It’s the last of this series for the year, so let’s get cracking.

• The first one of these is more boosterism than anything else, but it’s hard not to feel especially enthused about space development after the successful comet landing last month. This Bloomberg article talks about the successful initial test of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the platform that should eventually carry humans back to the moon and beyond. Of course, this is just an unmanned test of the crew module and they don’t even have a rocket, but progress is progress.
• The next article is more boosterism. It is in fact an advertorial from BWM but I found it fascinating enough to link to here (and not be paid for it). It talks about how modern car engineers spend a lot of time and effort on carefully designing what sound a car makes when you close its doors. Apparently consumers expect to hear different types of sounds depending on what type of car it is and are more influenced by the sound they hear than they are consciously aware of.
• The next link goes to the Daily Mail (sorry about that) but it’s about real science. It’s about the discovery of the largest desert necropolis ever in Egypt. So far some 1,700 mummified corpses have been found but calculations based on the area of the burial grounds suggest that the mass cemetery holds over a million corpses. They are said to date from around 1,500 years ago and are common citizens instead of royalty. No doubt it will be an important archaeological resource for decades to come.
• This one is great just for the reading pleasure alone. It is a New York Times article about the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical calculator that dates back to around 100 BC. It can be considered a very early computer, though it is not programmable. It can be used to predict lunar and solar eclipses and calculate the positions the sun, the moon and the other planets in the solar system.
• Finally everyone knows how bad the air pollution in China’s big cities is, but I enjoyed this Guardian article. It covers not only how the population has adapted to the situation over time but also some of the suggestions of how to deal with it, including outlandish proposals like large-scale vacuum cleaners to suck the smog out of the sky.