Simultaneous side booster vertical landings from SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy demo flight on Feb 6, 2018

“Title card number 7 for Journey To Excelsior. This one goes with the fic Two and A Half Scientists.”

“It features a bunch of blueprints that were part of that story. Check out the very first concept for my flying skateboard! It was pretty dumb. Haha. I wanted to just tie rocket boosters to my original skateboard.”

“For the final, I ended up building a high tech skateboard with gliding wings and rocket boosters that are built into the skateboard instead of tied on.”

A new artistic exhibition was derived from research that shows that Maori tattoos are next-to-invisible when photographed using wet-plate / collodion techniques (i.e that of the mid-19th century), which means that photos taken back then likely aren’t giving us a full picture of traditional tattooing. 

I knew that wet plate translates color fabric differently (thank you, years of Civil War reenacting) but never thought about how it would apply to tattoos!

Here’s an image of fabric, so you can see a comparison between wet plate, color, and modern black and white:

There’s been a bit of an uproar in the subtitle community about translating Roma incorrectly, which leads into a dive into the community of those who translate films for subtitles. Struggles include not wanting dialogue to move across a cut, which is “increasingly difficult to avoid in today’s films,” reading speed, and formality and gender in languages like German. 

They also include a still from Downfall, which is my chance to share that I saw it in France, with French subtitles, and while I was in a full immersion program, my vocabulary had not yet figured out the subtleties of Berlin defenses, so a big chunk was lost on me.

Apparently there are scavengers that seek out the fallen Soyuz rocket boosters in the far north of Russia! It’s a multi-man, multi-day affair, and there are some incredible photos in here of one man’s last hunt.

Turns out most ski maps today are drawn—by hand!—by ONE GUY: James Niehues. He inherited from a guy, who inherited it from a guy. As someone that spent long hours appreciating ski maps (look, I was a nerdy child), I am delighted to get this peek behind the curtain:

THE RAISIN INDUSTRY, as it happens, is about 1000x more cutthroat than I thought, which is because I didn’t think there was anything cutthroat about raisins. I was wrong! Jonah Bromwich dives into the infighting between raisin growers in the San Joaquin Valley, which begins with why the California Raisins got off the air, and goes through price-fixing, strikes, and a “showdown” at the Grape, Nut & Tree Fruit Expo! Go Forth!

In renovating the new Oscar de la Renta boutique in Paris, they found a 17th century painting behind the wall! (they’re restoring it and keeping it in situ, which I am very pleased about)

This New Yorker piece about Apollo Robbins, a theatrical pickpocket (34 min)—perhaps the best theatrical pickpocket, is breathtaking. It’s one of the times that reading about the tricks blows your mind almost as much as watching it must. Here’s the opening paragraph, and tell me if it doesn’t pull you in immediately:

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.” 

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale. 

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair. 

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and more The world’s most prolific rocket, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, is cleared to fly again, federal regulators announced Friday night, putting the vehicle back on track for two major human spaceflight missions. THE Federal Aviation AdministrationThe U.S. space…