Hello! I’m very excited because I’m nearing #50 and I want to do something special about it, but don’t know what. Any ideas? Also, thanks to you for sticking around and reading and giving feedback :)

*The SACC is officially pro-hyphen, arguing that the mark serves two functions. It resolves potential ambiguities in names like Eastern Striolated-Puffbird (i.e., this bird is a Striolated Puffbird of the east, not a puffbird with eastern striolae). And it signifies the close taxonomic relationship between species (i.e., the two Striolated-Puffbirds are more closely related to each other than they are to the twenty-some other puffbird species in South America). *

  • This Map Charts the Complex Landscape of an Artist’s Face - An artist called Michael Druks charted out a rather delightful map of his own face. It’s brilliant. “The eyes are like a lake,” Druks says. “The lips are a bit like a river. The blue can represent either air or water aiming either up or down—outside or inside.”

  • Humans Made The Banana Perfect

  • But Soon, It’ll Be Gone - In a quest for yields and uniformity, we have made all bananas the same - just clones of one plant, or super-plant. This is great for the industry. All bananas are equal, with the same size, shape and taste. This definitely poses biological problems, however. A single parasite or disease can wipe out an entire nation’s crop.

  • Space Sex Is Serious Business - FiveThirtyEight went for a rather clickbait-y title, and I’ll stick with it. This is a nice piece about how we know very little about conception, birth and growth in space. And if we do have to colonise other planetary systems (or even Mars, for that matter) we will need to know about these things a lot better.

  • Welcome to Pleistocene Park - In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.

At times they sounded like villains from a Michael Crichton novel. Nikita suggested that such concerns reeked of a particularly American piety. “I grew up in an atheist country,” he said. “Playing God doesn’t bother me in the least. We are already doing it. Why not do it better?”

  • The Secret Plan For The Days After The Queen’s Death - All you need to know about Operation London Bridge - what happens when the Queen dies? It’s a fun longread.

  • Is The Dark Really Making Me Sad? - How do Scandinavians deal with long, dark winters? And what might this teach us about the relationship between our moods and sunlight? The most interesting thing here is that in winter, our circadian rhythm falls out of sync with the daily cycle because it is connected to the light-dark cycle, which is heavily skewed in the winters. This is a nice investigation about “winter depression” by Mosaic which is one of my favourite science magazines.

  • Into The Woods - At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away with only the most basic supplies. He had no plan. His chief motivation was to avoid contact with people. This is not the best plan to have, but he was young and idealistic. He had to steal from cabins and houses to subsist, but otherwise his life was peaceful and rather idyllic. He survived for 27 years before being arrested by the police.

  • ‘A Death in Emergency Room One’ - Jimmy Breslin, a journalist who died last week, wrote something amazing in the wake of JFK’s assassination. Read it.