• Centauri Dreams reports on asteroid P/2016 G1, a world that, after splitting, is now showing signs of a cometary tail.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers outrage as a sociological phenomenon. What, exactly, does it do? What does it change?
• Joe. My. God. reports on a new push for same-sex marriage in Germany, coming from the SPD.
• Lawyers, Guns and ( Read more... )

• Anthropology.net reports on the recent discovery in China of two skulls a hundred thousand years old, possible remnants of a hitherto-unknown hominid species.
• blogTO reports on the boom in the Toronto tech community.
• Language Log breaks down the linguistics, specifically word lengths, of audiobooks.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the difficult ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes a threat to some of Liberty Village's historic buildings through development.
• Centauri Dreams looks at planetary formation around close binary SDSS 1557, which includes a white dwarf.
• False Steps' Paul Drye announces a new book project, They Played the Game, which looks at how different baseball players overlooked in our history might ( Read more... )

• Antipope's Charlie Stross wonders if the politics of Trump might mean an end to the British nuclear deterrent.
• Centauri Dreams shares Andrew LePage's evaluation of the TRAPPIST-1 system, where he concludes that there are in fact three plausible candidates for habitable status there.
• Dangerous Minds shares the gender-bending photographs of Norwegian ( Read more... )

News of the remarkable density of planets, including potentially Earth-like planets, in the system of nearby ultra-cool dwarf TRAPPIST-1 spread across the blogosphere. This NASA JPL illustration comparing the TRAPPIST-1 worlds with the four rocky worlds of our own solar system, underlining the potential similarity of some worlds to the worlds we ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that the redevelopment of Toronto's Port Lands is continuing.
• Crooked Timber argues that climate denialism exposes the socially constructed nature of property rights.
• D-Brief notes the reburial of Kennewick Man.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes there is no sign of a second planet around Proxima Centauri.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at life in ( Read more... )

Facebook's Leeman shared Ashley Strickland's CNN report noting NASA's announcement that nearby ultra-cool dwarf TRAPPIST-1 has been found to have seven broadly Earth-like planets, of which three are located in that star's circumstellar habitable zone.

Astronomers have found at least seven Earth-like planets orbiting the same star 40 light-years ( Read more... )

• James Bow offers his prescriptions for a fix to thje issues of guaranteed minimum income.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that, from the perspective of long-term habitability of exoplanets, stars slightly more massive than the sun are preferable.
• Language Hat introduces the toponym of the "triplex confinium", here the point where Serbia ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes the amazing spike upwards in temperatures for this weekend.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos of some stark war memorials of the former Communist world.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on brown dwarf HIP 67537b.
• The LRB Blog looks at Donald Trump's interest in a Middle Eastern peace settlement that looks as if it will badly disadvantage the ( Read more... )

• blogTO reports on the history of Toronto's Wellington Street.
• Dangerous Minds introduces me to the grim American gothic that is Wisconsin Death Trip. What happened to Black River Falls in the 1890s?
• The Dragon's Gaze links to hypotheses about KIC 8462852, one suggesting KIC 8462852 has four exoplanets, another talking about a planet's disintegration.
• ( Read more... )