GlobalXplorer: How You Can Be a Space Archeologist

A “hybrid of Indiana Jones and Google Earth,” archaeologist Sarah Parcak uses satellite imagery to scour the earth for remains and lost cities and now she’s inviting us regular schmoes to do the same. Parcak has just launched GlobalXplorer°, an online tool that means we can help search for these important sites so that archaeologists get there before looters do. She says, “Most people don’t …

Link About It: This Week’s Picks

How Mozart outsold Drake, a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci sketch, airplane upgrades and more in our look at the web

1. The Principals’ Sound Journeys Using field recordings documented by Chris Watson (the guy behind all of David Attenborough’s intoxicating wildlife documentaries), Brooklyn-based design studio The Principals recently created an interactive journey that guides visitors through the sounds of the natural world. Participants walk through three distinct aural zones—forest, canyon and sea—as sound elements like winds gusting across Norwegian islands or seals singing in Antarctica …

First Feathered Dinosaur Tail Found

Perfectly preserved in amber (with feathers, eight vertebrae and soft tissue), the world’s first dinosaur tail has been discovered—initially at a market in Myitkyina, Myanmar in 2015. While feathers have been found before, this fossil definitively links feathers to dinosaurs—and this one is believed to be 99 million years old. Microscopic analysis and CT scans have revealed the tail would have had 25 vertebrae in …