The BBC has dropped the first teaser for its forthcoming eight-part adaptation of Sir Philip Pullman's beloved fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. It's mostly just a quick glimpse of several major characters, but it does give us a sense of the glorious look and tone of the new series.

(Mild spoilers for the Philip Pullman trilogy below.)

First published in 1995, the three books in the series are The Golden Compass (published as Northern Lights in the U.K.), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. They follow the adventures of a 12-year-old girl named Lyra, who lives in a fictional version of Oxford, England, circa the Victorian era. Everyone has a companion daemon in the form of an animal—part of their spirit that resides outside the body; Lyra's is named Pantalaimon. Lyra uncovers a sinister plot that sends her on a journey to find her father in hopes of foiling said plot. That journey takes her to different dimensions (the fictional world is a multiverse) and ultimately to her own coming-of-age.

Enlarge / Wallace's Giant Bee next to a honeybee for scale. (credit: Clay Bolt)

For security reasons, I can’t tell you exactly where Clay Bolt rediscovered Wallace’s giant bee. But I can tell you this. With a wingspan of two and a half inches, the Goliath is four times bigger than a European honeybee. Very much unlike its honey-manufacturing cousin, it’s got enormous jaws, more like those of the famous stag beetle. And it lives not in nests with thousands of family members but largely alone in burrows in termite mounds, a tubular home it coats with waterproof resin.

Last month, Bolt and his colleagues were on a miserable slog through the rain on an Indonesian Island That Shall Not Be Named, searching for termite mounds in trees, the last place a scientist spotted the superlative species of bee nearly 40 years ago. Sometimes they’d sit under a tree with a pair of binoculars for 20 minutes, watching for the distinctive movements that would reveal a bee in a mound way up high. For mounds closer to the ground, they’d scramble up for a closer look.

Enlarge / The timeline of the approach and sampling process. (credit: JAXA)

Today, in an extended Twitter thread and ensuing press conference, JAXA's Hayabusa2 team announced that everything had gone well in gathering an asteroid sample for eventual return to Earth. While we don't yet know about the material it obtained, the Japanese spacecraft has successfully executed all the commands associated with the sample recovery.

Hayabusa2 has been in space since 2014, and it slowly made its way to an orbit 20km above the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. In late 2018, the spacecraft made a close approach to the asteroid and released two small, solar-powered robots that have been hopping on the surface since. This week has seen the first of what are intended to be several sample-gathering attempts.

The procedure for this is pretty straightforward: Hayabusa2 snuggles up to the asteroid and shoots it. The probe has a sample-gathering "horn" that it can place up against the asteroid's surface. Once it's in place, Hayabusa2 can fire a bullet into the asteroid's surface, blasting material loose that will be gathered by the horn and stored for return to Earth. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, calls its gun a "projector" but admits that the thing it fires is a bullet. JAXA has a webpage that describes some on-Earth testing of the whole system.

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  A toilet seat–based cardiovascular monitoring system (left) is integrated into an individual’s daily routine without requiring any change in habit, thereby addressing patient adherence. The system captures a comprehensive set of clinically relevant measurements automatically (right). [credit: Conn et al. ]

If developing heart disease scares the poo out of you, this new monitor may be just the thing.

Engineers at Rochester Institute of Technology have designed a high-tech toilet seat that effortlessly flushes out data on the state of your cardiovascular system. The tricked-out porcelain throne measures your blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and the volume of blood your heart pumps per beat (stroke volume)—taking readings every time you sit down to catch up on some reading of your own. The engineers, led by David Borkholder, recently published a prototype of the seat in the open-access journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth.

According to the inventors, the seat’s daily data dump could make patients and their doctors privy to early warning signs of heart failure, potentially helping to prevent further deterioration and avoid costly hospital stays. Moreover, the seat could ease in-home monitoring for heart patients, who often strain to consistently track their tickers with other, non-toilet-based monitors.

