Jan Stinson and Bruce Gillespie have announced the eighth issue of Steam Engine Time. My favourite piece is James Doig’s presentation of documents surrounding the 1945 banning of Olaf Stapledon’s novel Sirius in Australia by the Literary Censorship Board. The Minister for Trade and Customs overturned the board’s majority opinion and relied on the objections [...]
Demonstrating that there is probably no science story that can’t somehow be given an sf-flavoured headline, a National Geographic story about the colossal squid is titled “Colossal Squid Has Glowing ‘Cloaking Device‘”.
From Nature, via ABC News in Science, details of a placoderm fish fossil from WA’s Gogo site that pushes the “known record of live birth back by about 200 million years“.
Kudos to my friend John Long, my alma mater and current employer UWA, and to David Attenborough, after whom the fish has been named.
Bruce Dorminey reports in COSMOS on a fascinating paper that suggests the early Earth may have had three moons, only for the orbits of the two smaller (~100km or so) moons to become unstable over a billion years or so. The paper by Jack Lissauer and John Chambers is an excellent example of the sort [...]
After consulting the masses, Talking Squid is trying out a new theme, Velocity. Over the next little while we’ll be tweaking the design, so you can expect a new banner, highlighted hyperlinks, and maybe some surprises.
Margo Lanagan will be hosting a writers’ walking tour of the Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania. The tour will stretch over the week of 5-11 January 2009. Fitness levels do not need to be extreme. All the walks are “easy grade” and the emphasis is on observation and reflection rather than on burning up the [...]
