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At that point, Groves was just walking a well-trodden path of exploitation and chicanery first blazed by Christopher Columbus, whose initial steps in the New World were taken on the island now known as Grand Bahama. Within two decades, Spanish explorers had killed or carried off the island's native inhabitants, and for centuries afterward, Caribbean historians note, pirates made the Bahamas their base and...

Calls to protect northern Australia's ancient stone wall fish traps from tourists, climate change. Traditional owners say World Heritage listing would help preserve Australia's largest archaeological site, an elaborate network of stone walls designed to trap fish at low tide in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Whatever happened to Rolamite? Invented in 1966 by Donald F. Wilkes, it looks like a simple gadget made with two rollers and a steel band, but it's much more. As basic as the wheel, the lever, or the hinge, it is the only simple machine discovered this century. Its use will be widespread --- in everything from switches, thermostats, and valves to pumps and...

In recent years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn't always that way. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as the fear of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet citizens, idealistic scientists and engineers saw the...

Logging ceases in New South Wales state forest after rare emu chicks hatch. Forestry Corporation of NSW has ceased logging operations near Grafton after the hatching of endangered coastal emu eggs.

VFX artist KanePixels, creator of the breakout video series set in The Backrooms, has finished their latest project: The Oldest View (Youtube playlist).The Oldest View is a six video series about the discovery and exploration of an abandoned Texas Mall. It brings his trademark sense of place, pacing, tension and the uncanny to a new setting. Once you're done, you might be interested to...

102 Minutes That Changed America [YouTube] is an American television special documentary film that was produced by the History Channel and premiered commercial-free on Thursday, September 11, 2008, marking the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The film serves as a compilation of amateur footage taken by numerous people filming the attacks, edited together to present the film in real time. ***[NSFW] [Content...

Chappell Roan is a Pop Supernova. Nothing About It Has Been Easy. (slRollingStone)Chappell previously Also if you are not into current pop music, it's cool. Just give this post a pass!

Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi's long-awaited report [PDF] on Europe's competitiveness has finally seen the light of day - and its first lesson for Europe's slowing growth since the turn of the century is to stop procrastinating. "We have reached the point where, without action, we will have to either compromise our welfare, our environment or our freedom," Draghi warned at the report's...

"Something we've never seen before": Tasmanian camera-trap photo competition spots wild neighbours. The traps have captured photographs of threatened species, unique animal behaviours — and even a currawong lifting a bin lid.

Two short scifi stories about the pain, hope, and fear that we carry. "What was it you told me that 'dysphoria' meant, etymologically?" "Something that cannot be carried. Cannot be borne." "A Dragon in Two Parts" by Kiya Nicoll (published in audio and text in Escape Pod in 2021): a disabled person has reservations about biorefurbishment. "Hello aliens, I am scared of you so...

This old saloon tells the story of a small Central Texas town. The McDade Historical Society operates the museum, which was also a former Post Office, doctor's office and drug store.

When Boston went 'Basket Case' On this day, 30 years ago (aka 1994), Boston's WFNX (101.7 - Boston Phoenix Radio) threw a "Welcome Back Weekend" concert series to celebrate the return of the college crowd to the city. Booking months in advance, they put together a pop punk show at the famous Hatch Shell. They booked a little known opening act (The Meices) and...

Tennis is making bets on its future — one driven by data, sports betting, and foreign investment. But how big of a swing is it willing to take? [via]

"You're doing a play, got something to say So you sing it? It's absurd!" In honor of finishing Something Rotten, one of the best musicals I've ever been in (and guess what song is still rolling through my head today), here's your free thread.Suggested topics: musicals! Love 'em? Hate 'em? Watch them? Scorn them? Perform in them? Or ignore the topic altogether and talk...

"We should rid our writing of the domestication of atrocity, rid our writing of the tense that insists on the innocence of its perpetrators, the exonerative tense of phrases like 'lives were lost' and 'a stray bullet found its way into the van' and 'children died.' We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence. We should refuse the logic that produces a phrase...

Information foraging is the fundamental theory of how people navigate on the web to satisfy an information need. It essentially says that, when users have a certain information goal, they assess the information that they can extract from any candidate source of information relative to the cost involved in extracting that information and choose one or several candidate sources so that they maximize the...

ProPublica is doing another set of stories on healthcare and insurance failure in the United States. This one, entitled America's Mental Barrier: How Insurers Interfere With Mental Health Care is specifically on mental health care, the "ghost networks" - where providers are listed on sites, but have left the network for various reasons, and the providers, in this example Ambetter, never remove them -...

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now — pregnant with her fifth child — she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother. Then she ate a salad from Costco. The Marshall Project reports on how faulty drug tests have lead to mothers losing custody of babies after their birth even though the moms had done nothing...

After five years in Steam Early Access (previously), the automation marvel that is Satisfactory receives a 1.0 release tomorrow.A factory-building sim that some might consider a "Dad Game". You start off as a new employee with a chisel and a dream on an alien planet with a sumptuous first-person view, and end up the architect of grand industry spanning the continent. Sometimes a bit...

How to beat roulette A good story about the cat-and-mouse hunt for someone who, in typical casino anti-hero style, is able to beat the odds and (at least for a time) walk away with a substantial sum of money from a high-end British casino. [archive link], via the amateur