• blogTO shares photos of old Toronto department stores.
• Discover's Citizen Science Salon reports on how people are facing California seals and sea lions faced with famine.
• D-Brief warns people to be cautious about the newest claim of detections of extraterrestrial intelligence.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the discovery through microlensing of a ( Read more... )

• blogTO lists popular locations for Instagram photography in Toronto.
• The Dragon's Tales updates readers on the war in Syria.
• Language Hat notes the creation of a nursery school functioning in the Elfdalian dialect, in Sweden.
• Language Log notes representations of stigmatized varieties of Scottish Gaelic in the recent fiction of Ken MacLeod.
• The Map ( Read more... )

• blogTO considers if the Union-Pearson Express might work as a rapid transit line.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes that Earth-like worlds which rapidly lose most of their water can extend their habitable lifetimes.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog talks about the sociological lessons of party crashers.
• Geocurrents notes the complexities of Valencian identity and ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes the report that the CBC might sell its holdings.
• Centauri Dreams observes another search for a Kardashev III civilization that ended in failure.
• Crooked Timber is fed up with Rod Dreher.
• The Dragon's Gaze and Centauri Dreams report on new orbital parameters for Beta Pictoris b.
• The Dragon's Tales reports the Permian extinction lasted sixty ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that the Toronto Eaton Centre is set to be subtly renamed.
• Centauri Dreams notes the absence of evidence for extragalactic supercivilizations.
• The Dragon's Gaze observes a new observatory that should be able to detect Earth-like worlds around red dwarfs and links to a paper describing how dwarf planets can heat Kuiper belts.
• The Dragon's ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes that the Toronto Eaton Centre is set to be subtly renamed.
• Centauri Dreams notes the absence of evidence for extragalactic supercivilizations.
• The Dragon's Gaze observes a new observatory that should be able to detect Earth-like worlds around red dwarfs and links to a paper describing how dwarf planets can heat Kuiper belts.
• The Dragon's ( Read more... )

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly asks her readers what work means to them.
• Centauri Dreams considers Saturn's A ring.
• Crooked Timber examines a mid-19th century horror story.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the circumstellar disks of supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds and on TW Hydrae.
• The Dragon's Tales reports on the Donbas war.

Al Jazeera's Ian Bateson reports on the pressures faced by many Ukrainians in Russia. This is a large population, numbering perhaps two million people and well-embedded in Russian society, some descending from border communities and some from Soviet-era and post-Soviet labour migrants ( Read more... )

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton points out that despite its flaws, nuclear energy is still a much cleaner energy-production technology that fossil fuels.
• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait looks at U Camelopardalis, a spectacularly dying red giant star 1400 light-years away that offers us a glimpse into our own star's future.
• Daniel Drezner finds it ( Read more... )

Nearly eighteen years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many of its legacies remain: economic, military, political. The cultural legacies are particularly interesting, especially the linguistic ones. Although Soviet legislation provided for the free use of languages across Soviet territory, as in the 1977 Soviet Constitution's Article 159 ( Read more... )