Link About It: This Week’s Picks

Putting excess London Underground heat to use, an app for analog photography, a 2,000-year-old sarcophagus and more

NASA’s Highest-Resolution Photo of Mars NASA’s new image of the surface of Mars—the space agency’s highest-resolution photograph of the Red Planet ever—comprises 1,200 total images. The wide-pan photograph features what researchers hypothesize are former sites of lakes and streams that dried up over the course of several billion years. The 1.8-billion-pixel shot was taken by the Curiosity Rover during November and December of 2019 and …

2,000-Year-Old Sarcophagus Adorned With Leopard Painting Found

On the western bank of the Nile, 15 feet below ground, an archeological dig (led by Patrizia Piacentini from the University of Milan) has unearthed a stunning 2,000-year-old sarcophagus lid adorned with a colored painting of a leopard’s face. “Her name is Mafdet (meaning ‘she who runs’) and she was the first of the Egyptian cat goddesses, long before the more modish Bastet and Sekhmet,” …

Excess Heat From the London Underground Used to Warm Nearby Homes

A red, metal-clad building—the Bunhill 2 Energy Centre—in London’s Islington marks the center of Europe’s newest type of energy network. The building itself (by Cullinan Studio) acts as the central provider for heat and hot water for hundreds of homes and public offices within its proximity. A fan situated below ground, but above the Underground redirects heat from the Northern Line tunnel (which would otherwise …