them!

Reading a bit like a formicidic version Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the research of Polish entomologists into an ant “colony” discovered subsisting in a derelict nuclear weapons bunker yields quite a few unexpected findings, via Super Punch.
That the ants could carry on at all under such harsh and deprived conditions is remarkable to begin with, but even stranger is how they go through the motions of eusocial behaviour (more on the insects here and here) absent a queen or off-spring of their own, the population only being replenished by hapless outsider ants that fall through holes in the ventilation shaft and are obliged to join their ranks. The environment in the bunker is not at all suited to ants, being constantly cold and nearly devoid of food sources. Scientists are not speculating that the ants stave off certain starvation by somehow feeding on radiation, but rather gruesomely guess that the ants are surviving off the ecology that has established itself in the ants’ rather extensive graveyard (among the normal conventions that they try to keep up in these very abnormal conditions) and are in a way cannibals once removed—or zombies outright.

churfrankenland

We had heard of the Kurhesse region or even Churmainz previously (referring to the principalities’ electoral passing influence) but never before the term Churfranken, which was adopted not too long ago by a consortium of towns, villages and singular destinations along the River Main between the Spessart and Odenwald mountain ranges to promote themselves. We took advantage of the extended weekend to take a drive through this area and saw a few of the sites.
First, we toured the grounds of Schloss Mespelbrunn, an early Renaissance moated castle and keep still owned by the same noble family, governor of the Archbishop of Mainz six centuries on. We had the briefest of tours before being inundated with the crowds from a tour bus that had just arrived, but we were able to navigate through the trophy room ourselves and marvel at the authentic state of the elements and embellishments.
We clung to the river’s banks, crisscrossing several bridges and saw quite a lot along the way before stopping in historic Miltenberg. Here too, we unexpectedly found ourselves overwhelmed with crowds—there was a huge festival going on, but had a nice walk through the town nonetheless. Established as Roman fortress because of its strategic and defensible location, the town prospered throughout the Middle Ages because of its deposits of red sandstone, a distinctive building material much valued all over Europe.
The market, town gates and scores of half-timbered (Fachwerk) houses were absolutely charming and well-preserved. Among the main sites is the inn Zum Riesen (the Giant), whose registration documents dating back to the early 1400s make it one of the oldest, continuously running hotels in the world, with its guests including Holy Roman emperors, kings, generals, Napoléon, chancellors and Elvis Presley. We’ll have to return here soon and explore more.

steampunk

Published in the last decades of the nineteenth century and arguably the first dedicated periodical dedicated to science-fiction, the Franke Reade Library was quite a visionary—although that vision included Manifest Destiny, the white man’s burden and second-wave colonialism as well as the untapped potential of electricity—exploit in circulation in the five-and-dimes of New York and abroad.
Writing under the pseudonym Noname (which made me think of how the wily Odysseus called himself Nobody, Οὖτις, as a nom de guerre whilst combatting the Cyclopes and how Nemo is the Latin equivalent of the pen-name), the young Cuban-American Luis Senarens was certainly the first modern prolific writer in the genre, authoring hundreds of stories in this series and in others, later becoming the editor of a detective story and true-crime magazine. The comparison of Senarens’ work to that of Jules Verne (Captain Nemo) is and the two corresponded over their careers—taking elements of the other’s feats of engineering.

icebreaker and impasse

The somewhat ironically named Crystal Serenity is the first leviathan of a cruise-liner to haul holiday-makers through the once fabled Northwest Passage (only navigable year around since 2009 due to the arctic pack ice) and recently completed its maiden voyage, as Jalopnik reports.
Not only were guests a bit disappointed to not see majestic icebergs parting before them or penguins and polar bears accompanying them, it seems they also failed to appreciate the infamy of being the first “explorers” here. Aside from stark environmental concerns, as the sea-lanes widen and traffic inevitably increases, it also poses a vexing problem for Canada since the waters are part of the country’s internal territory but the rest of the maritime world has already decided (without conferring first with Canada) that there should be free and unhindered transit for all. Depending on how negotiations go forward, Canada might maintain its fishing and environmental regulations but not the power to bar any vessel entry—saddled with the responsibility for combatting piracy, smuggling and clean-up operations when a spill or a wreck does occur.