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.

Another outlet weighs in on Lucky Water, and when it's Laura Cortese, a second opinion is never redundant. The fiddler from the Boston scene keeps turning chamber-folk arrangements into something that sounds both old and freshly built. Compare notes with last week's review and see whether the critics hear the same record.

Clay pits dug for bricks have a long habit of coughing up Cretaceous bones, and this one has given palaeontologists something nobody had named before. The animal lived about 125 million years ago in the wet, river-laced lowlands that once covered southern England. Somewhere a kiln operator is wondering what else went into the walls.

Amphibians and salt water are famously bad friends, which is what makes this flat-headed Triassic oddball worth a look. Two nearly complete skeletons from China suggest this stem amphibian went fully marine, a lifestyle its relatives never managed. Not a dinosaur, but it shared their world and makes a good argument that evolution reads rules as suggestions.

The Sun takes about 27 days to turn, which means trouble can brew out of sight for a fortnight before swinging round to face us. A Southwest Research Institute team now uses probability to estimate where far-side sunspots are likely to be. Space-weather forecasting, in other words, gets a peek around the corner.

Every birder knows the feeling: epic landscape, ancient ruins, and the bird in the bins is a Twite. This post leans into it, pairing grand Silk Road vistas with the drabbest species the region could offer. A gentle, funny tribute to the dull birds that make up most of any trip list.

Smalltalk never went away; it just kept a live image running in the corner. The Pharo crowd shipped nearly a thousand merged pull requests into this one, and is moving its release season from spring to autumn. A small, stubborn community still building a whole environment for the fun of immediate feedback.

The WAL, big pages and batched writes all grew up around disks where seeks were the enemy, so the obvious answer is to tear them out for NVMe. Brooker argues the answer is not what you'd guess, and the reasoning goes through durability and the network rather than raw device speed. A nice corrective for anyone itching to rewrite the storage engine.

Most visitors to Maastricht see a pleasant river city; Geoff Manaugh checked in and promptly vanished below it. The town sits on centuries of tunnels, from medieval limestone workings to 17th-century fortification casemates and NATO-era bunkers. A good argument for adding a torch to the Netherlands packing list.

Condorcet showed in 1785 that majorities can go round in circles, and mathematicians have been poking the wound ever since. Quanta explains how topology, of all things, captures why fair ways to aggregate preferences keep running into walls. Pure maths about elections with no politics in it, which is a rare treat.

Look closely at a Veronese crowd scene and there is nearly always a dog in it, usually more interested in the food than the miracle. Thomas Laqueur follows those dogs through half a dozen paintings and into the painter's awkward interview with the Inquisition. Art history from floor level.