In 1908, Traffic Bridge was the scene of a near-disaster that marked the end of large-scale river traffic in Saskatoon. Yep, still writing the section on Saskatoon bridges.

Somehow I missed this last month, but the oldest map of anywhere in the western world, dating from about 500 B.C., has been found in southern Italy.

If you were to play a word association game with a random selection of people, it’s a safe bet that the word most would associate with the phrase “engineering project” would be “bridge.” Today’s topic: the bridges of Saskatoon, and specifically the Broadway Bridge, also known as the “Engineers’ Bridge.”

NASA might be interested. It’s posted its official request for proposals for privately built spacecraft that could ferry supplies and crew to the International Space Station. (Via Dispatches from the Final Frontier.)

Not that I’m one to be giving fashion advice (as my wife would be the first to tell you), but the idea of a scarf that automatically changes colour to match your clothes strikes me as, well…cool.

Get your colour–yes, colour–photographs of Imperial, pre-Revolution Russia here. Gorgeous, and fascinating.

No, honestly, that’s what this story says: a “brain” made of 25,000 neurons grown from a single rat embryo has learned to fly a figher jet simulator. I’m evenly divided between “Cool!” and “Ewwww!” Could go either way. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Methane-producing microbes buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland provide credance to the notion that high methane concentration in areas of the Martian atmosphere could be the result of life. Little green bugs, as it were. (Via The Speculist.)

He suffered from lead poisoning, analysis of bone fragments at the Argonne National Laboratory has confirmed. Deafness is a rare but not unknown complication of “plumbosis,” so that well-known disability of Beethoven’s may also have been caused by lead. Via MedGadget.

It’s not as famous as the one in California, or the one in the Yukon, but Saskatchewan had its own gold rush in the 1930s. Oddly enough, the topic is uranium, not gold. (Perhaps I should explain I’m working on a book for the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan, not currently writing …

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Some people think e-books won’t really take off until e-paper is perfected. That day is coming closer, as this e-paper display in a Tokyo subway station makes clear.

Check out this slide show of some of the most popular and best-selling toys of the past century. (Via Dynamist Blog.) How many did you have?