coastal squeeze

Sometimes reading a new word or phrase opens a whole new perspective on problems that we may already have known about in a less focused way. The words alone can suggest new connections, analytical methods, ways of describing things, a whole new world. This happened to me recently when I spotted the expression "coastal squeeze" in the headline of a press release. So I had to do a feature about how the coasts get squeezed, and why, and what to do about it.

My feature is out now:

Squeezed between land and sea

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 14, 21 July 2025, Pages R687-R689

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Coastal ecosystems are at risk of being squeezed out between rising sea levels and encroaching infrastructure. (Photo: x70tjw/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

a radiant legacy

I quite enjoyed learning about all the alumnae of Marie Curie's lab by reading:

The elements of Marie Curie
Dava Sobel
Fourth Estate 2024

It was also a good excuse to brush up on her life more generally, as it's been a fair few years since I read the biographies by Eve Curie and by Susan Quinn (long before I started to trouble the world with my reviews). My review is out now:

A radiant legacy

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 7-8, July-August 2025, Page 31

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

a 125-year-old new townhall

The Neues Rathaus (new townhall) of Elberfeld was new in 1900, when it was inaugurated by Kaiser Wilhelm II together with the famous suspension railway on October 24. The city administration moved there from the old townhall which now houses the Von der Heydt Museum.

It was where Heinrich the cellist worked from 1919 onwards. (After the merger with Barmen in 1929 he may or may not have been working at Barmen townhall at some point, as well as the shortlived appointment at the city's pawnshop, so I'm not sure how many decades he spent working in this building - I'd say at least one). At the time it appeared in all its art nouveau glory on the cover of the residents register of the city of Elberfeld:

Although the main seat of the city administration of Wuppertal is now in Barmen, the Elberfeld townhall is still part of it and contains public-facing offices, especially social services. After realising this, I scheduled a visit to just have a look around, which I did in February this year, and I loved the place to bits. They don't do tours or open days, but the porter didn't mind me just snooping around and taking lots of photos. Here's a selection, I have also put a set of 12 photos on my flickr.

I also took a ride or two on the paternoster, which was one of the things my aunt remembered from visiting her grandparents at Wuppertal.

32 strings attached

When I'm visiting flea markets in Germany, I sometimes see zithers, and have always passed them by. One day in September 2023, however, at the Aachener Platz fleamarket at Düsseldorf, I came across a derelict one that was marked a very affordable 5€, and when I had a closer look the vendor reduced the price to 4€. It looked like this:

I was one year into my pirate luthier adventures and thought, maybe I can fix this one, so I bought it and had it sitting around in a corner for a year and a half.

Now, after rediscovering the photo I took at the flea market before buying the instrument and sharing that on flickr, I got round to fixing it up. The biggest challenge was getting my head around the tuning of the harmony strings. The melody strings (above the fretted fingerboard) are tuned like a viola with a duplicate a string: CGDAA. (This is the Munich tuning, as opposed to the Viennese tuning which has a duplicate G string.) The harmony strings (away from the fingerboard) go around the circle of fifths: Eb Bb F C G D A E B F# C# G# Which makes 12 strings. And then the same thing again an octave below (bass strings), another 12. And then, depending on the model, there are variable numbers of contrabass strings descending from Eb chromatically. Mine only has three of these, so that's 27 plus 5 equals 32 strings, phew.

Of these, all of the melody strings and five of the harmony strings were missing, leaving me with just 22 strings in place. Bits of wire that may have been strings in happier times were strung around the back, suggesting that somebody had hung the instrument on a wall for decorative purposes.

When I tried to tune up the 22 strings (very slowly as I tried to get my head round that tuning pattern), I found that the tension warped the frame of the instrument upwards, away from its backside, with an ugly gap opening up under the tuning pegs. So I needed to relax the strings again and glue that gap shut with hide glue to make sure this can't happen.

I'm glad to report that this operation was successful, and I have now all 32 strings on and tuned up to their proper pitch and the instrument has stayed in its proper shape. I also applied some teak oil to the wooden surfaces to spruce them up a bit (not sure if that's allowed on instruments and I wouldn't have dared on a violin!), and that seems to have worked as well, so the instrument now looks like this:

There are still some small bits of wood missing around the edges which I'll carve and glue in at some point, but that's essentially a cosmetic issue and the instrument is playable now. The melody strings are brand new (cheap) violin strings, and the harmony strings are whatever I could find lying around that matched the requirements. I think the four higher ones were nyckelharpa strings in an earlier life, and the one at the lowest end is an old cello string. It looks a bit too bulky for this instrument but it does sound lovely for the bottom note.

