A Bit More Detail

• 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.

• Charlie Stross hosts at Antipope another discussion thread examining Brexit.


• Architectuul takes a look at five overlooked mid-20th century architects.


• Bad Astronomy shares a satellite photo of auroras at night over the city lights of the Great Lakes basin and something else, too.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the directions love has taken her, and wonders where it might have taken her readers.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the Hayabusa 2 impactor on asteroid Ryugu.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber takes issue with the claims of Steven Pinker about nuclear power.


• D-Brief notes the detection, in remarkable detail, of a brilliant exocomet at Beta Pictoris.


• The Dragon's Tales considers the possibility that China might be building a military base in Cambodia.


• Karen Sternheimer writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about the importance of small social cues, easily overlookable tough they are.


• Far Outliers notes the role of Japan's imperial couple, Akihito and Michiko, in post-war Japan.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing writes about the potential inadequacy of talking about values.


• Gizmodo notes a new study suggesting the surprising and potentially dangerous diversity of bacteria present on the International Space Station.


• Mark Graham shares a link to a paper, and its abstract, examining what might come of the creation of a planetary labour market through the gig economy.


• Hornet Stories takes a look at Red Ribbon Blues, a 1995 AIDS-themed film starring RuPaul.


• io9 notes that Guillermo del Toro and Cornelia Funke are co-writing a Pan's Labyrinth novel scheduled for release later this year.


• Joe. My. God. notes a new study suggesting 20% of LGBTQ Americans live in rural areas.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the Bluestockings, the grouping of 18th century women in England who were noteworthy scholars and writers.


• Language Hat notes an ambitious new historical dictionary of the Arabic language being created by the emirate of Sharjah.


• Language Log examines, in the aftermath of a discussion of trolls, different cultures' terms for different sorts of arguments.


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how early forestry in the United States was inspired by socialist ideals.


• The Map Room Blog links to a map showing the different national parks of the United Kingdom.


• Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, noting the new findings from the Chixculub impact, notes how monitoring asteroids to prevent like catastrophes in the future has to be a high priority.


• The New APPS Blog explains how data, by its very nature, is so easily made into a commodity.


• The NYR Daily considers the future of the humanities in a world where higher education is becoming preoccupied by STEM.


• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews Bear Grylls about the making of his new documentary series Hostile Planet.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw considers the pleasures of birds and of birdwatching.


• Jason C. Davis at the Planetary Society Blog noted the arrival of the Beresheet probe in lunar orbit.


• Drew Rowsome reviews the new amazing-sounding play Angelique at the Factory Theatre.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes a paper that makes the point of there being no automatic relationship between greater gender equality and increases in fertility.


• The Signal looks at how the Library of Congress has made use of the BagIt programming language in its archiving of data.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel comes up with questions to ask plausible visitors from other universes.


• Strange Company notes the mysterious deaths visited on three members of a British family in the early 20th century. Who was the murderer? Was there even a crime?


• Towleroad notes the activists, including Canadian-born playwright Jordan Tannahill, who disrupted a high tea at the Dorchester Hotel in London over the homophobic law passed by its owner, the Sultan of Brunei.


• Window on Eurasia notes rising instability in Ingushetia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes that the British surveillance of Huawei is revealing the sorts of problems that must be present in scrutiny-less Facebook, too.

• The study of the changing environment of the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence is explored in this article, over at Global News.


• A new process for extracting uranium from seawater makes nuclear energy still more viable. Forbes has it.


• A recent study of chimpanzee groups in central Africa has found evidence of regional variations in their material culture. Phys.org has it.


• Opium poppy farmers in India are forced to defend their fields against parrots addicted to their crops. VICE reports.


• CBC explores the Lunar Gateway project that Canada is newly involved in.

• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that the planet Earth, judging by the progress of space travel to date, is going to be the only planet our species will ever inhabit.


• D-Brief notes surprising new evidence that maize was domesticated not in Mesoamerica, but rather in the southwest of the Amazon basin.


• Dangerous Minds notes the penalties proposed by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia for buggery, sodomy, and bestiality.


• Earther considers the extent to which Thanos' homeworld of Titan, whether the Saturnian moon or lookalike world, could ever have been habitable, even with extensive terraforming.


