Getting to Mercury takes longer than getting to Pluto's neighbourhood would suggest, because the hard part is shedding speed, not gaining it: eight years and a string of flybys. The three-word game is a fluff video, but it's a nice excuse to mark the calendar for the December arrival. Collaborative is doing a lot of work in a mission split between two space agencies.

Apollo brought back hundreds of kilograms of Moon, but all from a handful of near-side sites chosen partly so the crews could land safely. Rocks blasted off the lunar surface by impacts and found in places like Antarctica sample the rest of the Moon at random. The piece is a good reminder that the cheapest sample-return mission is the one physics runs for free.

Everyone goes to Pench for the tigers, which leaves the birds to people who know better. A local guide writes about the reserve's birdlife and how birding tourism feeds back into protecting it. Central Indian dry forest has a different cast from Penang's, but plenty of familiar faces from the same families.

Every New England town of a certain size seems to have a vast brick campus on a hill with boarded windows, and Halloween is when people start wondering why. The answer is a story about nineteenth-century reform ideals, twentieth-century deinstitutionalisation, and what you do with a building designed to hold a thousand people. Worth it for the second half, on what the old campuses are becoming.

A former gcj hacker wanted to call a Java library from SBCL, didn't like any of the bridges, and so wrote a JVM bytecode compiler in Lisp instead, as one does. It's the purest kind of open source project: scratching an itch with a far bigger stick than the itch required. Bonus points for writing the first working version by hand.

Someone read the ESP32-S3's technical reference manual closely enough to notice it has 128-bit SIMD instructions, then used them to make a classic corner detector twice as fast. This is the good kind of embedded hacking: a cheap chip, an obscure corner of the ISA, and real numbers at the end. Source is included.

The usual objection to a big cache tier is that DRAM is expensive, and this paper turns that around: the CPU you stop burning on recomputation and serialisation can pay for it several times over. Murat and Aleksey poke at the 4x claim and the call for richer object caching collocated with the application. Coherence, as ever, is where the hand-waving lives.

For centuries, sober European writers described a Central Asian plant whose fruit was a small living lamb that grazed around its stalk until the grass ran out. The Public Domain Review weighs the candidate explanations, from a furry fern root sold as a curio to garbled reports of cotton. Medieval natural history at its most charmingly confident.

Someone reading an Edwardian text kept running into people not being at full hp, and for a moment it looked like video-game vocabulary had time-travelled. It hadn't, which is the fun of it: the abbreviation was doing a different job a century before anyone counted hit points. A small, pleasing linguistics find.

Fan-designed builds at 1:1 scale are old news among MOC builders, but LEGO turning one into an official set is less common. This one won an Ideas contest themed on hobbies and became a promotional freebie, so you'll have to buy something else to get it. The review is the interesting bit: how the parts fake brushes, pots and a palette.

Chris Thile is one of the great singers in acoustic music, so a Punch Brothers record with no singing at all is a bold flex. It's the band leaning into what they've always been underneath: five absurdly good pickers writing chamber music for a string band. The news hook is the European tour, their first in nearly a decade.

The World Fantasy Awards are the quieter, more literary sibling of the Hugos, decided by a judging panel rather than a popularity vote, which tends to surface books you won't find on airport tables. A winners list like this is a ready-made reading list for the long nights ahead.

OSIRIS-REx's sample capsule keeps paying dividends long after the parachute was folded away. The interesting bit here is that the grains seem to carry material from both sides of the Solar System's great divide, with Jupiter cast as the bouncer who let the crowds mingle.

One active supermassive black hole in an early galaxy is news; three in the same galaxy is a traffic jam. Two of them are close enough to be on course for a merger, and one is growing faster than the textbooks say it should, which is the part theorists will be chewing on.

An unidentified chip from a box of old parts, no matching part number in any databook, and a quick tap with a chisel to get inside: this is Shirriff doing what he does best. The grid of tiny capacitors on the die gives the game away, and the write-up on how switched capacitors fake resistors is the real treat.

Brooker usually argues tail latency matters for users; here he argues it matters for the bill. Borrowing the Lorenz curve from economists to show how much of the mean the slowest requests account for, then running it through Little's law to get capacity, is a neat bit of cross-disciplinary theft.

Plenty of American state universities began life as humble teacher-training schools. Massachusetts opened the first state-funded normal schools in the country, and the long arc from teacher training academy to modern university is a quietly important piece of New England history.

North America is stingy with pink birds, which makes each one a small event in the field. Kenn Kaufman fact-checked the list, and the fun is in how generous you have to be with the word pink before the roster gets past a handful.

Any Lisp programmer will feel a twinge of kinship. Sidney loved brackets so much that his romance Arcadia, unfinished at his death, breaks off partway through one, which is either tragic or the best punchline in English prose.

Everyone over forty has noticed that the years got shorter. A Victorian clergyman put that observation into a short rhyming poem and someone had the good sense to fix it to the front of a cathedral clock, which is about the most fitting place imaginable.

The Spinosaurus argument has been running longer than some sitcoms: river monster, heron with delusions of grandeur, or something in between. This round brings machine learning and a large pile of skeletons to the question, and lands on the soggy side. Worth noticing is the twist in the other direction, where a few marine reptiles turn out to have kept one flipper on the beach.

Exomoon claims have a habit of evaporating on closer inspection, so read this with the usual squint. Still, the setup is gloriously odd: a star, a brown dwarf circling it, and something at least Jupiter's mass circling that. Whether you call it a moon, a planet, or a taxonomy headache is half the fun.

Jepsen taught everyone to fear the network partition; this FAST 2017 study points at the disk instead. Inject a single bad block or read error under a replicated store and watch how often the system shrugs, crashes, or cheerfully propagates the damage to its healthy replicas. A good reminder that replication protects you from failures you modelled, not the ones you didn't.

Somebody needed a laptop, and instead of walking into a shop spent two months designing one around a mini-ITX board and power-tool batteries. The justification offered is 'because I can', which is the only correct one. The write-up on power delivery and the bill of materials is the meaty bit, and the trackball is a nice period touch.

October 19 just went by, so here is the surrender at Yorktown through the letters and recollections of New Englanders on the scene rather than the tidy textbook version. Eyewitness accounts tend to notice the odd details historians skip. A neat bit of anniversary reading.

Plenty of bird conservation groups have dull founding stories; this one started in 1899 because people were wearing whole stuffed birds on their heads. The interview moves on to modern work in the Netherlands, home of the godwit in the lead photo. A good look at how a European BirdLife partner actually operates.

Skip the arguments about what AI will do and look at the bill of materials: chip fabs, data centres, power plants. Timothy Taylor walks through a Brookings paper on how that physical buildout is being financed, which is a calmer and more useful question than most of the discourse. Treat it as an infrastructure story, the kind economists know how to read.

Most visitors see Maastricht's squares and cafes; Geoff Manaugh checked into his hotel and vanished beneath the city. Eight centuries of limestone quarrying, 17th-century countermine tunnels and Cold War bunkers all sit within an afternoon's walk. A good itinerary for anyone who prefers a torch to a tour bus.

Long before pop-up books were about trucks, the flap book was about transformation and, inevitably, the grave. Lift a flap and Adam becomes Eve, a lion becomes a griffin, and the moral arrives right on schedule. The Public Domain Review's scans make the mechanism easy to follow.

A workshop founded in 1882 still smoke-dries bonito over a hand-tended fire, a method only a handful of places keep alive. Watching six months of boiling, smoking, patching and mould turn a fish into something you could build furniture from is oddly calming. The ideal idle-moment video.