It’s hard to find a greater concentration of excellent museums in a city of Dresden’s eminently manageable size. As if the dozen or so museums that make up the Staatliche Kunstsammlung weren’t enough, there’s also the unforgettable (and unforgettably named) German Hygiene Museum and the brand-new German Military History museum, with an addition by designed by Daniel Liebeskind. For porcelain freaks, there’s also the Meissen factory just a few kilometers upriver. I’ve written about Dresden a lot, and it’s always a pleasure.

Weirdly, because it’s only a few hours from Berlin, I’ve only stayed the night there once. I will have to correct that some time soon. My recommendation to anyone traveling from Berlin to Prague: get off the train in Dresden, for a few hours or a few days.

The story, “Mystery Box,” is a peek into the fast-moving, anonymized world of containerized shipping and the risks it holds. The key question facing officials in Genoa: What do you do with a container that’s too radioactive to open, too risky to move and already on Italian soil? It isn’t hard to imagine the scenario repeating itself at ports in Newark or Los Angeles, and the experts I talked to said US officials aren’t exactly on top of evacuation and contingency planning.

I could have written another whole article on the subject of loose radioactive material and dirty bombs, and perhaps some day I will, but in the meantime I’m relieved the story ended as well as it did. In a strange twist, the radioactive source material ended up in Leipzig, Germany, where I spend quite a bit of time.

The piece has already been picked up by Longform.org and I’ve gotten lots of good initial feedback. Check it out and see what you think.

One postwar biographer called him “Hitler’s most evil henchman,” a title for which there was stiff competition; Heinrich Himmler, the infamous head of the SS, eulogized him as “an ideal always to be emulated, but perhaps never again to be achieved.” Indeed, Heydrich was the go-to guy for the Nazi leadership’s most sensitive and difficult tasks.

He organized the Wannsee Conference, where the details of the Final Solution were hashed out; he helped orchestrate the Night of the Long Knives, the internal bloodbath that established the SS’s dominance within the Nazi party, and was a personal favorite of Hitler’s. Heydrich was also an arrogant bastard, and that proved to be his undoing. Ambushed by two Czech commandos, Heydrich was killed despite a string of bad luck on the part of the hapless assassins mostly because he insisted on riding around Prague in a Mercedes convertible, rather than an armored car.

The story of the assassination and its repercussions is one of the lesser-known dramas of the war. But it was a pivotal moment. If Heydrich had survived, he might have risen even higher in the Nazi hierarchy — to the detriment of the Allied cause.

The idea would be laughable, except for the fact that Kiruna managed to turn two of the few things they have in abundance — snow and ice — into a resounding commercial success. I spent a night in the IceHotel, which is essentially a 60-room igloo. Lots of people pay lots of money to spend a night (rarely more than one) in the hotel sleeping on reindeer-skin covered foam mattresses. The IceHotel has turned into a global brand, with bars made of ice in several countries around the world. With that kind of marketing genius, I give Spaceport Sweden a strong shot at becoming a reality.

Banning bags — and carrying durable, re-usable cotton or plastic ones instead, is a statement that’s easy to make, visibly “green” and doesn’t take much effort or dramatic lifestyle changes. It’s a lot easier than, say, giving up your car, or buying less stuff, or forgoing plane flights. And it makes much less of an impact than those more dramatic gestures. But anything helps, right?

I wrote about the energy cost of bags for National Geographic News last week. Check it out.

Credit: Siggi Bethke

I’ve got an article out in this week’s Science about one physicist’s struggle to resurrect data from an old experiment. Siegfried “Siggi” Bethke, now the head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, worked at a German supercollider in the 1970s, and in 1995 he wanted to take another look at his old results. What he found “was a disaster.” The problem, as I explain in the article, is that physicists are accustomed to working in large collaborations and moving swiftly on to bigger, better machines.

“… particle physicists have no standard format for sharing or storing information. “There’s funding to build, collect, analyze, and publish data, but not to preserve data,” says Salvatore Mele, a physicist and data preservation expert at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland.”

Bethke ended up reconstructing the data he needed from old 9-track tapes, scattered hard disks and even stacks of ASCII printouts. He compared it to “physics archaeology,” which I loved. It’s always hard to know in the moment what might be valuable in the future. That’s not an argument for hoarding, just something to think about as we race off to the next new thing.

The results line up with what we know about history amazingly well — wet, cold, miserable summers coincide with plagues and famines in the Middle Ages; severe droughts happen to take place when the worst barbarian invasions wash over the Roman Empire, suggesting starvation set the tribes in motion; and warm, wet summers line up with the peak years of the Roman Empire.

It’s not proof that climate chaos caused the fall of the Roman Empire, but it’s very interesting supporting evidence — and a warning for us today.