• Hornet Stories notes the interesting light that a study of ideal penis sizes among heterosexual women sheds on studies of sexuality generally.


• JSTOR Daily takes an extended look at how the sharing economy, promoted by people like Lawrence Lessig and businesses like Airbnb, turned out to be dystopian not utopian, and why this was the case.


• Victor Mair at Language Log reports on controversy over bread made by a Taiwanese baker, and at the language used.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the latest proof of the decline of Harper's as a meaningful magazine. (Myself, I lost respect for them when they published an extended AIDS denialist article in 2006.)


• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca celebrates, using the example of lexicographer Kory Stamper's new book, how the blog helped him connect with the stars of linguistics.


• Katherine Franke at the NYR Daily notes pressure from Israel directed against academic critics in the United States.


• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has picked up InSight hardware on the surface of Mars below.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how NASA is running short of Plutonium-238, the radioactive isotope that it needs to power spacecraft like the Voyagers sent on long-duration missions and/or missions far from the sun.


• Window on Eurasia notes how, based on an excess of deaths over births, the population of Crimea will decline for the foreseeable future.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some examples of the anaphora, a particular kind of rhetorical structure.

• Angela Bischoff at NOW Toronto is right to make the point/u> that the disposal of the nuclear waste from the Pickering plant is a major issue, though I do not think this waste disproves the case for the plant.


• Durham Region is set to experience something of a marijuana boom when cannabis production becomes legalized. The Toronto Star reports.


• The mayor of the British Columbian community of Delta is concerned marijuana might displace food production on scarce, and wants regulation to prevent this. Global News reports.


• Mother Jones notes the terrible damage that Ben Carson has inflicted, as housing secretary, on low-income residents of a development in embattled Cairo, Illinois.


• Open Democracy's Budour Hassan pays tribute to Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria recently destroyed by the civil war that once was a capital of the diaspora.

• At Anthropology.net, Kamzib Kamrani looks at the Yamnaya horse culture of far eastern Europe and their connection to the spread of the Indo-Europeans.
  
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the predicted collision of China's Tiangong-1 space station. Where will it fall?


• James Bow notes a Kickstarter funding effort to revive classic Canadian science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.


• Centauri Dreams notes the impending retirement of the pioneering Kepler telescope, and what's being done in the time before this retirement.


• D-Brief notes how nanowires made of gold and titanium were used to restore the sight of blind mice.


• Russell Darnley takes a look at the indigenous people of Riau province, the Siak, who have been marginalized by (among other things) the Indonesian policy of transmigration.


• Dead Things reports on more evidence of Denisovan ancestry in East Asian populations, with the suggestion that the trace of Denisovan ancestry in East Asia came from a different Denisovan population than the stronger traces in Melanesia.


• Hornet Stories paints a compelling portrait of the West Texas oasis-like community of Marfa.


• JSTOR Daily notes how indigenous mythology about illness was used to solve a hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico in the 1990s.


• Language Log praises the technical style of a Google Translate translation of a text from German to English.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that, under the Shah, Iran was interested in building nuclear plants. Iranian nuclear aspirations go back a long way.


• The LRB Blog looks at the unsettling elements of the literary, and other, popularity of Jordan Peterson.


• Marginal Revolution notes the continuing existence of a glass ceiling even in relatively egalitarian Iceland.


• The NYR Daily looks at the unsettling elements behind the rise of Xi Jinping to unchecked power. Transitions from an oligarchy to one-man rule are never good for a country, never mind one as big as China.


• Drew Rowsome writes about Love, Cecil, a new film biography of photographer Cecil Beaton.


• Peter Rukavina celebrates the 25th anniversary of his move to Prince Edward Island. That province, my native one, is much the better for his having moved there. Congratulations!


• Window on Eurasia looks at a strange story of Russian speculation about Kazakh pan-Turkic irredentism for Orenburg that can be traced back to one of its own posts.


• At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Frances Woolley takes the time to determine that Canadian university professors tend to be more left-wing than the general Canadian population, and to ask why this is the case.

• Centauri Dreams takes a look at how stellar winds from red dwarfs complicate the habitability of planets in their circumstellar habitable zones.


