Dinosaur news, and a properly odd one. Oviraptorosaurs have long been the Rorschach test of theropod diets, with eggs, shellfish and plants all proposed at one time or another; this one comes with an intact skull whose beak and jaw look built for mashing soft fruit, much like a parrot's. Notice that the fossil came out of the ground in 2011, which is a reminder of how long a good skull can wait in a prep lab for its moment.

Opportunity's mileage record stood for years as the gold standard of planetary road trips, and it took that rover nearly fifteen years to set it. Perseverance has beaten it in about five and a half, mostly thanks to an autonomous driving system that lets it plan its own path instead of waiting on the round trip to Earth. The flight software folks deserve a quiet nod for this one.

A star like the Sun swells up on its way out and swallows whatever planets sit too close, which ought to be the end of the story. Here the debris left behind settles into a disk around the white dwarf, and astronomers think they can see two new bodies taking shape in it. Zombie planets around a zombie star, and just in time for Halloween.

The Madagascar Fish Eagle is one of the world's rarest raptors, with only a small population left along the island's western coast and lakes. This short interview with a lodge on the northwest coast is mostly about where and how you might see one, and it is a fine bit of daydream fuel for a raptor fan. Treat it as a travel brochure with better birds than usual.

Cilker's first two records made her a favourite among people who like their Western folk literate and a bit dusty. Her third was cut in Lockhart, Texas with Bruce Robison producing, and she cheerfully describes it as a concept album whose concept is being sad and going to Texas. That kind of dry self-awareness usually means the songs are good.

Most mayors leave behind a few plaques. Manuel José Laredo, who was also a painter and restorer, left a whole palace that mixes Neo-Mudejar brickwork, Gothic revival and early Modernism, with William Morris hovering in the background. It sits a short walk from the station in Alcalá de Henares, which is an easy day out from Madrid.

Before machines set type, fast hand compositors were minor celebrities, and their speed contests drew big crowds and serious prize money. This essay digs the scene out of the archives, including the women typesetters who used it to push for fairer treatment at work. It is also a nice reminder that every automated job once had its champions.

Peter Alvaro and colleagues tackle the question every distributed system designer fudges: where do you really need ordering or sealing, and where are you paying for coordination you do not need? Blazes reasons over a dataflow model of the components and places coordination only where the analysis says anomalies can creep in. Good company for the Viewstamped Replication write-up from this morning's batch, approaching consistency from the opposite end.

Under the keypad, the TRANZ 330 payment terminal turns out to be a perfectly good Z80 computer with UV-erasable ROMs. One hacker mapped out its innards, hooked up a GPS module and a period-correct thermal printer, and made it compute where the planets are. Exactly the sort of pointless, wonderful repurposing that retrocomputing contests exist for.

The classification of finite simple groups is famously a proof spread over tens of thousands of pages that few people have ever checked end to end. A project to formalise it in the Lean proof assistant has turned up counterexamples to one step in a published route through the argument, and has supplied a repaired argument for the case that matters. That is the strongest case for machine-checked mathematics you are likely to see this year.

A favourite artist in the Irish Times, though not for a new record this time. Hayes describes finding herself on the wrong end of AI-driven fraud and how unsettling it is to have something posing as you out in the world. The pool only had the headline, so the details of what was faked and how she found out are behind the link.

Megaraptorans are the big-thumb-clawed predators usually associated with South America and Australia, so one turning up in Britain rearranges the map a bit. Better still, the bones were collected from the Isle of Wight around a century ago and sat unrecognised in a collection until someone looked properly. A fine argument for museum drawers.

A planet this close to its star ought to be bare rock by now, its air long since blown off. Webb says otherwise, and the leading explanation involves reflective mineral clouds plus a magma ocean that keeps breathing gas back out. Notice how much a single brightness measurement is doing the heavy lifting here.

Martian meteorites have long told a chemistry story that contradicts what models of the planet's interior predict. Two Ehime University researchers propose that garnet in the deep mantle is the missing piece, quietly shifting the balance before magma ever rises. Small mineral, big bookkeeping consequences.

