[PHOTO] Two photos of 1286 Dupont Street

https://www.point2homes.com/CA/Home-For-Rent/ON/Toronto/Davenport/1286-Dupont-Street/57673974.html

Once home to a U-Haul outpost, this kiosk with attached land across Dupont Street from the Galleria Mall was advertised for sale at a quarter-million dollars before it was bought some time ago. Neatly renovated, this is now available for renters at a price of $C 3500 a month. Suggested uses include dry cleaning, vehicle rental services, or a garden centre.

[PHOTO] Looking across the northwest corner of Dupont and Bartlett

The northwest corner of Dupont Street and Bartlett Avenue once hosted the downtown Toronto outpost of Affinity Luxury Car Rentals. The business has been closed down for months, and a banner advertises that this space is available.

[PHOTO] Three photos of front yard flowers on Lansdowne Avenue

My heart was warmed yesterday evening when I walked home along Lansdowne Avenue and saw the flowers in the front yards of the different homes. The tulips and daffodils were lovely, but the sheer heft of the flowering trees impressed me. Were those five-petal white flowers in the second photos product of a tilia or linden tree, as my later googling suggested?

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomy identifies the most distant globular cluster known to exist around the Milky Way Galaxy, PSO J174.0675-10.8774 some 470 thousand light-years away.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the strange ring of the Kuiper Belt dwarf planet Haumea.


• Crooked Timber looks at an ill-constructed biography of Eric Hobsbawm.


• D-Brief notes an experiment that proves antimatter obeys the same laws of quantum mechanics as regular matter, at least insofar as the double-slit experiment is concerned.


• Earther notes that life in Antarctica depends critically on the presence of penguin feces.


• Imageo looks at awesome satellite imagery of spring storms in North America.


• The Island Review interviews Irene de la Torre, a translator born on the Spanish island of Mallorca, about her experiences and thoughts on her insular experiences.


• Joe. My. God. notes a new deal between Gilead Pharmaceuticals and the American government to make low-cost PrEP available to two hundred thousand people.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the many ways in which The Great Gatsby reflects the norms of the Jazz Age.


• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money is rightly critical of the Sam Harris suggestion that white supremacism is not an ideology of special concern, being only a fringe belief.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution solicits questions for an upcoming interview with demographer of religion Eric Kaufmann.


• Russell Darnley at Maximos62 shares cute video of otters frolicking on the Singapore River.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel asks when the universe became transparent to light.


• Arnold Zwicky shares photos of his blooming flower gardens.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: raccoons, High Park sakura, dog parks, marijuana, Queen Video

• Jamie Bradburn looks back at vintage coverage in the Toronto press from 1952 about some fortunate raccoons.


• blogTO notes that this weekend will seek peak bloom in the cherry blossoms of High Park.


• Edward Brown at Spacing writes about the decades-long struggle to get dog parks accepted in Toronto.


• CBC Toronto notes controversy in Etobicoke surrounding a local brewery's decision to process medical marijuana on site.


• This National Post article by Sadaf Ahsan looks at how now-defunct Queen Video contributed hugely to pop culture in Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Hobart, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Wroclaw

• La Presse considers some different strategies to keep rue Saint-Denis in Montréal a healthy thoroughfare and neighbourhood.


• Atlas Obscura explains how the upstate New York town of Hobart made itself as a home for a used book store cluster.


• Guardian Cities explains why anti-gentrirfication activists in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin are fighting to keep their local Aldi, to continue to have low-cost food locally.


• Window on Eurasia notes a poll of immigrant workers in St. Petersburg that finds most quite like their new home.


• CityLab looks at Polish architect Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, whose brutalism played a key role in the reconstruction of the Poland city of Wroclaw from the ruins of old German Breslau.

[URBAN NOTE] Five notes about smart animals: bees, wolves/dogs, cetaceans, Denisovans, Neanderthals

• The Conversation notes how urban beekeepers can play a key role in saving bees from extinction.


• Motherboard looks at the comparative intelligence, and generosity, of wolves versus their domesticated dog counterparts.


• National Geographic looks at how marine mammals, particularly cetaceans, have been used in different militaries.


• Smithsonian Magazine looks at how recent studies have demonstrated the diversity among Denisovan populations.


• Smithsonian Magazine looks at the new consensus about the remarkable capabilities of Neanderthals.

[NEWS] Five sci-tech links: dinosaurs, phages, algae, space development, interstellar travel

• MacLean's notes the controversy surrounding claims of a remarkable find of fossils dating from the very moment, nearly, of the Chixculub impact 66 million years ago.


• Wired looks at how genetically manipulated phages can be used to treat infectious diseases untreatable by antibiotics.


• Universe Today notes the usefulness of algae in life-support systems for long-duration crewed missions.


• Evan Gough at Universe Today notes the need to come up with a system capable of ensuring the sustainable development of space.


• Corey S Powell writes at Discover about new technologies that could conceivably be used for rapid interstellar flight, and about stepping-stone targets worth noting as we work up to the stars.