• The Crux, noting the 75th anniversary of the atomic age, notes some non-nuclear weapons achievements of this era.


• D-Brief notes the exceptional strength of prehistoric women farmers.


• Daily JSTOR takes a look at the instantaneity and power--frightening power, even--of celebrity culture in an era where technology gives us access to the intimate details of their lives.


• Far Outliers notes that Pearl Buck, American author and missionary in China, actually was egalitarian and feminist.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas considers all those texts created in the past, of importance then and relevant even now, which have been forgotten. How can the canon be restored?


• Imageo shares photos of the eruption of Mount Agung, in Bali.


• Language Hat notes the intense interest of Roman Italy in all things Egyptian, including hieroglyphics. Where, exactly, was the like European interest in the cultures it colonized more recently?


• Language Log tries to find people who can identify the source language of a particular text. It seems Turkic ...


• Lingua France talks about Robert Luis Stevenson and his opinions (and the blogger's) about the weather of Edinburgh.


• Lovesick Cyborg notes the seriously destabilizing potential of roboticization on human employment. To what extent can improving education systems help?


• Tariq Ali at the LRB Blog talks about the latest religious-political crisis in Pakistan.


• The Map Room Blog links to an article describing a Vietnamese historian's search for cartographic proof of his country's claims in the South China Sea.


• The NYR Daily considers an interesting question: how, exactly, do you get an actor to act naturally for film? What strategies do filmmakers use?


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes a new genetic study hinting at a much greater survival of indigenous populations--women, at least--in Argentina than was previously suspected.


• Roads and Kingdoms notes an interesting effort to try to preserve and restore the older districts of Kabul.


• Seriously Science notes the exploration of the microbial life populating the coffee machine sludge of some inquisitive scientists.


• Window on Eurasia notes that substantially Russian-populated northern Kazakhstan is at risk of becoming a new Russian target, especially after Nazarbayev goes.


• Arnold Zwicky shares some thoughts on people of colour and the LGBTQ rainbow flag.

• Climate change, it is newly realized, contributed to the fall of Ptolemaic Egypt. VICE reports.


• I liked this long-form article looking at the efforts of two North American groups to make fusion energy viable, courtesy of Vice.


• The progress we are making in mapping the entire Milky Way, even areas apparently hidden, is amazing. Universe Today tells the story.

• Anthony Easton at MacLean's writes in defense of Nickelback, one of Canada's most popular bands if not a critical darling.


• Also in MacLean's, Stephanie Carvin notes that the new foreign and military policies announced by the Canadian government could still fall short.


• Bloomberg View's Stephen L. Carter considers the idea of the just war through the lens of Wonder Woman.


• Nuclear energy, it seems, will be India's answer to global warming in the era of Trump.


• Qataris, Bloomberg notes, are trying to deal with their island country's state of siege.


• Airbus may pull its production plants from the United Kingdom unless the country keeps single market access.


• Refugees, Lynne Olson notes at National Geographic, helped save the United Kingdom during the Second World War.

Toronto's west end has a new nuclear neighbour. General Electric Hitachi announced August 19 that it plans to sell its Canadian nuclear operations, including its uranium pellet plant on Lansdowne, to BWXT Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Lynchburg, Virginia's BWX Technologies, which operates one of only two facilities in the U.S. licensed to process highly enriched uranium.

BWX Technologies is the prime contractor in charge of the U.S. Department of Energy's 13,000-hectare nuclear weapons testing laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Among the "recent accomplishments" listed on the company's website: the manufacturing of the grapefruit-size plutonium cores used in the W88 thermonuclear warhead designed for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

If BWXT acquires the necessary licence and regulatory approval from the federal government, it will take over GE Hitachi's operations and 350 employees at three plants in Toronto, Peterborough and Arnprior. BWXT's Cambridge plant was recently awarded a $103 million contract to supply the first eight of 32 steam generators for the refurbishment of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Tiverton.

The GE Hitachi plant at 1025 Lansdowne, north of Dupont, processes 53 per cent of all the nuclear fuel used in Canada's nuclear reactors. Drums of yellowcake uranium dioxide powder are trucked into Toronto and transformed into ceramic pellets for use in fuel rods at the Pickering and Darlington reactors.