A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares images of galaxy M61.


• Centauri Dreams looks at a proposal for the Solar Cruiser probe, a NASA probe that would use a solar sail.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of bacteria on coasts which manufacture dimethyl sulfide.


• Bruce Dorminey writes about some facts about the NASA X-15 rocket plane.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the strange nuclear accident in Nyonoksa, Russia.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the recent uncovering of the ancient Egyptian city of Heracleion, under the Mediterranean.


• Language Hat looks at 19th century standards on ancient Greek language.


• Language Log notes an ironically swapped newspaper article subhead.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the role of Tom Cotton in the recent Greenland scandal.


• Marginal Revolution glances at the relationship between China and Singapore.


• The NYR Daily looks at how the car ride played a role in the writing of Jacques Lacan.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares an index on state fragility around the world.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why Jupiter suffers so many impacts from incoming bodies.


• John Scalzi at Whatever reports on what seems to have been an enjoyable concert experience with Iron Maiden.


• Window on Eurasia reports a claim that, with regards to a border dispute, Chechnya is much more unified than Dagestan.

• The Crux notes the discovery of a second impact crater in Greenland, hidden under the ice.


• D-Brief notes new evidence that ancient Celts did, in fact, decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads.


• Far Outliers notes how Pakhtun soldier Ayub Khan, in 1914-1915, engaged in some cunning espionage for the British Empire on the Western Front.


• Kashmir Hill at Gizmodo notes how cutting out the big five tech giants for one week--Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft--made it almost impossible for her to carry on her life.


• Hornet Stories notes that, unsurprisingly, LGBTQ couples are much more likely to have met online that their heterosexual counterparts.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox imagines Elizabeth Warren giving a speech that touches sensitively and intelligently on her former beliefs in her Cherokee ancestry.


• Mónica Belevan at the Island Review writes, directly and allegorically, about the Galapagos Islands and her family and Darwin.


• JSTOR Daily looks at the economics of the romance novel.


• Language Hat notes the Mandombe script creating by the Kimbanguist movement in Congo.


• Harry Stopes at the LRB Blog notes the problem with Greater Manchester Police making homeless people a subject of concern.


• Ferguson activists, the NYR Daily notes, are being worn down by their protests.


• Roads and Kingdoms lists some things visitors to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent should keep in mind.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel makes a case for supersymmetry being a failed prediction.


• Towleroad notes the near-complete exclusion of LGBTQ subjects and themes from schools ordered by Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro.


• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at the Kurds, their history, and his complicated sympathy for their concerns.

• With new translation facilities in place, MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette has delivered the first speech translated from the Cree delivered in the House of Commons. Global News reports.


• La Presse looks at the newly-lodged land claim of the Attikamekw to much of the Haute-Mauricie region.


• Brielle Morgan at The Discourse looks at the necessary, but neglected, role of "roots workers" in keeping indigenous children in care in British Columbia connected with their cultures.


• Tanya Talaga at the Toronto Star looks at the serious impact of climate change on many Indigenous communities, starting with the High Arctic.


• The New Yorker takes a look at the literary success of queer Greenlandic writer Niviaq Korneliussen.

• D-Brief suggests that, in an era of climate change, waves of simultaneous wildfires may be the new normal in California.


• The Dragon's Tales shares some news items looking at the history of the Precambrian Earth and of ancient life.


• The Island Review shares some Greenland-themed poems by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how the introduced Callery pear tree has become invasive in North America.


• Language Log considers language as a self-regulating system.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes his new magpie friend. What name should he have?


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that the democracy of Mexico is in such poor shape that, even now, the democracies of Poland and Hungary despite far-right subversion are better off.


• Drew Rowsome reviews the 1993 novel The Night of the Moonbow by Thomas Tryon.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the falling fertility rates in Syria, and takes issue with one statistical claim.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that gravitational waves are affected by gravity, and looks at what this implies for physics.


• Towleroad reports that Sarah Silverman has rethought her use of the word "gay" in her comedy routines.


• Vintage Space notes the evidence confirming that many--most, even--Apollo astronauts had tattoos.


• Window on Eurasia notes how the boundaries of the "Russian world" continue to contract, with the status of the Russian language receding in the education and the media and the public life of neighbouring countries.


• Arnold Zwicky considers which part of Europe Switzerland lies in. Is it central European, or western European?

• Atlas Obscura takes a look at Malaga Island in Maine, an island brutally depopulated by state authorities a century ago because of its non-white population.


• Gizmodo notes the discovery of some of the oldest soil ever found, paleosoil, 3.7 billion years old, in Greenland.


• A fringe political candidate in British Columbia wants his Vancouver Island to become a separate province. The Province reports.


• The Gibraltar Chronicle has a feature on a journalist with a book exploring the historical connection between Gibraltar and the Balearic island of Menorca, at one time a British possession.


• The Guardian reports on how Palau dealt with a freeze on tourism from China over its continued recognition of Taiwan.

• La Presse notes that ongoing contruction is making traffic to and from the heavily populated Ile-des-Soeurs, just off Montréal, very difficult.


• IPS News notes that Barbados is hoping to diversify beyond its traditional sugar cane agriculture to start tapping fisheries in the adjacent Atlantic.


• The Island Review shares the reports of Marg Greenwood around the Scottish island of Islay.


• Are the oldest fossils in the world, imprints in Greenland rocks billions of years old, actually fossils? CBC reports.


• The Inter Press Services notes that the Seychelles have issued some bonds in support of new fisheries projects.

• JSTOR Daily notes how severe drought in Ireland is revealing, to aerial and other observers, the outlines of ancient ruins.


• D-Brief examines how the export from Norse Greenland to Europe of walrus ivory played a key role in these lost settlements' economy.


• The people of Rapa Nui, Easter Island, have demanded a return of one of their moai statues from the British Museum, taken at their historical nadir.


• Asylum-seekers being held in detention by Australia on the island of Nauru have beseeched Canada, asking for refuge here. CBC reports.


• New York Magazine suggests that San Juan, capital of Puerto Rico, is despite recent horrors a good destination for tourists.

• Australia's ABC reports on an ambitious plan to develop drones capable of mass tree planting.


• The Weather Network warns that global warming could see Canada circa 2100 experience tropical summers.


• National Geographic reports on the discovery of a thriving ecosystem existing in the waters beneath the Greenland icecap.


• Daily Xtra criticizes a recent MacLean's article for making bad arguments against anti-HIV treatment PrEP.

It's an image that requires a double-take: a pristine Arctic landscape in Greenland, dotted with rusted debris from an abandoned World War II military base.

Bluie East II was a U.S. military base built in eastern Greenland in 1942. It was used to bring in supplies, refuel planes and manage flights in need of an emergency landing pad.

When the site, which housed 200 to 300 soldiers, was abandoned in 1947, everything was left behind to rust and break down.

"I was really just shocked at it, it was beyond belief," says Ken Bower, a graphic designer from New York City who stumbled across the site for the first time in 2012.

"You have this absolute pristine, picture-perfect landscape and then sitting in that landscape is all the hazardous materials."