Sunday, August 4, 2013

Link roundup

1.  Barry Bonds's success convinced baseball players to use bats made from maple, instead of ash.
Trouble is, while all bats may break, some maple bats did not so much break as explode. Bits of them have ended up in Colvin’s chest, and in the faces of fans in ballparks in New York and Kansas City. For five years, Major League Baseball has been trying to end the era of the shattered bat.
MLB teamed up with the US Forest Service to improve the bats.

2. "Lo Hsing Han, heroin king and business tycoon."

3. David Quammen looks at the short, violent lives of lions for NatGeo:
They were handsome devils, a quartet of eight-year-old males, resting in a companionable cluster. They looked forbidding and smug. They’re probably two sets of brothers, Rosengren told me, born within months of each other in 2004. They had been dubbed “the Killers” back in 2008 by another field assistant, based on his inference that they’d killed three collared females, one by one, rather systematically, in a drainage just west of the Seronera River.