Ratites rarely get good news, so this one is worth the minutes. Twenty years ago Darwin's rhea was almost gone from this corner of Patagonia, and now a team of women is preparing thirteen birds for release. A calm, hands-on look at what reintroduction actually involves.

What happens when theme-park fabricators build a hotel for themselves. A miniature castle with a moat and a guardian dragon, a ship stuck in a tower, and a hobbit-ish house under a fake hill, all in a farming village. Pure whimsy, built the hard way over nine years.

In 1525, the year of the German Peasants' War, Dürer sketched a victory column out of baskets, tools and livestock, crowned by a slumped figure with a sword in his back. Nobody has ever quite agreed whether it mocks the rebels or mourns them. The Public Domain Review gives it the careful reading it deserves.

Liskov and Cowling's 2012 rewrite of VR is the replication paper people quietly prefer to Paxos when they actually have to build the thing. Colyer's write-up walks through normal operation, view changes, recovery and reconfiguration, and is good on why VR is a protocol rather than an algorithm you bolt on later.

Every Sputnik-era kid had rocket books on the shelf, and most of them have vanished without a trace. Alan Brown digs one back out, Joseph Greene's Dig Allen series, and reads it with affection and a clear eye. Good company if you remember Tom Corbett or wish you did.

A rare natural experiment: a whole country that had no television until 1999, then suddenly did. This short Aeon documentary looks at what changed, and is gentle about it rather than preachy. Good fodder for anyone who remembers the internet arriving in their own life.

Enantiornithines were the dominant birds of the dinosaur age and then vanished entirely, which makes them easy to forget and hard to picture. This rebuild of Concornis stacks fossil evidence, digital modelling and old-fashioned sculpting, so every feather has to answer to a bone. Worth a look for how much careful inference goes into a single convincing model.

Hubble's early Orion pictures showed proplyds, protoplanetary disks being blasted by nearby massive stars, and the arithmetic said they should have been stripped away long ago. The proposed way out involves a merger, which would change the story of how long the disks have actually been exposed. A tidy example of an old paradox resolved by questioning the history rather than the physics.

A short field note from just down the road in Perak, the kind of careful local observation that keeps regional bird knowledge honest. Glossy Starlings are famously unfussy, but splitting open champak carpels for the red arils had only been suggested, not properly documented. Something to watch for next time a cempaka tree is fruiting near a Penang flock.

There is something very 1999 about serving your own pages from NetBSD with the httpd that ships in base and one extra package for TLS. The author is upfront that it is meant for homebrew projects and small communities, not heavy traffic, which is the right spirit. A pleasant reminder that a web server can still be a weekend afternoon rather than a platform.

Anyone who has watched fsync latency eat a database's throughput will recognise the setup: flash got wildly parallel, but enforcing write order still means draining queues and waiting. Won et al. push an ordering barrier down through the block layer to the device so order no longer implies durability. Adrian Colyer's write-up is a good refresher on why the block layer's ordering story was built for spinning disks.

ZA-001, the very first 787 prototype, now sits indoors at Chubu Centrair near Nagoya with a small exhibition built around it. You can get close to the cockpit and engines, and there's a children's play area alongside for those travelling with small aviation fans. A good excuse to arrive early for a flight out of Nagoya.

Long before forums, curious Britons mailed their oddest historical questions to Notes and Queries and other readers mailed back answers. This selection from an 1858 compilation chases things like what became of Mary Queen of Scots' head and who wielded the axe on Charles I. Quirky history, footnoted by an army of amateurs.

Ruffin's life reads like a tour of nineteenth-century Boston reform: Civil War relief work, charity, suffrage, publishing and the women's club movement. She ran a newspaper and built networks that outlasted her. A solid, calm profile of someone whose name deserves to be better known around Beacon Hill.

Timothy Taylor does what he does best here: take a fat flagship report and pull out the one idea worth chewing on. The argument is that poor countries are short on skilled people, and AI tools might stretch what scarce experts like agricultural extension agents can reach. Sober, example-driven, and free of either hype or doom.

Colonial writers described open, park-like forests and smoky skies, and tree-ring evidence turns out to back them up. The landscape Europeans called wilderness had been shaped for generations by Indigenous burning. A good corrective, told through the slow record of wood.