Link About It: This Week’s Picks

Food photography, ballroom dancing, the sun's actual size and more in our look at the web

1. The Sun Might Be Bigger Than We Thought Perhaps surprisingly, we don’t know the sun’s size—at least, not as accurately as we know the Earth or the moon. When working with Google Maps (to measure the sun’s shadow) and his own models, Xavier Jubier realized something was off with the measurements, “For me, something was wrong somewhere, but that’s all I could say,” Jubier …

The 170-Year History of Food Photography

The first image of food wasn’t avocado toast—instead it was a still life of fruit, shot by William Henry Fox Talbot (a British scientist and mathematician, best known as a pioneer photographer and the inventor of several photog processes). Influenced by traditional painting, food photography took some time to develop on its own—in 1927, Edward Steichen was commissioned by the Stehli Silk Corporation to “produce …

Tracing the Evolution of Language

Michael Gavin, associate professor of human dimensions of natural resources at Colorado State University, and other researchers across six disciplines formed a unit (in 2010) with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and they’re on a mission to better understand why our species, collectively, speaks over 7,000 distinct languages. They began by reviewing existing studies (language studies around the equator and …