Amazing librarians. "In the years after the Great Depression, President Roosevelt enacted The New Deal to help get people back on their feet. This allowed for some truly creative projects to spring up, and one of them was the Pack Horse Library Project of Eastern Kentucky.

The people of the Eastern Kentucky mountains had been hit hard by the Depression, and many of them had little connection to the outside world. This project brought in librarians from around the state and charged them with establishing routine library services in the remotest of towns. Though many were skeptical of the program at first, demand for books and magazines could barely keep up with demand; further, the librarians also brought news, comfort, and contact to a struggling people. "

"Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was guiding a bird- and mammal-watching tour through Desembarco del Granma National Park, Cuba, when he first noticed the cavern-hunting snakes. Intrigued by the bold behavior, he decided to take a closer look.
[...]
After 8 days of records, Dinets concluded the snakes coordinated their hunts, and published his results in the Animal Behavior and Cognition. The first boa would pick its place. Then, when the next slithered up, it would position itself in near the first. And if a third snake joined in, it would hang with the others, too. Dinets considered that the snakes might all just prefer the same areas of the passage, but no snake chose the same segment twice during the entire study, suggesting coordination, not similar taste in locale.

And that coordination paid off—boas were significantly more likely to capture a meal if they hunted together. “Visual observations suggested that most bats were able to avoid flying near boas when there were one or two boas present, but with three boas present the bats had to fly either within striking distance from one of them (often colliding with the boas) or very low above the passage floor,” Dinets explained in the paper."

If you backed at this pledge level, watch out for it. "If you have been keeping up with our DevLogs in recent weeks, you will be aware that backers who pledged $60 or more on our Kickstarter will be getting access to a special demo of Saurian before the public Early Access release. Well, we are pleased to announce that this is very nearly complete and we will be releasing this to pertinent backers on the day of the next DevLog, the 8th of June. To reiterate:

Saurian pre-release demo will go live on Steam on the 8th of June 2017

In this DevLog we will give you a brief rundown of what to expect from the pre-release."

Nice intro to some birds in North America. "This month, we thought we’d make a comic for people who are just a little bit curious about birds. My dad grew up in a big city and he only knew these species as “the little brown ones” or “the big grey ones”. Here’s an intro to some of those birds."

Yep, looks like a good and punny title. ;-)

"Carl T. Bergstrom @CT_Bergstrom

Marie Clifford defending her @UWBiology PhD dissertation.

Great title or the greatest title? "

Huh. Saturn could float; so, apparently, could the Death Star. ;-) "[Phil Plait] Forty years ago this week, 12-year-old me sat in a movie theater to see what this “Star Wars” movie thing was all about.

Two hours later, I walked out dazed. Blown away. For that soon-to-be teenaged boy, it was pretty much the apotheosis of my science fiction nerdery.
[...]
But while those other writers will wax on about Jedi and characters and the prequels and and and, I am who I am. So: Let’s talk science*.

Let’s talk Death Star.

Ah yes, the Empire’s superweapon, the spherical mobile planet-killer that has become an icon of evilness. It’s so large, Luke mistakes it for a moon ... well, he says a “small moon,” but of course even a small moon can still be pretty big.

And that got me thinking (as science fiction is supposed to do). What if the Death Star were a moon? How would it stack up? Just how moony (moonish? Mooneriffic?) is it?
[...]
The Death Star’s gravity is so small that if it were to orbit the Earth where the Moon is, we’d hardly notice any difference. The Moon is 40,000 times more massive than the Death Star! So again, nature wins.

My advice: If you want to go for a stroll while visiting the Death Star, stay inside.

And oh, one thing: If the Death Star is 10% quadanium by mass (i.e. a density of about 800 kilos per cubic meter), or the same density as an aircraft carrier, it would float, as well! There would be some odd effects where the waterline would be; the space station would have enough gravity to pull the water up a bit around it. But still, it would float."

Fantastic. No hexagons (like at Saturn's poles), lots of storms and lots of questions that still need answers. "Earlier this year, Juno performed the closest approach to Jupiter ever made by human hardware, passing within 5,000km of Jupiter's cloud tops. Juno's highly elliptical orbit also takes it over both poles, allowing them to be imaged in greater detail than ever before. And every instrument on the probe managed to capture some data.

The easiest data to interpret comes from its camera, the JunoCam, which captures images in RGBM—the usual RGB plus a wavelength sensitive to methane. Expectations were that we might see something like Saturn's pole, which has a vortex sitting right at the pole and an odd hexagonal shape in its clouds. Instead, the poles of Jupiter are studies in chaos. The neat banding pattern of the mid-latitudes gives way to a darker surface littered with cyclones that we can observe rotating in time-lapse imagery. There are also more diffuse, light-colored areas up to 10,000km across that don't have a defined rotation. And there's no hint of a hexagon.
[...]
Unfortunately [...] intense radiation is going to help cut Juno's life short. And it's not the only thing; the science teams report that dust grains "impact the spacecraft with a relative velocity of >60km/s, which provides sufficient kinetic energy to vaporize the grain and a portion of target material." But, in just a few orbits, we've already gotten a lot of high-resolution data on our Solar System's giant. As long as it survives a few more orbits, it will almost certainly provide planetary scientists with enough data to keep them occupied for years."

A glimpse of a new exhibition. "[John Hawks] It was an exciting morning for me in the Cradle of Humankind, as the visitor centre at Maropeng opened the new exhibit, “Almost Human.” The exhibit showcases the science behind the Homo naledi discoveries in the Rising Star cave system.

The stars of the show are the original fossils of H. naledi. More than 700 of the fossil specimens from the Dinaledi Chamber have returned to Maropeng for this exhibition. They are joined by more than a hundred of the Lesedi Chamber fossils, including the outstanding “Neo” skeleton. In terms of sheer numbers, these two extraordinary collections together make up the largest display of fossil hominins ever staged for the public.

This exhibit is different from any human origins museum exhibition that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them. Rising Star has been a human story, and the people are here front and center from the very discovery of the fossils. The whole team, from cavers and volunteers, to the six “underground astronauts”, to the laboratory scientists, have a place here."

See also [ https://remembersingapore.org/2011/04/04/old-names-of-places/ ] and [ https://remembersingapore.org/2011/04/11/interesting-singapore-road-names/ ] for more historical road names. "Singapore's former master planner Liu Thai Ker made headlines recently when he said at a forum in China that he regretted not preserving one or two slums so that Singaporeans have an idea of where the country had come from.

Indeed, so little of the past has been preserved that it can be hard to keep in mind Singapore's rich history.

What has survived, though, is a tapestry of road and place names going back decades and even centuries, which serve to anchor the past in our ever-changing landscape.

In particular, many road names point to individuals and communities who helped shape Singapore, and whose stories are quietly embedded in our surroundings, awaiting our discovery."

Pictured: Mr Razali Ishak (left) and his step-brother, Mr Mustaffa Mohamed, with a street sign for Jalan Hajijah, in this 2012 photo. They are former residents of Kampung Jalan Hajijah in Upper East Coast Road near Siglap. The village was demolished in the 1980s. It is now the site of condominiums, like Laguna Green and The Taipan. BERITA HARIAN FILE PHOTOS