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The periodic table is 150 – but it could have looked very different [The Conversation] 

It may seem a small leap from this to the familiar diagram but, years after Mendeleev’s publications, there was plenty of experimentation with alternative layouts for the elements. Even before the table got its permanent right-angle flip, folks suggested some weird and wonderful twists.

The father of the periodic table [Chemistry World] 

Mike Sutton looks at how Mendeleev’s patience revealed periodicity in the elements

How ‘magic angle’ graphene is stirring up physics [Nature] 

Misaligned stacks of the wonder material exhibit superconductivity and other curious properties.

Why exercise alone won’t save us [The Guardian]

Sedentary lifestyles are killing us – we need to build activity into our everyday lives, not just leave it for the gym.

Protein mania: the rich world’s new diet obsession [The Guardian]

If you are worrying about the amount of protein in your diet, then you are almost certainly eating more than enough. This is the paradox of our new protein obsession

Exxon’s Insane Ideas for Combating Climate Change [Topic] 

In 1997, scientists working for the oil company offered visionary solutions for climate change. The only problem? Their plans might destroy the earth in the process.

Endangered Baobab Trees: Are They Victims of the Effects of Climate Change? [Topic]

A shocking study published in 2018 found that some of the most beautiful, and famous, baobab trees are dying. What will this mean for the people who depend on them—and for the planet?

Lost in the Valley of Death [Outside Magazine]

The valley may appear idyllic, but it holds a dark past. Over the past 25 years, according to both official and unofficial reports, at least two dozen foreign tourists have died or disappeared in and around the Parvati Valley.

Did the Great Wall of China work? [History Magazine - National Geographic]

The Ming dynasty built a giant wall stretching 5,000 miles to keep invaders out of China, but how effective was it against the enemy?

The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn [The New York Times]

Mr. Ghosn, the ousted Nissan executive, wasn’t supposed to succeed in Japan, but he never expected to fail like this. He faces charges of financial wrongdoing at the company he helped save.

Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a weekly feature of this blog. New issues are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT

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Life and Death of a Planetary System (NASA) 

How did we get here? How do stars and planets come into being? What happens during a star’s life, and what fate will its planets meet when it dies? Come along on this interstellar journey through time and scientific detective work.

This is a beautiful interactive feature.

How Giant, Intelligent Snails Became a Marker of Our Age (Atlas Obscura)  

Ages from now, giant snails could be one of the lasting signs of human influence on Earth.

The Science of Dreaming (Longreads) 

Science journalist Alice Robb on why we need to take our dreams seriously.

The Soccer Politics of Morocco (The New York Review of Books)

How the “ultras” of Raja Casablanca and other teams have become the main opposition to a government crackdown on dissidents. 

“Nothing rivals the intensity of emotions of religion but soccer,” Dorsey said. “You can’t close down the mosque and you can’t close down the soccer pitch.”

One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine (The New York Times) 

By discovering the principles of chess on its own, AlphaZero developed a style of play that “reflects the truth” about the game rather than “the priorities and prejudices of programmers,” Mr. Kasparov wrote in a commentary accompanying the Science article.

The question now is whether machine learning can help humans discover similar truths about the things we really care about: the great unsolved problems of science and medicine, such as cancer and consciousness; the riddles of the immune system, the mysteries of the genome.

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? (New York Magazine)  

The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real.

When Your Body Says No (Outside Magazine) 

A lifelong runner and outdoor athlete is hit with a mysterious physical breakdown. Once the engine starts to fail, what happens to the mind?

The Story of Dyngo, a War Dog Brought Home From Combat (Smithsonian Magazine) 

“If you ask a family that’s never dealt with a military dog before if they wanted to adopt one, I bet they’d be all about it,” former Marine handler Matt Hatala told me. “But ask them if they want a random veteran who’s been to Afghanistan three times sleeping on the couch, they might be a little unnerved. It’s no different. That dog’s been through situations you’re not going to be able to understand and might not be able to handle.”

How Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel became a Renaissance icon (History Magazine - National Geographic) 

When awarded the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was doubted by critics. Silencing them, his beautiful brushstrokes came to embody the peak of Renaissance art.

Gillette used to rule razors — then came Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club (Vox) 

The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.

Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a weekly feature of this blog. New issues are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT

10 stories to read this weekend • Issue 258 • December 21, 2018

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As Seas Warm, Galápagos Islands Face a Giant Evolutionary Test [The New York Times] 

As climate change warms the world’s oceans, these islands are a crucible. And scientists are worried. Not only do the Galápagos sit at the intersection of three ocean currents, they are in the cross hairs of one of the world’s most destructive weather patterns, El Niño, which causes rapid, extreme ocean heating across the Eastern Pacific tropics.

The Machines That Spy on Antarctica’s Hidden Lakes [Earther] 

Researchers are left to their own devices for weeks to months on end, sleeping in unheated tents and surviving off a stash of snow-preserved food while racing to collect as much data as physically possible in the time allotted.

Polar Light [Harper’s Magazine]

Searching for the solar system’s origins at the end of the earth 

… 

In Antarctica, however, the unusual dynamics of the ice environment not only preserve an inordinate number of meteorites, they actually concentrate many of them in clusters on top of the ice, in areas called stranding surfaces, bare shields of glacier burnished by sometimes ferocious winds. 

(via @RobGMacfarlane) 

The Meteorite Hunters Who Descended on the Carancas Fall [Wired] 

In the remote high plains of Peru, a red-hot chunk of rock plummeted from the heavens, making landfall with a tremendous blast. Half a world away, meteorite hunters like Robert Ward got word and rushed to get a piece of the action. Then things got weird.