In theory, the F, A and C# strings are coloured red for easier orientation. Now that I know this, I can just about detect remnants of the colour and confirm that I have the right strings in the right places (apart from one F string that was missing), but it's not conspicuous enough to be real help with playing. It's also confusing for harp players used to recognising the C strings by their red colour.

Oh, and when I attempted to clean up the fingerboard, I discovered a nearly invisible brand name, Sonora:

I found a few zithers and lots of other instruments under that name (including outdoors tubular bells) but it doesn't seem to be an established brand name for a specific zither maker, so it didn't lead me to any information re who made my zither where.

More info on zithers (in German) on this website claiming you only need three hands to play it.

If you think you've never heard a zither, here's the one zither tune that everybody knows.

And here is a picture from Wikipedia of a similar one being played:

Von Naturpuur - Eigenes Werk, CC BY 4.0, Link

crossing the Mediterranean

Humans have been crossing the Mediterranean for millennia, even before the Phoenicians invented the ways and means to build proper ships. I took a recent study of the ancient genomes of numerous people living in the Phoenician colonies around the Western Mediterranean as an excuse to look into the ancient travels on the Mediterranean, including when and how people first reached the islands. Your regular reminder that humans have always migrated and will continue to do so.

My feature is out now:

Mediterranean movements

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 13, 7 July 2025, Pages R639-R641

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Genomes from Punic burials reveal the surprising diversity of the people who lived in communities that were culturally Phoenician. The image shows pendant masks from Carthage made of glass paste in the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. (Photo from the exhibit Carthage: The Immortal Myth inside the Colosseum and taken by G41rn8/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

a bookish book

Some thoughts on

The bookbinder of Jericho
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2024

I loved Pip Williams's Dictionary of lost words, so kept an eye open for her follow-up novel, which has now crossed my path in a matching edition. (Faced with an ever-growing TBR pile, there is no point ordering books, I just let fate decide.) Although this is not quite a sequel, we are staying in the realm of Oxford University Press, and Esme's dictionary of lost words gets a cameo appearance here. In fact, this novel grew out of a discovery the author made when she researched the first one.

Williams found that in the early 20th century lots of women worked for the Press in the book binding process, but have been forgotten by written history. And this led her to a remarkable frontline between Town and Gown, and between the working folks and posh people. The line runs along Walton Street in Jericho - to the West of it the books published by the Press were typeset, printed, bound, etc., at that point still with lots of manual labour, and just opposite on the other side of the road, at Somerville College, the first generation of young women that had the opportunity to obtain degrees from Oxford University were studying the contents of those very same books. Even their exam papers were produced on the other side of the road.

Our fictional lead character, Peggy, has been working in the bindery since the age of 12 but harbours the ambition to cross the road into Somerville, to "read the books, not bind them". It looked like an impossible ambition in Victorian times, even more so for an orphan looking after her twin sister with autism, but World War I helps to stir the class system just enough to open a plausible path for her to achieve that.

Williams invents the characters standing in for those who were too unimportant to have been recorded by history, but the more notable people that pop up in the story are historic, including for instance the principal of Somerville, and the famous Somervillian Vera Brittain (author of Testament of youth), as well as the upper echelons at OUP.

Her local knowledge is amazing (especially for somebody normally living in Australia, but I assume she must have spent some time in Oxford). Just one thing occurred to me that she may have missed: People go to the cinema in her story, and I think the Electric theatre in Castle Street is mentioned as the place they go. In fact, Jericho got its own cinema during that time, the North Oxford Kinema, which is still standing and now known as the Phoenix Picturehouse. It opened in March 1913, so the characters in the novel would have walked past it and might have noticed a new cinema popping up in their neighbourhood.

Like the first novel, this one is also a heartwarming fairytale driven by social justice and feminist themes. Surprisingly, after the novel about words in dictionaries, the author managed to produce an even more bookish book.

PS re-reading the blurb on the back of my paperback edition after posting this entry, I noticed that none of the things that I discussed above and that are obviously crucial to me get mentioned there. The presentation there goes to great lengths to avoid the mention of books, Oxford, Jericho, education etc. Trying to sell it as a novel about what women do when the men are off to fight a war. Of which there are hundreds of others I suspect, so not at all what makes this book special.

Other reviews etc:

Here is an appreciation from Jericho Online

A Guardian piece about the author and the book