Watches, Stories, & Gear: Selfies On Mars, Magnetic Muons, and A Lost Golden City

“Watches, Stories, and Gear” is a roundup of our favorite content, watch or otherwise, from around the internet. Here, we support other creators, explore interesting content that inspires us, and put a spotlight on causes we believe in. Oh, and any gear we happen to be digging on this week. We love gear.

Share your story ideas or interesting finds with us by emailing our Managing Editor at [email protected]

This installment of “Watches, Stories, and Gear” is brought to you by the Windup Watch Shop.

Lost Golden City Found In Egypt

This week, National Geographic reports on the discovery of the “Lost golden City of Luxor” in Egypt, a potentially major archaeological find that could shed light on one of the most turbulent periods in ancient Egyptian history. The city was built 3400 years ago by the pharaoh Akhenaten after abandoning the throne in the Thebes, Egypt’s ancient capital. Akhenaten ruled in the new city he created, which he named Akhetaten, with his wife Nefertiti until his death, and the city was eventually lost to time after his son, Tutankhamun, became the ruler of Egypt. The discovery of the lost city last year was a surprise to Egyptoligists, who hope to learn more about why Akhenaten left Thebes. As archaeologists begin to examine the findings as the city is dug out, there’s real hope that this site could answer many questions that they’ve been asking for years about this period in Egypt’s history, as so much has been preserved. One archaeologist even referred to it as “an Egyption version of Pompeii,” implying that this lost city could yield fruitful information for generations, and be home to many fascinating antiquities. More at National Geographic right here.

Yahoo! Answers Going Offline On May 4th

If you have a desperate need to get terrible crowdsourced advice to rudimentary questions that you should probably already know the answer to, be sure to get those submissions in soon, as we learned this week that Yahoo Answers will be shut down for good on May 4. Yahoo Answers has been around since 2005, and in that time has developed a reputation as a place where reliable information goes to die. Many other websites have sprung up over the years where people can have their legitimate questions answered by people who are, you know, qualified to do so, leaving Yahoo Answers as something of a cesspool for conspiracy  theories and a factory for endless memes. It’s also a source for genuine laughs, but it appears that years of questions and answers will vanish once Yahoo Answers is taken offline, so if you want to stroll down memory lane, time is limited.

Can AI Bring Us Music Lost To The Forever 27 Club?

What’s a music fan to make of The Lost Tapes of the 27 Club? The project involves creating AI generated music in the style of artists who lost their lives to suicide or drugs at the age of 27 (Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Jimi Hendrix among them). It’s a somewhat macabre idea, but the intentions are good; the project seeks to bring mental health awareness to the music community. And the process is fascinating as well, as it involves a computer program “learning” an artist’s style by being fed dozens of real life examples. The end results sound marginally like the original artists, something akin to what a cover band might play if they wrote an original song, but knowing they were created by an AI robs the music of a certain urgency. Regardless, it’s a fascinating idea with far reaching implications if AI derived music is ever adopted on a mass scale. Read more about the project via Open Culture, right here.

The Standard Model of Physics May Be In For An Overhaul Thanks To New Muon Measurement

An experiment conducted at Fermilab by a team of physicists yielded an interesting result, scientists learned earlier this year: the muon’s magnetic moment is larger than expected. The muon, which is a larger, less stable version of the electron, didn’t quite behave in accordance with expectations, and as a result as flung open the possibility for new physics which could fundamentally change the standard model as we know it. The experiment is actually a new, blinded study of a similar test run in 2001 that first showed something could be amiss, and the new data agreed with those initial findings. This should set theoretical physicists to work devising new experiments that could shed light on the “why” here, so keep an eye out for some potentially very exciting discoveries in the coming years. Learn more about the experiment, and how it was blinded, from Nature right here.

NASA’s Perseverance’s Takes Selfie With Ingenuity

It’s been nearly 50 Martian days since NASA’s Perseverance successfully landed on the surface of the planet, and just this week the rover made new by depositing the small helicopter drone it had in tow called Ingenuity. Perseverance took the opportunity to stitch together some of the images taken by the camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering), part of the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument (very clever, NASA) for a selfie of the two together on the surface of Mars. This is just the first move in setting up for Ingenuity’s first test flight coming soon. Read more about the moment from NASA right here.

eBay Finds: Vintage Omega Seamaster

This week we have a crisp and classic vintage circa 1966 Omega Seamaster, and it’s a ‘beaut! 34.5mm stainless steel case is unpolished, with really sweet geometric lugs with super sharp edges. Caseback engraving is also nice and clean. The silver dial is original with no patina and the classic Omega stick markers and hands in gold tone for contrast. Semi-recessed signed crown as well. I think I can even discern the little Omega symbol in the middle of the crystal in one of the pics, but don’t hold me to it. The 24 jewel caliber 552 automatic movement looks clean and the seller states it runs well.

View auction here.