Link About It: This Week’s Picks

An ancient mystery solved, architectural advancements, photographing natural wonders, and inspiration aplenty in our look around the web

Quentin Blake’s Cheerful Rainbow E-Cards Legendary artist Sir Quentin Blake has created 10 new artworks, featuring watercolor rainbows and a cast of characters, that can each be sent as e-cards free of charge. The 86-year-old illustrator drew the pictures in order to share a little humor and bolster optimism, saying “It seems like a time when a few straightforward jokes might not come amiss, so …

Pioneer Works Launches Broadcast, an Online “Station for the Presently Stationary”

“There are times in history, defining moments in many of our lives, when we have taken that astronomical perspective… to view the sight of humanity as a whole: vulnerable, brave, afraid, cruel, compassionate,” Janna Levin (author, astrophysicist and Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works) writes. “From that astronomical perspective, humanity—in all its hyper-finely pixelated colors and languages and traditions and beliefs—resolves into a crisp portrait …

Uncovering The Formula For a Mysterious, Medieval Blue Ink

For thousands and thousands of years a purple-blue ink known as folium was used to color all kinds of books, cheese rinds and more, but its formula was lost until a team of researchers recently deciphered the recipe through three ancient texts. It’s long been confirmed that the dye comes from the fruit of chrozophora tinctoria, but this isn’t a complete assessment. By poring over the …