Enlarge / Artist's estimate of how small the rumored Nintendo Switch revision might look, based on a Nikkei report. (To be clear, this image is sarcastic.) (credit: Aurich / Walt Disney Pictures)

Nintendo's rumored plans to produce a revised Nintendo Switch model picked up steam on Thursday with a tantalizing bit of new information. Last year's rumor mill simply predicted a new model could arrive in 2019, but a Japanese report has narrowed fans' expectations based on its sources' intel: Nintendo may have a new SKU with portability and price, not power, in mind. (And the news outlet uncovered one other possible "service" to come as well.)

The report from official stock exchange news outlet Nikkei.com (helpfully translated by Nintendo Everything) cites a combination of hardware partners and game developers who all suggest the next Switch model will be "miniaturized." The resulting system will reportedly emphasize "portability" and "playing outside," and it will "cut features" to bring the retail price down.

Nikkei's report does not include more specifics, which still leaves plenty of questions about this rumored SKU. If we add up the details offered by Nikkei, though, we can guess that one of its cut features might be the removal of a bundled Switch TV Dock; this product can currently be purchased separately at an MSRP of $89.99. Cutting that combination of chipset, plastic mold, and increased box size and weight would be the easiest way to reduce the system's current $299.99 MSRP.

Steven Pruitt has made nearly 3 million edits on Wikipedia and written 35,000 original articles. It's earned him not only accolades but almost legendary status on the internet.

The online encyclopedia now boasts more than 5.7 million articles in English and millions more translated into other languages – all written by online volunteers. Pruitt was named one of the most influential people on the internet by Time magazine in part because one-third of all English language articles on Wikipedia have been edited by Steven. An incredible feat, ignited by a fascination with his own history.

Pruitt is deeply obsessed with history, and his love of opera inspired his Wikipedia username: Ser Amantio Di Nicolao, his favorite opera character.

"My first article was about Peter Francisco, who was my great great great great great great grandfather … and if we had an hour I could probably go into the full story," Pruitt said. "He was a sergeant in arms in the Virginia Senate and there's kidnapping, potential piracy. If you read the story you would not believe any of it happened."

Still living with his parents in the home he grew up in, Pruitt has always remained true to his interests.

"I think for a long time there was an attitude of, 'That's nice, dear. The boy's crazy. I don't know why he wastes his time, the boy's crazy,'" Pruitt said of what his parents think of his volunteer gig.

That may have changed when Time magazine named him one of the top 25 most influential people on the internet, alongside President Trump, J.K. Rowling and Kim Kardashian West.

How much money does he make from his work? None.

"The idea of making it all free fascinates me. My mother grew up in the Soviet Union ... So I'm very conscious of what, what it can mean to make knowledge free, to make information free," he said.

Pulling from books, academic journals and other sources, he spends more than three hours a day researching, editing and writing.

Even his day job is research, working in records and information at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He joked that his colleagues probably think he's nuts.

"Because I edit Wikipedia all the damn time, I think that one sort of goes without saying," Pruitt said.

Wikipedia's Kui Kinyanjui said the site would not exist without the dedication of its volunteers. It is now one of the top five most visited in the world, among Google, YouTube and Facebook.

"People like Steven are incredibly important to platforms like Wikipedia, simply because they are the ones that are the lifeblood," said Kui Kinyanjui, WikiMedia's vice president of communications.

Six-thousand people visit the site every second, bringing a responsibility for the editors to present a diverse and fair platform.

"We know there's a lot more to be done. That's why we're very excited about projects like Women in Red, which seeks to identify and place more content on women on our platform ... Steven has been a large contributor to that project," Kinyanjui said.

"The last statistic I saw was that 17.6 percent of the biographical articles on Wikipedia area about women, on the English Wikipedia I should say," Pruitt said. "It was under 15 percent a couple of years ago which shows you how much we have been able to move the needle."

How does he celebrate that victory? "Write another article, make another edit."

To put in to perspective what it took for Pruitt to become the top editor, he's been dedicating his free time to the site for 13 years. The second-place editor is roughly 900,000 edits behind him, so his first place status seems safe, for now.

