[NEWS] Twenty news links

• NOW Toronto looks at the Pickering nuclear plant and its role in providing fuel for space travel.
• In some places like California, traffic is so bad that airlines actually play a role for high-end commuters. CBC reports.
• Goldfish released into the wild are a major issue for the environment in Québec, too. CTV News reports.
• China’s investments in Jamaica have good sides and bad sides. CBC reports.
• A potato museum in Peru might help solve world hunger. The Guardian reports.
• Is the Alberta-Saskatchewan alliance going to be a lasting one? Maclean’s considers.
• Is the fossil fuel industry collapsing? The Tyee makes the case.
• Should Japan and Europe co-finance a EUrasia trade initiative to rival China’s? Bloomberg argues.
• Should websites receive protection as historically significant? VICE reports.
• Food tourism in the Maritimes is a very good idea. Global News reports.
• Atlantic Canada lobster exports to China thrive as New England gets hit by the trade war. CBC reports.
• The Bloc Québécois experienced its revival by drawing on the same demographics as the provincial CAQ. Maclean’s reports.
• Population density is a factor that, in Canada, determines political issues, splitting urban and rural voters. The National Observer observes.
• US border policies aimed against migration from Mexico have been harming businesses on the border with Canada. The National Post reports.
• The warming of the ocean is changing the relationship of coastal communities with their seas. The Conversation looks.
• Archival research in the digital age differs from what occurred in previous eras. The Conversation explains.
• The Persian-language Wikipedia is an actively contested space. Open Democracy reports.
• Vox notes how the US labour shortage has been driven partly by workers quitting the labour force, here.
• Laurie Penny at WIRED has a stirring essay about hope, about the belief in some sort of future.

[URBAN NOTE] Ten city links: Laval, Calgary, Vancouver, Cleveland, Machu Picchu, London, Görlitz …

• The Québec city of Laval now has a cemetery where pets can be buried alongside their owners. CBC reports.
• Talk of Alberta separatism has already cost Calgary at least one high-profile non-oil investment, it seems. Global News reports.
• A new piece of public art in Vancouver, a spinning chandelier, has proven to be a lightning rod for controversy. CBC reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at the continuing fight against lead contamination in Cleveland.
• Machu Picchu was built in a high remote corner of the Andes for good reasons, it is being argued. The National Post reports.
• Wired looks at how rivals to Uber are currently fighting for dominance in London, here.
• Guardian Cities shares a cartoon history of the birth of Nairobi, here.
• The east German city of Gorlitz offered interested people one month’s free residence. The Guardian reports.
• JSTOR Daily notes that Hong Kong was born as a city from refugee migrations.
• Is Tokyo, despite tis size and wealth, too detached from Asia to take over from Hong Kong as a regional financial centre? Bloomberg View is not encouraging.

[NEWS] Five JSTOR Daily links: ch’arki, pisco, X-rays, lavender scare, language (@jstor_daily)

