Andrea Lius in The Scientist:
Metallica’s lead vocalist James Hetfield often lauds Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister as one of his biggest inspirations. In 2024, nine years after Kilmister passed away, Hetfield tattooed the ace of spades (the title of one of Motörhead’s most popular tracks) on his right middle finger. But what made Hetfield’s tribute so heartfelt—and eccentric—is the fact that he didn’t just use any tattoo ink but one mixed with a pinch of Kilmister’s ashes.
As morbid as they may sound, cremation tattoos are more common than one might expect. Tattoo parlors, crematoriums, and companies specializing in the production of cremation tattoo inks claim that the practice is safe, or at least that it’s no riskier than conventional tattooing. However, no regulatory body actually governs what can go into tattoo ink and under people’s skin. From human ashes to industrial paint used on cars, just about anything goes.
More here.
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As Clementine Churchill famously remarked, her husband was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings.
Poetry is the expression of an eloquent, enlightened, and enlightening subjectivity. Every subjectivity is bedevilled with prejudices, good and bad. Sometimes it happens that the unhealthy prejudices are sophisticated and have tenacious roots (one thinks of T. S. Eliot’s antisemitism), sometimes they are cheap and irritating (Ezra Pound’s). Neither is a legitimate reason to excommunicate a poet or his work.
The avenues that lead women to jail tend to differ from those for men. Criminologists have long understood this. What happens with women is often a layering of trauma and abuse. They might have economic instability or mental health challenges that allow them to be exploited by violent partners. They might exchange sex for food or housing, and then get arrested for any number of infractions: prostitution, trespassing, drugs. The criminal-justice researcher Stephanie Kennedy calls these “crimes of survival.”
I’m an appellate court judge. I’ve read thousands of briefs. Here’s what no one told you about persuasion and how to win.
Most recently, it appeared in the television series “The Pitt,” set in a hospital emergency department. When the digital patient board suddenly went offline, medical student Joy Kwon saved the day by effortlessly reciting from memory every lost detail – names, rooms, doctors, conditions, vitals. It’s a gripping moment. The stakes are high, recall is perfect, and the implication is clear: Some people have minds that function like high-resolution cameras.
Flipping through the rest of the book, I learned that pumps in water works have an “average life” of 21.3 years compared to only 5.3 years for telephone switchboards. The life of an electric lamp is better expressed in hours (around a 1,000) than years. A railroad tie made from Douglas fir lives a couple more years, on average, than one made white oak and a manure spreader outlives an automobile by more than three years.
Few emotions are as nagging as 
Emergency doctors make high-stakes decisions in fast-paced, often chaotic situations. They have to figure out which patient most urgently needs care, what’s wrong, and what to do next. AI could lend a hand. In a series of challenging scenarios, 
I recently decided to, finally, have my iPhone fixed, only to realize a few hours later that my AppleCare could have covered it. I was in a low mood until my partner suggested that I was robbing myself of a good decision.
Over the past few decades, scientists have been learning more and more about the ways that bees figure things out. They’ve studied how honeybee foragers fan out across miles of unfamiliar terrain in their six-week adult lifespan, navigating by sunlight and memory as they visit thousands of flowers to retrieve nectar for their colonies. They’ve followed bees back to their nests and seen how they dance to tell others where the best flowers are, and how they make collective decisions to swarm and relocate their homes.