• 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... )

• James Bow calls for an end to the US-Canada Safe Third Country agreement prohibiting people coming from American soil from claiming refugee status in Canada.
• D-Brief reports on the vast array of man-made minerals appearing in what is now being called the Anthropocene Era of Earth.
• Dangerous Minds notes the efforts of the Disco Preservation Society to ( 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... )

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 an Instagram user from Toronto, @brxson, who takes stunning photos of the city from on high.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the limits of exoplanet J1407b's massive ring system.
• The Dragon's Tales notes evidence that the primordial Martian atmosphere apparently did not have carbon dioxide.
• Imageo notes that the California ( Read more... )

• blogTO tries to pit the west side of Toronto against the east side.
• Centauri Dreams describes an inventive plan to launch a probe to rendezvous with Proxima Centauri.
• Crooked Timber looks at the idea of civil society in the age of Trump.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that aims to explore why Neptune-class exoplanets are so common.
• Marginal ( Read more... )

This news comes from the end of 2016, but it's still quite good. May China continue to progress in space travel, for the benefit of us all.

China vowed Tuesday to speed up the development of its space industry as it set out its plans to become the first country to soft land a probe on the far side of the moon, around 2018, and launch its first ( Read more... )

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares a video showing how tacos are made in space.
• blogTO shares some classic photos of the TTC in the 1960s and 1970s.
• The Crux goes into more detail about the mesentery.
• D-Brief notes how the binary star KIC 9832227 is projected to experience a stellar merger in 2022.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper suggesting that ( Read more... )

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the need for opponents of Trump to fight, not just the man but the root causes.
• Centauri Dreams notes a study suggesting Proxima Centauri is gravitationally bound to Alpha Centauri A and B.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos depicting the devastation of Gatlinburg by fire.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes that stars ( Read more... )

• Bad Astronomy shares a video imagining of how Cassini will meet its end with Saturn.
• Cody Delistraty shares an interview with Rebecca Solnit.
• Far Outliers reports on Margaret Thatcher's unorthodox campaign in 1979.
• Joe. My. God. shares Hillary Clinton's thanks to her 66 million voters.
• Marginal Revolution looks at gender stereotypes among scientists.