• JSTOR Daily examines ch’arki, an Andean food like jerky.
• JSTOR Daily reports on how Peru and Chile contest claims to being the origins of pisco.
• JSTOR Daily explores the X-ray craze of 1896, here.
• JSTOR Daily explores the “lavender scare” of the 1950s that saw dozens of queer men purged from the American government.
• JSTOR Daily looks at how linguists are using Urban Dictionary to study the evolution of language.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes new research on where the sun is located within the Milky Way Galaxy.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly considers the value of slow fashion.
• Centauri Dreams notes the different gas giants that our early methods have yet to pick up.
• Crooked Timber shares a lovely photo looking back at Venice from across its lagoon.
• D-Brief notes that upcoming space telescopes might find hundreds of rogue planets thanks to microlensing.
• io9 notes that Marvel will soon be producing Warhammer40K comics.
• The Island Review shares some poetry and photography by Ken Cockburn inspired by the Isle of Jura.
• JSTOR Daily notes that different humpback whale groups have different songs, different cultures.
• Language Hat tries to find the meaning of the odd Soviet Yiddish word “kolvirt”.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the history of Elizabeth Warren as a law teacher.
• Map Room Blog shares information from Google Maps about its use of data.
• Marginal Revolution notes that in 2016, not a single child born in the United Kingdom was given the name Nigel.
• Peter Watts talks about AI and what else he is doing.
• The NYR Daily marked the centennial of a horrible massacre of African-Americans centered on the Arkansas community of Elaine.
• Emily Margolis at the Planetary Society Blog looks at how the Apollo moon missions helped galvanize tourism in Florida.
• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money looks at the constitutional crisis in Peru.
• Drew Rowsome takes a look at A Streetcar Named Desire.
• Peter Rukavina looks at a spreadsheet revealing the distribution of PEI public servants.
• Spacing reviews a book imagining how small communities can rebuild themselves in neoliberalism.
• Towleroad shares the criticism of Christine and the Queens of the allegedly opportunistic use of queer culture by Taylor Swift.
• Understanding Society considers, sociologically, the way artifacts work.
• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China should be a day of mourning, on account of the high human toll of the PRC.
• Window on Eurasia suggests the Russian generation of the 1970s was too small to create lasting change.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at how underwear ads can be quite sexualized.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Architectuul notes the recent death of I.M. Pei.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes what, exactly, rubble-pile asteroids are.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about definitions of home.
• Centauri Dreams considers white dwarf planets.
• The Crux notes how ultra-processed foods are liked closely to weight gain.
• D-Brief observes that a thin layer of insulating ice might be saving the subsurface oceans of Pluto from freezing out.
• Bruce Dorminey notes the critical role played by Apollo 10 in getting NASA ready for the Moon landings.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes the American government’s expectation that China will seek to set up its own global network of military bases.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina reports on the Soviet Union’s Venera 5 and 6 missions to Venus.
• Far Outliers looks at the visit of U.S. Grant to Japan and China.
• Gizmodo notes a recent analysis of Neanderthal teeth suggesting that they split with Homo sapiens at a date substantially earlier than commonly believed.
• io9 notes the sheer scale of the Jonathan Hickman reboots for the X-Men comics of Marvel.
• Joe. My. God. shares the argument of Ted Cruz that people should stop making fun of his “space pirate” suggestion.I am inclined to think Cruz more right than not, actually.
• JSTOR Daily notes the wave of anti-black violence that hit the United States in 1919, often driven by returned veterans.
• Language Hat shares a recognizable complaint, written in ancient Akkadian, of bad customers.
• Language Log shares a report of a village in Brittany seeking people to decipher a mysterious etching.
• This Scott Lemieux report at Lawyers, Guns and Money about how British conservatives received Ben Shapiro is a must-read summary.
• Benjamin Markovits at the LRB Blog shares the reasons why he left his immigrant-heavy basketball team in Germany.
• Marginal Revolution looks at one effort in Brazil to separate people from their street gangs.
• The NYR Daily looks at how ISIS, deprived of its proto-state, has managed to thrive as a decentralized network.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw tells of his experiences and perceptions of his native region of New England, in southeastern Australia.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes how the Chang’e 4 rover may have found lunar mantle on the surface of the Moon.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that while Argentine president Mauricio Macri is polling badly, his opponents are not polling well.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of things to do in see in the Peru capital of Lima.
• The Signal examines how the Library of Congress engages in photodocumentation.
• Van Waffle at the Speed River Journal explains how he is helping native insects by planting native plants in his garden.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how scientific illiteracy should never be seen as cool.
• Towleroad notes the questions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as to why Truvada costs so much in the United States.
• Window on Eurasia notes how family structures in the North Caucasus are at once modernizing and becoming more conservative.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes how the distribution of US carriers and their fleets at present does not support the idea of a planned impending war with Iran.
• Arnold Zwicky examines the tent caterpillar of California.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes how the warp in space-time made by the black hole in V404 Cygni has been detected.
• The Crux reports on the discovery of the remains of a chicha brewery in pre-Columbian Peru.
• D-Brief notes a new model for the creation of the Moon by impact with primordial Earth that would explain oddities with the Earth still being molten, having a magma ocean.
• Bruce Dorminey shares the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations might share messages with posterity through DNA encoded in bacteria set adrift in space.
• The Dragon’s Tales reports on progress in drones and UAVs made worldwide.
• Gizmodo notes some of the privacy issues involved with Alexa.
• JSTOR Daily explains how some non-mammals, including birds and fish, nurse their young.
• Language Hat reports on the latest studies in the ancient linguistic history of East Asia, with suggestions that Old Japanese has connections to the languages of the early Korean states of Silla and Paekche but not to that of Koguryo.
• Language Log considers the issues involved with the digitization of specialized dictionaries.
• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money remembers the start of the Spanish Civil War.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points towards his recent interview with Margaret Atwood.
• The NYR Daily reports on a remarkable new play, Heidi Schreck’s What The Constitution Means To Me.
• Towleroad reports on what Hunter Kelly, one of the men who operatives tried to recruit to spread slander against Pete Buttigieg, has to say about the affair.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that a Russian annexation of Belarus would not be an easy affair.
• Arnold Zwicky reports on the latest signs of language change, this time in the New Yorker.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the possibility that interstellar objects like ‘Oumuamua might help planets consdense in young systems.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly explains the genesis of news stories.
• Centauri Dreams explores a remarkable thesis of somehow intelligent, living even, mobile stars.
• Citizen Science Blog reports on an ingenious effort by scientists to make use of crowdsourcing to identify venerable trees in a forest.
• The Crux takes a look at the idea of rewilding.
• D-Brief takes a look at how active auroras can lead to satellite orbits decaying prematurely.
• Bruce Dorminey reports on a new finding suggesting that the suspected exomoon given the name Kepler-162b I does not exist.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the incident that led to the concept of Stockholm syndrome.
• Language Log takes a look at the idea of someone having more than one native language. Is it even possible?
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at how trade war with the EU is hurting the bourbon industry of the United States.
• The LRB Blog reports on the aftermath in Peru of the startling suicide of former president Alan Garcia.
• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that rising health care costs have hurt the American savings rate and the wider American economy.
• Russell Darnley takes a look at the innovative fish weirs of the Aborigines on Australia’s Darling River.
• The NYR Daily takes a look at Russian Doll and the new era of television.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes the formal end of the Mars rover expeditions. Spirit and Opportunity can rest easy.
• Drew Rowsome praises Out, a one-man show at Buddies in Bad Times exploring what it was like to be out in the late 1970s.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes that a search for dark matter has revealed evidence of the radioactive decay of pretty but not perfectly stable isotope xenon-124.
• Window on Eurasia considers the likely impact of new Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky on Ukrainian autocephaly.
• Arnold Zwicky celebrated the penguin drawings of Sandra Boynton, starting from her World Penguin Day image from the 25th of April.

