A brief aside in the latest YLE newsletter:

Interestingly, one specific strain of flu—called Yamagata influenza B—has gone extinct due to Covid-19 measures. This is incredible news because of two things:

1. It wasn’t thought that we could eliminate a flu strain.
2. This strain was notoriously difficult to predict for flu vaccine strain-selection purposes.

I've just finished reading The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements, which is chock-full of fascinating trivia about the discovery and use of the various elements.

One of the tales concerns the time a fellow named Otis King bought a molybdenum mine in Colorado and pioneered a new extraction process to produce more molybdenum from it than the world could possibly use in a year. This warranted a note in a metallurgical bulletin in 1915, just when the German military was looking for more molybdenum to build more of its big guns. Fritz Haber (of the Haber-Bosch process and later chemical warfare research) noticed it, and the Germans determined that they needed to take control of that mine.

At which point the story turns into a Hollywood Western:

[Max] Schott-- a man described as having "eyes penetrating to the point of hypnosis"-- sent in claim jumpers to set up stakes and harass King in court, a major drain on the already floundering mine. The more belligerent claim jumpers threatened the wives and children of miners and destroyed their camps during a winter in which the temperature dropped to twenty below. King hired a limping outlaw named Two-Gun Adams for protection, but the German agents got to King anyway, mugging him with with knives and pickaxes and hurling him off a sheer cliff. Only a well-placed snowbank saved his neck. As the self-described "tomboy bride" of one miner put it in her memoirs, the Germans did "everything short of downright slaughter to hinder the work of his company." King's gritty workers took to calling the unpronounceable metal they risked their lives to dig up "Molly be damned".

King had a dim idea what Molly did in Germany, but he was about the only non-German in Europe or North America who did. Not until the British captured German arms in 1916 and reverse-engineered them by melting them down did the Allies discover the wundermetall, but the shenanigans in the Rockies continued.

Anyway, the US eventually entered the war and started taking an interest in the actions of German companies on its own soil, and when it found out that Schott's company was shipping its entire output to Germany, it put a stop to that. King made his fortune shortly afterward when he persuaded Henry Ford that moly steel would be good for car engines, putting an nice bow on things.

Reading the newsletters for this year's Eastercon (the UK national sf convention) as they get posted, I came across this:

John Holden’s display of arc lamps will be set up in the Aviator conference centre, outside the Armstrong room.

Jules Duboscq was a world class Parisian scientific instrument maker.

He made at least 509 carbon arc lamps between 1840 to 1885 and these were bought by the most renowned scientists around the world. Then many moved into national science museum collections.

The Arc Lamp man has found one percent so far.

Can you make it two percent by taking part in this hunt to find another half dozen?

How to do it:

1) Log onto a national science museum, world class University or science research site from around the world.

2) Find the search collections part of the site. Filter for objects.

3) Search “Duboscq”

4) If you find one then send the picture and link to: johnholden07450@gmail.com

Happy hunting and can we find where another six lamps live?

By not precisely following these steps, I was able to find one at the Smithsonian, one at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, and multiple ones at Harvard and the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave. I doubt all of those are new to him, but I sent them all in just in case. Some of you can probably do a lot better than me though (delosharriman, I'm looking at you).

In the interests of science education and cinematic verisimilitude, Iceberger will tell you what the stable orientation of your iceberg is.

(Found via ludy.)

2019 is almost over over here, and thank goodness. Here are a couple roundups of interesting stuff to close it out.

Science News's favorite books of the year are always worth a look. This year it's everything from quantum physics to a Victorian penguin coverup.

"Damn, We Wish We'd Written These Stories" is a regular end-of-year feature at FiveThirtyEight.

And finally, Dork Tower has some geeky good wishes for the new year.