Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Outside the Welsh town of Chepstow, an innovative project to build an underwater human settlement is taking place. It’s being funded by an anonymous private investor with deep pockets, and the founders say they want it up and running by 2027. Lisa Bachelor went behind the scenes to check it out.
(The Guardian, approx 14 mins reading time)
Deep will offer the same experience but with more sophisticated accommodation, at greater depths, and allow scientists to work at those depths for greater periods of time. Their sentinels will also be able to be redeployed to different places. The idea is that a foundation construction will be attached in the desired location at the required depth and then the sentinels will be lowered down to click into the base like “a ski boot being locked into a ski”, Kernagis says. The basic sentinel houses up to six people but the idea is that multiple sentinels could be attached to potentially form multi-nation, multi-purpose research stations (or perhaps, one day, an underwater village for ordinary people). In the past, a lot of the early underwater habitats were meant to be redeployable, but it was difficult to do that, so they would be put down in one place and stay there for years. “You’re restricting what marine science you can do if you can only do it from one place,” Kernagis says.
For over four decades, mystery has surrounded the deaths of Jeannette Bishop May and Gabriella Guerin, who disappeared in a snowstorm one night and whose remains were found more than a year later. Now investigators have reopened the case.
(Town and Country, approx 11 mins reading time)
On November 29, 1980, Jeannette and Guerin were enjoying what was to be a weeklong visit to Sarnano, where Jeannette was renovating a farmhouse with her second husband, Stephen May, a British department store executive. That afternoon they had drinks with a surveyor overseeing the renovation, who declined Jeannette’s invitation to join them for a sightseeing excursion in the mountains. Hours later, despite an ominous forecast, Jeannette and Guerin drove off in Jeannette’s black Peugeot toward the wintry peaks, where they found themselves caught in a blizzard. By the following morning they hadn’t returned to their hotel. The surveyor notified the authorities, who searched for weeks before spotting the Peugeot poking out of a snowdrift. The women were nowhere to be found, but the police suspected they had sheltered temporarily in a vacant cottage nearby. Months later, as the mountains surrendered to spring, there was still no sign of Jeannette or Guerin. A headline in the Telegraph declared, “Mystery of Missing Women Deepens as Italian Snows Melt.”
When a meteorite landed in a market town in England’s idyllic Cotswolds, a group of scientists were hot on its trail to find out as much as they could about it.
(The Guardian, approx 17 mins reading time)
“I have to admit that I wasn’t absolutely convinced at first,” King said. “That splat shape … it was a little bit too perfect. You do get people who will fake things. It’s a weird thing to do but it happens,” he said. What were the chances of the meteorite landing so neatly and conveniently in front of someone’s house? (According to the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb: “Statistically, you have to wait for a billion years before your home will be hit by a meteorite.”) But fake or not, King wanted to get his hands on the potential meteorites as quickly as possible. In addition to the weather, there was another reason to hurry. With news of the meteorite all over the internet, professional meteorite hunters would be alerted to the scene. Here, the Covid lockdown was in some ways a piece of good fortune. “Otherwise we could have been overrun with big meteorite hunters from abroad,” King told me. These are the sorts of people who can jump on a plane at a moment’s notice to get to the site of a suspected fall.
A fascinating look at one man’s journey to reunite a traditional Japanese sword with the family it came from.
(Outside, approx 48 mins reading time)
When Benny came home, he picked up the sword at his parents’ farm and moved with it to an apartment before he built the home I’d come to know. There it occasionally emerged from my grandparents’ basement and into the kitchen, with too many of us gathered around their three-seat table. Benny was modest and quiet while my grandma and elder brother, Erik, nudged him toward the memories. If he complied, Benny began by saying how easy he’d had it compared with front-line infantry. We were left with an image of him finding the sword. We didn’t consider a next step. When the stories of our grandfather as a younger man were over, the silent blade went back into the cool basement on Louis Street. He didn’t display it. It wasn’t a trophy. Eventually he stopped telling people about it. He’d grown tired of answering the same irritating question: Did you kill him?
Last August, the Russian-born founder of Telegram was charged with failing to curb extremist and illegal content on the messaging app and banned from leaving France. This is the inside story of his arrest.
(WIRED, approx mins reading time)
Blood is one of the most valuable substances in the world. It saves lives, but not enough people give it. So what if we had a substitute? In this piece, Nicola Twilley writes about scientists’ latest attempts to replicate blood in a lab.
(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time)
Part of the problem is that a lot of people need it. An astonishing number of civilians die of injury each year—upward of a hundred and fifty thousand in the U.S., and more than five million globally. “Every! Year!” John Holcomb, the trauma surgeon, said. “It’s the leading cause of life years lost.” Accidental injury is the primary cause of death for anyone forty-four or younger, and blood loss is the most common cause of potentially preventable trauma deaths. Holcomb and his colleagues estimate that in the U.S. alone there are likely thirty thousand preventable deaths each year, owing to hemorrhage. In one paper, they combed through the 2014 mortality data for the county encompassing Houston, Texas: even in a major metropolitan area with a well-resourced trauma-care network, more than one in three people who died from bleeding could have possibly been saved. “If you go into hemorrhagic shock, you need blood products,” Holcomb said. “And the data are clear that, the earlier you get blood products, the better your survival.”
A 2016 read by Brandon Keim on what pigeons can teach us about love.
(Nautilus, approx 11 mins reading time)
It’s a word not often associated with pigeons, or even other animals. “Our highest esteem is accorded romantic love, which is considered the most suspect to ascribe to animals,” writes Jeffrey Moussaief Masson in When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. Indeed, science for most of the last several centuries would have found the suggestion risible, suggesting instead that Harold felt—if pigeons could even be said to feel—some instinctive, unconscious urge to stay nearby, an urge with no more emotional resonance than an itch.
Love, after all, is central to the human condition. How could a creature with a brain the size of a bean possibly feel something so profound? Something that gave rise to Romeo and Juliet and “Unchained Melody” and the Taj Mahal? Part of the reluctance to talk of bird love, I suspect, is rooted in our misgivings about our own love’s biological underpinnings: Is it just chemicals? A set of hormonal and cognitive patterns shaped by evolution to reward behaviors that result in optimal mating strategies? Perhaps love is not what defines us as human but is something we happen to share with other species, including the humble pigeon.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say