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.

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.