Puritanism has its roots in the late sixteenth century, after Henry VIII broke ties with the Catholic Church. The Puritans believed that reforms had not gone far enough and advocated for a church entirely divorced from Catholic ceremonies. For over a century, Puritans argued amongst themselves, schismed, predicted the end of the world, and still found time to fight the English Civil War and start colonies in the Northeastern United States.

Perhaps their greatest gift to history, however, is their wonderfully strange taste in names. A wide variety of Hebrew names came into common usage beginning in 1560, when the first readily accessible English Bible was published. But by the late 16th century many Puritan communities in Southern Britain saw common names as too worldly, and opted instead to name children after virtues or with religious slogans as a way of setting the community apart from non-Puritan neighbors. Often, Puritan parents chose names that served to remind the child about sin and pain.

Many Puritan names started to die out after 1662, when the newly restored monarch, Charles II, introduced new laws that cracked down on nonconformist religions and consolidated the power of the Anglican Church. Despite this, some of the names have remained in common use in Anglophone countries.

I’ve collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names. To show that some of these names are still in use, I’ve referred to 2012 statistics on names in the UK from the Guardian’s interactive chart of baby names.

20 Puritan Names That Are Utterly Strange

1. Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar. Son of Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar, born 1676.
2. Praise-God. Full name, Praise-God Barebone. The Barebones were a rich source of crazy names. This one was a leather-worker, member of a particularly odd Puritan group and an MP. He gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653.
3. If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Praise-God’s son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas Barbon.
4. Fear-God. Also a Barebone.
5. Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes
6. Has-descendents
7. Wrestling
8. Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith
9. Fly-fornication
10. Jesus-Christ-came-into-the-world- to-save. Brother of “Damned Barebone”. I can only imagine this name shortened to “Save.”
11. Thanks
12. What-God-will
13. Joy-in-sorrow. A name attached to many stories of difficult births.
14. Remember
15. Fear-not. His/her surname was “Helly”, born 1589.
16. Experience
17. Anger
18. Abuse-not
19. Die-Well. A brother of Farewell Sykes, who died in 1865. We can assume they had rather pessimistic parents.
20. Continent. Continent Walker was born in 1594 in Sussex.

12 of the Cruelest Puritan Names (meant to remind children of the pain of the world)

1. Humiliation. Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.
2. Fly-debate
3. No-merit. NoMerit Vynall was born in Warbleton in Sussex, a fount of beautiful names.
4. Helpless
5. Reformation
6. Abstinence
7. More-triale
8. Handmaid
9. Obedience
10. Forsaken
11. Sorry-for-sin. Sorry-for-sin Coupard was another resident of Warbleton.
12. Lament

12 Strangely Pleasant Puritan Names

1. Silence
2. Creedence
3. Dust
4. Diffidence
5. Desire. In the UK, seven babies were named this in 2012.
6. Make-peace. This name was in use at least until 1863; see William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist.
7. Ashes
8. Tace. It’s another word for silence, and is of course a female name.
9. Placidia
10. Kill-sin. Kill-sin Pimple did Jury service in the 1650s.
11. Freegift
12. Vanity

10 of the Sweetest Puritan Names

1. Jolly
2. Liberty. 129 were born in the UK in 2012.
3. Tenacious
4. Happy
5. Felicity. 302 babies got this name in 2012.
6. Hope. 416 babies took this name in 2012.
7. Prudence. 13 babies got this name in 2012.
8. Amity. 5 babies got this name in 2012.
9. Verity. 131 babies were born with this name in 2012.
10. Trinity. 69 Trinities were born in 2012. The name saw a burst in popularity in 1999—due to a particular film, I suppose.

Despite their eccentricities, the Puritans did leave us some beautifully resonant names. Names like Verity, Felicity, and Hope more than make up for the Humiliations, Die-wells, and Kill-sins.

Kill-sin Pimple probably wouldn’t have agreed. But, to be fair, his first name was only half of his problem.