26 Aug 2026 #DollyParton #RoyalFamily #KingsGuard
The King’s Guard performed a special rendition of ‘9 to 5’ outside Buckingham Palace in memory of Dolly Parton.
Sharing the special moment on social media, The Royal Family wrote: “Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many – including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you”
#DollyParton #RoyalFamily #KingsGuard #BuckinghamPalaceBand #9to5
[…]
In South Liverpool, there’s a neighborhood called Granby. It used to be one of the most vibrant and diverse neighborhoods in the UK. It had a busy main street lined with shops and cafes. But starting in the 1960s, the neighborhood began to decline. Over decades, it hollowed out, suffering through unemployment, aggressive policing, and failed redevelopment schemes.
The local government forced residents to sell their homes and then boarded them up. But before the authorities sealed each house, they gutted it. They would strip out the copper, the lead, and everything that was seen to have economic value, along with the toilets and any kind of infrastructure that would make the homes liveable. Then the council would place a sign on the front reading, “All items of value have been removed from this property.”
But a small group of residents would prove those signs wrong. They refused to leave the neighborhood, and they began clearing trash from empty lots, planting community gardens, and painting the boarded up houses in bright colors. Eventually they formed a Community Land Trust, or a CLT. Their goal was to take ownership of the empty houses and bring people back to the neighborhood.
Eventually the CLT realized it might be useful to have some folks on board who knew how to design and build stuff. Which is how a design collective called Assemble got involved. With Assemble’s support, the CLT pushed the local government to stop demolishing the remaining homes and then they worked together to renovate a handful of the old houses.
As Assemble worked on the renovations, they began experimenting with the debris they pulled out of the old houses. Eventually, they set up a little backyard workshop with an artist named Will Shannon, and together they figured out how to make something they called Granby Rock.
Granby Rock was a kind of rubble terrazzo made from the broken bricks and bits of slate from the old houses. It was mixed together with concrete, poured into molds and then polished smooth. Granby Rock mantlepieces and countertops went into each of the renovated houses. “It just felt important as part of the process of reclaiming the narrative of these houses, of this neighborhood – that actually valuing everything that was there was important,” said Lewis Jones of Assemble.
In the world of design, there’s a term that’s used for the practice of taking elements from older buildings and reusing them in new ones. It’s called spolia. What Assemble did in Granby was a version of that. The designers looked at the materials from the old houses and they saw an opportunity to make something new.
Reuse has always been an element of how humans build. But with spolia, the reuse isn’t just practical, it also carries meaning. […]
More: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/680-spolia/
14 Aug 2026 #Water #ExtremePressure #Physics
What would happen if you kept compressing water harder and harder—with no container strong enough to stop it? At extreme pressures, water stops behaving like the liquid we know and begins transforming into entirely different states of matter.
In this video, we explore what happens when water is compressed toward its physical limits. Discover how increasing pressure can force water into high-pressure forms of ice, including Ice VI and Ice VII, even at temperatures where ordinary ice would not be expected. Experiments have shown that liquid water can remain metastable far beyond the pressure range where high-pressure ice phases are thermodynamically favored, before rapidly transforming under extreme conditions. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
We’ll follow water through increasingly extreme pressures and examine how its molecular structure changes. At still higher pressures and temperatures, water can enter the extraordinary superionic state, where oxygen atoms form a solid-like lattice while hydrogen ions move through it almost like a liquid. Laboratory experiments have observed this behavior at hundreds of gigapascals and thousands of kelvin. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
But does water have an actual “absolute limit” where it can no longer be compressed? The answer is more complicated. Water becomes progressively less compressible as pressure rises, while its molecular and atomic structure changes dramatically. At sufficiently extreme conditions, ordinary H₂O no longer resembles the familiar liquid we encounter on Earth.
Watch until the end to discover how far water can be pushed before it becomes something completely different—and what the most extreme experiments have revealed about matter under unimaginable pressure.
[…]
msamba 