[NEWS] Five D-Brief links: whales, bacteria, offshore platforms, Falcon Heavy, Denisovans

• D-Brief notes the discovery of a fossil of a four-limbed whale in Peru, dating 42.5 million years.
• D-Brief looks at how the bacterium Enterococcus faecalis morphed from normal gut bacteria to potentially fatal hospital-borne infection.
• D-Brief notes a proposal to build offshore platforms as habitat for fish and for birds.
• D-Brief notes how the Falcon Heavy is proving itself a vanguard of progress in spaceflight.
• D-Brief notes new evidence of there having been multiple regional populations of Denisovans, drawing from work in Indonesia.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos of the Triangulum galaxy.
• The Crux notes how innovative planning and recovery missions helped many NASA missions, like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, improve over time.
• Sea stars on the Pacific coast of North America, D-Brief notes, are starting to die out en masse.
• David Finger at the Finger Post shows his readers his recent visit to the Incan ruins at Ollantaytambo, in Peru.
• Gizmodo notes how astronomers accidentally found the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Bedin I a mere 30 million light years away.
• JSTOR Daily notes the new evidence supporting the arguments of W.E.B. Dubois that black resistance under slavery helped the Confederacy lose the US Civil War.
• Language Hat notes the discovery of a new trilingual inscription in Iran, one combining the Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian languages.
• Language Log notes the impending death of the Arabic dialect of old Mosul, and notes what its speakers are said to talk like birds.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money thinks that if Cary Booker does not win the Democratic nomination for 2020, he will at least push the discourse leftwards.
• Marginal Revolution notes new evidence that the post-1492 depopulation of the Americas led directly to the global cooling of the Little Ice Age.
• Neuroskeptic considers the ways in which emergence, at different levels, could be a property of the human brain.
• The NYR Daily features an excerpt from the new Édouard Louis book, Who Killed My Father, talking about the evolution relationship with his father over time.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw muses on the potential for a revival of print journalism in Australia.
• Roads and Kingdoms interviews journalist Jason Rezaian on the subject of his new book about his long imprisonment in Iran.
• Drew Rowsome writes about how censorship, on Facebook and on Blogspot, harms his writing and his ability to contribute to his communities.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel writes</a about how galaxy clusters lead to the premature death of stellar formation in their component galaxies.
• Window on Eurasia notes a new poll from Ukraine suggesting most Orthodox Christians there identify with the new Ukrainian national church, not the Russian one.
• Arnold Zwicky talks about language, editing, and error.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams considers the possible roles and threats posed by artificial intelligence for interstellar missions.
• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber makes the point that blaming Facebook for the propagation of fake news misses entirely the motives of the people who spread these rumours, online or otherwise.
• The Crux looks at the factors which led to the human species’ diversity of skin colours.
• Dangerous Minds reports on a new collection of early North American electronica.
• Far Outliers reports on the salt extraction industry of Sichuan.
• JSTOR Daily notes how inbreeding can be a threat to endangered populations, like gorillas.
• Language Log examines the connection of the Thai word for soul with Old Sinitic.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at divisions on the American left, including pro-Trump left radicals.
• Caitlin Chandler at the NYR Daily reports on the plight of undocumented immigrants in Rome, forced from their squats under the pressure of the new populist government of Italy.
• Spacing takes a look at the work of Acton Ostry Architects.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel looks at the ten largest non-planetary bodies in the solar system.
• Strange Company looks at the very strange 1997 disappearance of Judy Smith from Philadelphia and her latest discovery in the North Carolina wilderness. What happened to her?
• Strange Maps looks at the worrisome polarization globally between supporters and opponents of the current government in Venezuela. Is this a 1914 moment?
• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia and Venezuela share a common oil-fueled authoritarian fragility.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at the camelids of Peru, stuffed toys and llamas and more.