WWWednesday: July 14, 2021

Thanks to Terry Weyna for this link to the Aurealis Award winners.

Congratulation to Natania Barron and other winners of the Manley Wade Wellman Award.

The Ladies of Horror site have unveiled their finalists for 2020. Premee Mohamed, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and T. Kingfisher are among the finalists.

On LitHub, Katie Biberdorf contemplates the chemistry of cocktails (well, booze in general).

Richard Branson went into space with some friends. This article has information about the others on board, and the pilot. (Thanks to File 770.)

And an OK Go video to commemorate Branson’s zero-gravity flight. (The airplane they filmed in creates zero-g for 27 seconds at a time, so they filmed this video is 27-second increments.)

The Crab Nebula is making some news in Scientific American.

According to author Sam Kean, most mad scientists weren’t even good scientists. Ars Technica reviews his book The Ice Pick Surgeon, a compilation of creepy murderers, villains and just plain bad scientists who swore that were working for knowledge.

In 1996, Dolly Parton founded a reading program in her hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee. The Imagination Library mailed books to children for free. Since then it has expanded to other countries.

At Nerds of a Feather, Joe gets started on his summer reading list, which he shares with us.

On Whatever, Ryan Van Loan writes about power, corruption, and their relationship in The Justice in Revenge.

The world’s tallest sand castle (so far) has been constructed in Denmark.

The United Kingdom’s Victoria and Albert Museum hosts an Alice in Wonderland exhibit.

The Mary Sue discusses accountability in The Black Widow.

In honor of the movie, Smithsonian shares eight fun facts about the arachnid Natasha Romanoff is named for. Warning, spider images.

From last year, a nice Marvel Cinematic Universe “Where are they now?” compilation of various villain actors.

Still more from Marvel—a trailer for their animated feature What If…