The Consolidated Model 31 flying boat (1939) was the first aircraft designed with a high-efficiency Davis Wing. Intended as a successor to the PBY Catalina, initial testing suggested excellent handling, a speed of 250mph and a potential 3,500 mile range. 📷 Destination’s Journey #NavalHistory 🧵1/4

I can't even find the words to express how spectacularly dumb and damaging this administration is, not just for US science and healthcare but for the world. Innovations like mRNA vaccines - for pathogens, cancer, autoimmune diseases etc - benefit all of humanity.

This week on the blog: Carthaginian Armies! We're going to discuss over the next few weeks the makeup of Carthaginian armies and how they were raised, beginning this week with the (quite limited) role of Carthaginian citizen soldiers. acoup.blog/2026/04/10/c...

hey i’m being real fucking serious right now call your reps. this is insane. he already had thousands of jobs removed from the us fish and wildlife service. dismantling the us forest service will have a devastating impact on habitat protections. im too mad for words.

Starting the day with the lose/lose task of making a “comprehensive summary”, and heartily disliking it.

I'm deep down the rabbit hole on FROGFISH, 60 species of anglerfish in family Antennariidae. They are deeply, utterly WEIRD & MARVELOUS. Most walk on modified fins. Others use jet propulsion. Some are capable of air-breathing. Some are "hairy", others blend perfectly in sargassum.

The Yeongno, is a Korean mythical creature known as a "celestial eater of the rich," this dragon-like monster seeks to consume 100 corrupt politicians, the wealthy, the powerful, etc in order to return to heaven. A cathartic symbol of social justice.

The Potez 62 was a French airliner of 1935, its design made it a transitional aircraft between the more archaic Wibault 280 and the modern Bloch MB.220 in the Air France fleet. It was considered robust and safe for the transport of 16 passengers. © ECPAD

An absolutely delightful discovery. Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

No replies yet! It is either too easy or too difficult. Or people have other things on their mind…

A device from equally troubled, but simpler times.

The White House Military Office has always had a detailed 25th Amendment Operations Plan, as long as that Amendment has existed.

The port of Antwerp at the Scheldt Gate Albrecht Dürer, 1520. (Albertina, Vienna)

I cannot, I simply cannot emphasise how amazing this photograph is. It’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand posing as a mummy on a trip to Cairo in 1896. Yes, that Archduke, whose murder led to the First World War. Pretending to be a mummy.

Today the Flemish Universities of Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent are awarding an honorary doctorate to Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Entirely justified and very proud of my Alma Mater that they are involved in the organization.

In honor of (hopefully) today's launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon in more than 50 years, here is a to-scale graphic of exactly how far away the Moon actually is. (Click image to expand.) You could fit about 30 Earths between the Earth and the Moon!

To understand better...

Saturday night quiz. Four things that are not cars (sheesh). Identify all four of these poor cousins.

Lots of pollinators out on the blackthorn today! Mostly too high up for me and my camera but I did manage to capture a few portraits including this Mining Bee & Sweat Bee 📸 I’m thinking these are Andrena fulva & Lasioglossum calceatum but second opinions are welcome 👀

Saturday night quiz. Four things that are not cars (sheesh). Identify all four of these poor cousins.

My resignation letter

Wednesday Quiz. Four designs from the brief glory period of aviation, before they started to do weird things with undercarriages. They all insisted on being photographed from their good side. ID all four. Complete answers only.

Translation is a form of creation. The translator has to make decisions about preserving style over direct content, about cultural equivalence, about how to preserve a sense of pun or sentence structure from one language to the next. People who assume an LLM can do it are not understanding the task.

😂

Today’s moment of calm

The Bernard HV-40 was a racing seaplane designed to compete in the 1929 Schneider Trophy. Due to the death of a pilot and delays in engine development, it never took part in any races. What I like most is the way its radial engine blends seamlessly into the rest of the fuselage.

Need instructions for opening the Strait of Hormuz? Refer to this page of the #Voynich Manuscript, obviously.

Well, friends, the word is out! Watch for "The Most Mysterious Book In the World: Unlocking the Secrets of the Voynich Manuscript," coming your way in 2027! For the code- and codicology-curious teen in your life. #Voynich

Chemistry in current events: the connections between fertilizer, the Haber-Bosch process, and the Persian Gulf. Read this and your knowledge will exceed that of most of our current political leadership after only a few minutes of light work:

With sufficient taxation, billionaires could become a cryptid.

On International Women’s Day, I’d like to lift up and celebrate Women Airforce Service Pilot, and my grandmother, Charley Lucier

Every single time a new outlet feels compelled to interview an unremarkable billionaire they should pause and ask themselves if there isn't an under-represented artist, scientist, activist, engineer, or academic actually doing useful/interesting things that's more deserving of your readership's time

I believe that I can guarantee that you will *not* have guessed this potential antiviral mechanism or even thought about it before:

It is impossible to imagine Eisenhower saying he would fight “without mercy” even against the Nazis; nor would he have reveled in the thought of death and destruction. He would have regarded it not only as deeply un-American but also beneath his dignity as a serious career soldier.

As part of an AI committee at my university, I spent this weekend trying out Claude (Opus 4.6) for writing, and I have to say, far beyond its hallucinations and the usual complaints, it is a baffling experience cognitively. I want to be more precise in my evaluation here than I usually am about AI.

As a professional military strategist, I just wanted to make sure everyone has a full understanding of the American strategy in Iran, thank you for your attention to this matter

We should talk about how aviation today is a media news desert. In my research into politics and the FAA I have been reading a lot of news coverage of the agency and plane crashes from the 1950s forward. It is stunning how much coverage the FAA used to get & how long the articles were. /1

I’ve admired this 1068 Toledo astrolabe in its case and I studied every millimeter of it on digital images, and today I got to handle it with the medieval manuscripts group. Oxford is wild.

every device i own just pinged with the news that andrew has been arrested. I think probably the oven did.

The Couzinet 33 "Biarritz" was a monoplane built entirely of wood by René Couzinet, which made its first flight in 1931. It took part in the Raid Paris-Nouméa in New Caledonia in 1932. It covered 24,000 km in 20 stages and 133 flight hours.

Why would a tropical frog toxin be used to murder someone in Siberia? You know why.

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Someone asked for a thread of my medieval story times (twist my arm!), so here they are. I’ll pin and add as I go!

Nobody has tried yet. It can’t be so bad? I’d award a virtual trophy for three out of four 🏆

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I think not. Is this better? No? Can you hear me? Apparently not. I will leave Teams and join the call again.”

Weekend quiz. Four anonymised victims of aeronautical engineering. You might underestimate the range to your target.

Live footage of Hannah Arendt's dichotomy between violence and power.