Morgenwunder

One Wikipedia article every morning, worth the detour.

Wikipedia has around 10,000 articles hand-vetted as outstanding. We send you one each morning, with a few lines on why it deserves your five minutes.

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Three real entries from the pool, with the copy that comes with them.

The Sun and the Moon were once planets. Pluto no longer is.

The word "planet" has never had a stable meaning — it started as Greek shorthand for any point of light that wandered against the fixed stars, which at various times swept in the Sun, the Moon, moons of other worlds, and asteroids. The 2006 vote in Prague didn't settle it either: astronomers who study orbital dynamics want a planet to be a body that has gravitationally cleared its lane, while planetary geologists argue the only thing that matters is whether an object is massive enough to pull itself round. Under the second view, our Solar System has dozens of planets, several of them moons. It is a rare case of a scientific argument where both sides have the data and simply want the word to do a different job.

The IAU's official definition applies only to the Solar System — exoplanets had been handled separately, three years earlier.

Definition of planet · Article from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.

He printed the stories the pulps were too squeamish to buy

Eight scrappy issues across two titles, run by a fan who thought the professional magazines were cowards about subject matter, and the contributor list ends up including Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and Clifford Simak. Simak's story had been turned down for its religious theme; Howard's appeared here first. It is a neat case of an amateur operation doing what the paying market would not, and then collapsing exactly when its ambitions grew — newsstand distribution, pamphlets, hardcovers, none of which the budget could carry. The whole thing lasted about two years and still left a mark on the genre's history.

The promotional flyer for the magazine came with a sample page from P. Schuyler Miller's "The Titan" — a story no professional magazine would buy because of its sexual content.

Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories · Article from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.

LA's water tunnel runs under a volcano chain that's due

This isn't one volcano but a 25-mile seam of steam-blast pits, rhyolite domes and cinder cones that has gone off every 250 to 700 years for the last three millennia — and the most recent activity, the uplift of an island in Mono Lake, was roughly 250 years ago. What makes it stranger is that these eruptions seem to come from scattered small pockets of magma rather than one giant chamber like the one that blew Long Valley Caldera apart 760,000 years ago, which makes the next vent harder to guess. Meanwhile the same ground has been quietly industrialized: obsidian quarried for arrow points and now sold as yard decoration, timber milled for the Bodie gold rush, and an aqueduct tunnel cut straight through the craters in 1941. Earthquakes and swelling ground in 1980 put the whole system back on the watch list.

Los Angeles gets water through a tunnel bored beneath the Mono Craters, a chain whose explosion pits on Mammoth Mountain were blasted out within the last 1,000 years.

Mono–Inyo Craters · Article from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.

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