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.

Fresh McEvoy coverage, which by house rules walks straight past the bouncer. The local paper frames her, as everyone does, as the writer of the song that sold more copies in Ireland than almost anything before it, but the more interesting thing is that she is still out doing small-room dates decades on. The pool only carried the headline, so dates and venue details are behind the link.

The solar wind is usually described as a firehose, which undersells how knotted it is. Parker has been flying close enough to see magnetic structures twisting up as they leave the Sun, and the point of interest is the bridge between big fluid-like plasma behaviour and what individual ions are doing. That gap is where the old puzzle of the too-hot corona may finally get some purchase.

Ancient eclipse records are one of the few ways to measure how Earth's rotation has slowed, and they only work if you know where the observer was standing. Here the fix was mundane and lovely: an ancient Chinese capital sat about eight kilometres off from where people had assumed. Shift the city, redo the geometry, and the length of a day nearly three thousand years ago comes into sharper focus.

Picathartes are the bald-headed, bright-skinned rockfowl that birders cross continents to see, and this one wandered into footage meant for chimpanzees. The find is in the Luki reserve in western DR Congo, which makes it a strong argument for treating the forest as one system across borders. Bycatch, in the best possible sense.

Japan is known for pearls and jade, so a museum devoted entirely to fossil tree resin in a small Iwate city is the kind of side trip that rewards the detour. Kuji is one of the few places in the country with amber big and clean enough to carve, and the museum claims to be the only one of its kind in Japan. Bonus: weather permitting, visitors can try digging for their own.

A gloriously pointless question pursued properly. With no 16-bit subsystem on 64-bit Windows, the hunt moves to the early NT era and the odd corner of Win32s, which is where the archaeology gets fun. Anyone who has stared at PE headers and loader quirks will enjoy watching the search narrow.

Reed-Solomon is storage-efficient and miserable to repair: lose one node and you read k others in full. Clay codes from FAST'18 keep the MDS property while hitting the minimum repair bandwidth, and Adrian Colyer walks the layered construction without hand-waving. Old post, still the best way in to why MSR codes stopped being a purely theoretical curiosity.

Every October a chunk of fandom reads Zelazny's last novel a chapter a day, finishing on Halloween, and we are about five chapters from the end. Judith Tarr looks at it through its animal narrators, starting with Snuff, the watchdog who tells the story. A good excuse to start now and binge to catch up.

A century of poster design from one corner of the world, all scanned and browsable, is a fine place to lose an evening. Princeton holds nearly five thousand of them, from 1904 to 2004, and there is a separate Flickr album of Soviet-era work for those who like their constructivism in bulk. Look at the typography as much as the slogans.

Pascal gets credit for the calculator, the wager and a unit of pressure, and almost nobody mentions that his last venture was public transit. In 1662 he helped launch shared carriages running fixed routes on a schedule at a set fare in Paris, the basic idea behind every bus line since. A transit planner makes the case that this was one of the great inventions, and he is not wrong.

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.