• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly calls on journalists to stand up to Trump.
• Centauri Dreams looks at exocomets.
• Language Log shares an ad from the 1920s using the most vintage language imaginable.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money talks about globalization as a mechanism for concentrating wealth at the top of the elite.
• The LRB Blog talks about the ghosts of ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes five interesting abandoned places to explore around Toronto.
• The Dragon's Gaze considers how to map minute areas of the protoplanetary disks of young stars.
• Joe. My. God. notes ISIS' claim of responsibility for the Orlando massacre.
• Language Log looks at the oddly misprinted signs in non-Latin scripts at an Austrian botanical garden.
• Speed ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes planned additions to the Eaton Centre.
• Centauri Dreams explores protocols for contact between our spacecraft and those of aliens.
• Discover's Dead Things notes the discovery of an archeological site almost 15 thousand years old off the coast of Florida.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the roughness of Neptune's migration to its current orbit.
• The ( Read more... )

• D-Brief reports on Ceres' bright spots.
• Dangerous Minds celebrates the video game arcades of the 1980s.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper speculating that tightly-packed globular clusters might be good cradles for life.
• The Dragon's Tales examines the processes by which gravel is formed on Mars and Titan.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog wonders about the ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams looks at the earliest mentions of Proxima Centauri in science fiction.
• D-Brief notes that early oceans could moderate chemical reactions that could lead to life.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes that most super-Earths around red dwarfs may not be close enough to burn off their excess hydrogen/helium envelopes.
• The Dragon's Tales looks at the ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams notes how the New Horizons probe is maneuvering into mapping orbits of Ceres.
• Crooked Timber examines the decline of inter-generational mobility and class mobility.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on Jupiter analog HIP 11915b.
• The Dragon's Tales notes Russian claims in the Arctic and links to a comparison of Chinese and American statements ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that the cash-strapped CBC may be forced to sell its iconic downtown Toronto headquarters.
• James Bow reflects on winter in Kitchener-Waterloo.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper studying the relationship between exoplanets and circumstellar dust discs.
• The Dragon's Tales links to a simulation of the polar atmosphere of Venus and notes ( Read more... )

The Diplomat's Stephen Blank argues that in post-Soviet Central Asia, even in Kazakhstan, the Russian language is waning. This has obvious consequences for Russian soft power on the ground in the region.

[I]t has been clear for some time, and recent news reports confirm it, that the Russian language is steadily losing ground in Central Asia in ( Read more... )

The Inter Press Service hosts a multiply-authored Eurasianet article talking about the impact of the Russian economic slowdown on Central Asian migrant workers. (The lure of access to the Russian labour market may have been raised as a way to seduce migrant-exporting Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to join the Eurasian Union.)

According to Russia’s ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams looks at how the inability to make contact with the long-departed ISEE-3 probe offers hints as to the problems with long-duration spaceflight.
• The Dragon's Gaze considers Beta Pictoris' planets, one paper considering the orbit of Beta Pictoris b and another wondering if the identified planet might in fact be massive dust clouds from ( Read more... )