Items of Interest

Mackintosh Hill House Chain Mail Box

In Helensburgh in Scotland, famous designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh built his showcase Hill House in 1904. A weaker Portland cement was used in the construction and is now unfortunately crumbling after over 100 years of exposure to one of the wettest regions of Scotland. To preserve the house and protect it from the rain, The National Trust has built a massive chain mail box over the house which will keep it dry but also ventilated. The box includes 32.4 million hand sewn steel rings!

Podcast Of The Week: Addressing Bias In NASA Submissions

This NPR Shortwave episode describes how scientists at NASA analysed the submissions for use of the new James Webb telescope, as well as Hubble and found a huge amount of unconscious bias was leading to the majority of approvals going to submissions from male scientists. They ran some experiments with the submission procedures and found blind submissions as well as more fact based reviewing procedures removed a lot of the biases from the process.

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