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.

Birds spent the Jurassic barely getting the hang of flight, and here is one that apparently decided the whole business was overrated. If the reading holds, flightlessness turns up almost as soon as flight does, which makes the ostrich look less like a late dropout and more like a family tradition. Teeth and a grasping claw included, for the nostalgic.

Before the giant LSST camera went in, Rubin ran for a few weeks on a small commissioning camera whose whole job was to shake down the plumbing. Its leftover frames are now being released, and the Seagull Nebula shot shows what the telescope can do even when the instrument on the back is the understudy.

A honky-tonk songwriter going back to the tunes that made him want to play in the first place is a familiar move, but it is usually done with less commitment than this. No Depression's review hears him serving the songs rather than restyling them, which is exactly what the old-time crowd tends to want.

Somebody picked a bargain-bin business sim at a mall in 2004 and, twenty years on, cracked it open to see how its little isometric city works. The fun part is the method: Ghidra for the four thousand functions, live memory peeking to map cash and camera state, and a patched message loop to drive the game from outside.

Charapko admits he keeps trying to leave state machine replication and keeps getting dragged back. This one leaves the protocol's core alone and goes after the tail: what happens to throughput when one replica is sluggish, the network splits, or log compaction kicks in at a bad moment. Worth it for anyone who has watched a healthy Paxos cluster stutter for no visible reason.

Timothy Taylor in his natural habitat: one report, one set of charts, no sermon. The interesting bit is the accounting, where productivity is whatever output growth is left after land, water and inputs are tallied, and that residual has been sagging for over a decade just as the world needs it most.

The Bird Ecology Study Group keeps doing the patient work of noting exactly who eats what, which is how field guides eventually get better. A mostly insect-eating babbler adding another fruit to its menu, recorded at Kledang-Saiong, is about as close to home as these records get.

Revere gets remembered for one night's ride, but he spent a lot more time on the dull and useful business of organising Boston's craftsmen. The Mechanic Association was part guild, part mutual-aid society, and later a sponsor of big industrial fairs, a nice reminder of how artisan Boston looked after itself.

Before boardwalk amusements got loud, people paid a coin to look at elaborate figures carved out of wet sand, knowing the sea would take them by morning. The Public Domain Review's selection preserves an art form whose whole premise was not being preserved.

Marilou Schultz has woven die photographs of chips before, and this time it is the 555, possibly the most-sold integrated circuit ever. Ken Shirriff does what Ken Shirriff does and explains which bit of the rug is which bit of the silicon, so you can admire the comparators and the weaving at the same time.

Every space telescope launch story eventually has a chapter about mirrors, and usually it is the anxious kind. This one is the opposite: a nudge smaller than a sliver of a hair and the Wide Field Instrument now beats its own error budget by a wide margin. Nice to see the alignment engineers get the headline for once.

When two supermassive black holes merge, the gravitational waves can carry away momentum unevenly and give the newborn hole a shove. Theory has said so for decades; the fun part is the image of a monster black hole pacing back and forth through its own galactic centre like a pendulum. The evidence is statistical rather than a single smoking gun, which is exactly how these things usually start.

A palate cleanser from 10,000 Birds: species given the opinions their natural history implies. The cuckoo on parenting, the starling on native species, the hoatzin on personal hygiene. Silly, yes, but every joke is a real bit of biology, which is the best kind of silly.

Taylor's quiet point: economists have a decent recipe for a demand collapse, and much less of one when the shock hits what the economy can produce. Spending and rate cuts can prop up demand, but they cannot conjure up missing goods. A calm, useful frame for a lot of recent economic news.

Vermont spent fourteen years as its own republic, and some of the furniture from that era is still in use. Its county courts have had elected assistant judges continuously since then, and no other state does it. The kind of local oddity that only makes sense once you know the history.

A spiral staircase with no newel post, held together by wooden pegs, rising two full turns to a choir loft. Nobody recorded who built it, which has given legend plenty of room to work. Go for the carpentry; the mystery is a bonus.

Old TV collectors have the same problem as old radio fans: nothing on the air. Someone who worked in a 1990s transmitter control room solved it by building a miniature broadcast chain, waveform monitor and vectorscope included, mostly out of Raspberry Pis. Pure hobbyist joy, and a good tour of what a TV station actually had in its racks.

Homologation specials were road cars built in just enough numbers to let the racing version compete, and they are mostly extinct. Toyota's GR Yaris is the modern exception, and Mihail Rakovskiy has captured its odd three-door rally stance in bricks. Car MOCs live or die by their shaping, so look at the curves.

From the archive: Adrian Colyer working through Shapiro and colleagues' 2011 tour of state-based and operation-based replicated data types. The appeal is principled eventual consistency, with consensus pushed off the critical path rather than waved away. Still the paper people mean when they say CRDT.

Thomas Gainsborough wanted to paint landscapes but had portraits to pay the bills, so he brought the countryside indoors. Broken stones, moss, vegetables and shards of mirror, all set on a folding table and painted by candlelight. An eighteenth-century model railway enthusiast, minus the railway.