Galileo, Krypton, and How the Metric Standard Came to Be [Wired] 

Science often progresses not because of ideas or insights but because more precise tools for measurement are invented, and those tools open new frontiers. 

Excerpted from the book The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

Yemen on the brink: how the UAE is profiting from the chaos of civil war [The Guardian] 

The Emiratis’ strategy in Yemen shows how a small and very ambitious nation is projecting its power beyond its borders

How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments [The New York Times]

Other consulting companies serve similar clients, but none have the stature to confer credibility quite like McKinsey, a confidant for 92 years to many of the world’s most admired companies.

Inside The Country Where You Can Buy A Black Man For $400 [BuzzFeed News] 

Slavery is thriving in Libya, where thousands of black Africans hoping to get to Europe instead find themselves bought and sold, forced to work for nothing, and facing torture at the hands of their owners.

Also see: Modern Slavery: An exploration of its root causes and the human toll. 

The Indian Empire at War and India, Empire and the First World War review – a story finally told [The Guardian] 

The experience of the 1.5 million men who fought in the Indian army during the first world war is at last being recounted, in books by George Morton-Jack and Santanu Das

How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus [ProPublica]

Modern American blood-spatter analysis didn’t originate in a federal crime laboratory or an academic research center. It started in Corning, New York, in MacDonell’s basement. Decades before blood-spatter analysis gained fame in TV series like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” or “Dexter,” MacDonell spent countless hours in his home laboratory, incubating and refining the technique. Then, he spent a lifetime helping it spread.

Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a weekly feature of this blog. New issues are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT

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The Race to Understand Antarctica’s Most Terrifying Glacier (Wired)

Thwaites has long been the subject of dark speculation. If this mysterious glacier were to “go bad”—glaciologist-­speak for the process by which a glacier breaks down into icebergs and eventually collapses into the ocean—it might be more than a scientific curiosity. Indeed, it might be the kind of event that changes the course of civilization.

Also see: An Upheaval at the Ends of the World 

Susan Potter gave her body to science. Her cadaver became immortal. (National Geographic Magazine)

Susan Potter donated her body to science. It was frozen, sawed into four blocks, sliced 27,000 times, and photographed after each cut. The result: a virtual cadaver that will speak to medical students from the grave. National Geographic has been documenting Potter’s journey for 16 years.

How personalized medicine is transforming your health care (National Geographic Magazine)

Stunning advances in gene research and data mining will predict diseases and devise treatments tailored to each of us.

How the brain’s face code might unlock the mysteries of perception (Nature) 

Doris Tsao mastered facial recognition in the brain. Now she’s looking to determine the neural code for everything we see.

The Mass Extinction Detectives (Methods - Science Friday)

No one knows how the dinosaurs rose to dominate the planet. But the answers may lie within a mysterious mass extinction that wiped out their competition.

Rise of the Colossus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (History Magazine - National Geographic) 

Standing for a little more than 50 years in the third century B.C., Rhodes’s titanic statue of Helios made a colossal impact on Western art, history, and imagination.

The Next Great Chess Boom Is Here (The Ringer)

The unpredictable champion Magnus Carlsen and a YouTube-trained, Twitch-streaming generation of young fans has revived one of our oldest games. Is the next great chess boom here?

The Case of Agatha Christie (London Review of Books)

Her great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate. She believed in evil, not necessarily in a theological sense – that’s a topic she doesn’t explore – but as a plain fact about human beings and their actions. She isn’t much interested in the ethics or metaphysics of why people do the bad things they do. But she is unflinchingly willing to look directly at the truth that they do them.

Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave (The New Yorker) 

The best surfer in history made a machine that creates perfect conditions on demand. Will his invention democratize surfing or despoil it?

A Tragedy in Yemen, Made in America (The New York Times Magazine) 

Tracing an airstrike halfway around the world back to an American bomb factory.

Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a weekly feature of this blog. New issues are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT

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The Riddle of the Roaming Plastics (Hakai Magazine) 

It is one of the modern world’s biggest mysteries—99 percent of the plastics that enter the ocean are missing.

Palm oil is unavoidable. Can it be sustainable? (National Geographic) 

Our appetite for the oil hurts the environment and wildlife. But Gabon hopes to show how to build an industry while protecting its forests.

Also See: Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe. (From last week’s edition) 

The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster (The New New - Medium) 

Scientists are scrambling to head off one unexpected impact of climate change

These dusty young stars are changing the rules of planet-building (Nature)

Astronomers peer inside planetary nurseries for clues about how our Solar System and others came to be.

Frauchiger-Renner Paradox Clarifies Where Our Views of Reality Go Wrong (Quanta Magazine)

A thought experiment has shaken up the world of quantum foundations, forcing physicists to clarify how various quantum interpretations (such as many-worlds and the Copenhagen interpretation) abandon seemingly sensible assumptions about reality.

Why language might be the optimal self-regulating system (Aeon) 

Bound by rules, yet constantly changing, language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge

The Woman Who Outruns the Men, 200 Miles at a Time (The New York Times) 

Courtney Dauwalter specializes in extremely long races. But her success in winning them has opened a debate about how men’s innate strength advantages apply to endurance sports.

The Thai Cave Rescue: Miracle At Tham Luang (GQ) 

The story of the Thai cave rescue—in which a team of young soccer players and their coach survived for 18 days before being extracted by divers—got even more unbelievable the closer we looked.

Syria’s Last Bastion of Freedom (The New Yorker)

Amid the brutal civil war, a town fought off the regime and the fundamentalists—and dared to hold an election. Can its experiment in democracy survive?

Inside China’s audacious plan for global media dominance (The Guardian) 

Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to ‘tell China’s story well’ – as part of a worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition.

Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a weekly feature of this blog. New issues are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT