(1) MÉLIÈS FILM SAVED. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] The Library of Congress Magazine’s new issue has an article about a long-lost 1897 Georges Méliès’ short film, “Gugusse and the Automaton”, being found and restored. May contain the first representation of a robot on film. “A Long-Lost Film, Finally Found”.

And a page to watch the film: “Gugusse et l’Automate”.

… “This is one of the collections that makes you realize why you do this,” said Courtney Holschuh, the archive technician who unraveled the film.

Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who drove the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.

His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day and a traveling showman by night. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with some of the world’s first moving pictures.

A Méliès film would have been an unforgettable experience to almost anyone in the 19th century….

… Méliès was a devotee of the science fiction work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and his films often featured surreal, fantastical sets. An image from his most famous film, “A Trip to the Moon” — that of a rocket landing in the eye of the man on the moon — became the image representing early cinema. His 1896 short, “Le Manoir du Diable,” is considered the world’s first horror film.

“Gugusse,” for its part, is a one-shot, one-reel short filmed in front of a painted screen made to look like a workshop in which clocks and automatons were being made. In the film, the magician (Méliès) winds up an automaton dressed like the famous clown Pierrot. Once wound, the clown beats the magician with his walking stick. The magician retaliates by bashing the automaton over the head with a sledgehammer, each blow seeming to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll. The magician then smashes it into the floor….

…After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them to him.

McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels — they could no longer be safely run through a projector — and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.

“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.

McFarland, relieved to have finally found a home for his family’s treasure chest, found it all fascinating, the films and the diaries of his wandering showman of a great-grandfather.

“He talks about full houses, and rowdy houses, and canceled shows, and he went all the way to the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, and I think into Ohio as well,” he said. “He made as much as $20 bucks a night, I see in his records, and sometimes he made $1.35 for the night, you know?”…

(2) LOTS OF CASH STICKING TO THIS WEB. “’Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Reaches Stunning $1.67 Billion After Two Weekends at Global Box Office” – Yahoo! keeps account.

Sony/Marvel Studios’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is simply unstoppable at the box office, earning an incredible $145 million domestic and $381 million worldwide in its second weekend in theaters to bring its global total to $1.67 billion.

With $655 million in the U.S. and Canada, the latest “Spider-Man” film has grossed more money before inflation adjustment than any other film in domestic box office history after 10 days of theatrical play. It is now on pace to become the first film to gross $1 billion domestically before adjustment, passing the all-time North American record of $936 million held by “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

Overseas, the film continues to perform very well in China with $186 million, putting it on pace to join the top 10 highest grossing Hollywood releases of all time in that country. That list only has two films released after the COVID-19 pandemic: “Avatar: The Way of Water” with $245.9 million and the Hollywood record holder “Zootopia 2” with $651.9 million….

(3) SOCKS IT TO ME. “Harry Potter fans force power link diversion to avoid Dobby’s grave” reports BBC.

Harry Potter fans succeeded in diverting a multimillion-pound power link between the UK and Ireland after they complained it would disturb a “memorial” to Dobby the House Elf.

The £430m Greenlink interconnector links the National Grid to Ireland via 125-mile cable between County Wexford and Freshwater West, a beach in Pembrokeshire where the death of fictional character Dobby was filmed in the Potter films.

Project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast the cable was originally “going to go straight through” the tribute, before fans left his firm “hundreds of calls”.

“Actually we went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby’s grave,” he said.

Ludlam, founder of Etchea Energy, said a BBC News interview about the project had turned into a public relations nightmare after fans got wind of what was to happen.

He told the podcast that during the filmed interview he had pointed out where the cable would go underground, saying: “We did the shot, we finished I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later.

“And we got hundreds of calls, I mean hundreds of calls.”

A colleague told him the nature of the calls, and that “apparently, we’re going to go straight through Dobby’s grave”.

“I said, ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby? I don’t know Dobby?’

“I said, ‘he’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’

“[The colleague] said ‘no it’s very, very serious’.”

Ludlam discussed with planners “exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn’t go anywhere close to Dobby’s grave”.

He added: “A lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby’s happy.”…

… The cable diversion is not the first time Dobby’s grave has been saved.

In 2022 the National Trust agreed it could remain in place following a consultation, but urged visitors not to leave souvenirs.

Fans were asked not to leave socks on the mock grave, made of pebbles with messages written on them, because the beach was environmentally sensitive….

(4) DRONE STRIKE DESTROYS HUGE NUMBER OF UKRANIAN BOOKS. “Millions of burnt books show how ‘war of endurance’ is hurting Ukraine” – Reuters has the story.

Viktor Kruhlov, director of Ranok, one of Ukraine’s largest children’s publishers, struggled to hold back tears as he watched pile after pile of his books turn to ash.

“It’s a terrible sight to see books burning,” he said.

A Russian drone strike on Ranok’s warehouse in the northeastern city of Kharkiv on August 1 destroyed about 8 million books, the biggest blow yet to Ukraine’s publishing industry during the four-year-old war.

Publishers say more than 10 million books have been destroyed in attacks on warehouses in recent months, threatening an industry that initially benefited from rising demand for Ukrainian-language literature at the start of the conflict.

As firefighters battled the blaze, Kruhlov said the first explosion at the warehouse was followed moments later by a second at the same spot.

“This was a deliberately planned attack against the book warehouse,” said Kruhlov, whose company prints around one-third of the textbooks used in Ukrainian schools.

Russia’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The attacks on book warehouses and printing houses have resonated deeply in a country where many see the war as a fight for national survival and identity. Education Minister Andrii Butenko described them ⁠as an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian language, history and memory, “everything from which the identity of our children grows.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly questioned Ukraine’s separate statehood and argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people….

(5) FLAME ON! “Timothy Watches The Thing” – a learning experience at Camestros Felapton.

What if I was very cold and there were dogs? This is the genre they call “horror”. The Webster’s dictionary defines “horror” as “intense aversion or repugnance”, which was the reaction of Mrs Webster when she discovered the dead bird I had left on their sofa after I borrowed their dictionary….

(6) TRAILER PARK. Paramount has released a trailer for Children of Blood and Bone, based Tomi Adeyemi’s 2018 novel. Variety reported that the trailer “introduces Thuso Mbedu as Zelie, a woman with the power to command undead spirits. Her homeland, the kingdom of Orisha, is divided into clans with different magical abilities. Under King Saran’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) reign of terror, magic is suppressed.”

The logline: “In the epic fantasy world of Orïsha, a young woman goes on a quest to reclaim the magic that was violently stolen from her people. She and her brother ally with the daughter and son of the king to fight back against his brutal rule.”

(7) TOM CHADBON DIES. [Item by Steven French.] Farewell then Tom Chadbon: “Tom Chadbon obituary” in the Guardian.

The actor Tom Chadbon, who has died aged 80, was a deft character player, blessed with a versatile voice – his naturally light, delicate, melodious vocal register acquired steel and depth when required – and an almost cherubic physiognomy that could toughen on command. …

….He will also be remembered as the inept but dogged detective Duggan in the 1979 Doctor Who story City of Death, helping (and sometimes hindering) Tom Baker’s attempts to thwart an alien scheme to steal the Mona Lisa. A comically imaginative caper, filmed partly on location in Paris and co-written by Douglas Adams, City of Death is a high-water mark for Doctor Who and remains the series’ most watched story: the final episode notched up an impressive 16 million viewers. In a perfectly judged performance, Chadbon was both doughty sidekick and comic foil – playing Duggan dead straight (bar the odd well-timed double take when needed) and being hilarious as a consequence….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Steven Brust’s Brokedown Palace

I asked Brust where Brokedown Palace as a name came from as I assumed it was named after the Dead song, and he confirmed it was.

There are certain novels that I return to from time to time and Steve Brust’s Brokedown Palace is one of them. It’s the only stand-alone novel set in Dragaera series, which runs currently to over twenty-five novels. (I’ve read or listened to quite a few of them.) It leads off the series, and it is also notable for being set in Fenario, the human-populated portion of that world where the rest are mostly not.

The novel is heavily influenced by Hungarian myth and culture, not surprising giving that Brust is of Hungarian descent.  Brust uses that tradition’s folklore to great effect while combining it with family dynamics King László, the oldest of the brothers, is a fair and just ruler along the Princies of the Lands. All live in Brokedown Palace.

Once upon a time, there were four brothers who lived in the land of Fenario. These were the King and Princes of the land, and they lived together in the decrepit Old Palace in the center of the city of Fenario. Ahhh but things are not as they seem as things well become very complicated… I won’t say more than that as it’d spoil things if you’ve not read it yet. And this really deserved not to be spoiled in any way at all. 

This is a more complex novel than Brust usually writes and the characters here actually have more agency, more feel of being actual individuals than that they usually get in his novels including much of this series. That’s a reflection of it being a family-based novel so it feels more intimate than usual.

The art is by Alan Lee which was done for the 1996 Ace edition and later used by Ace and Orb, the latter twenty years back in a most excellent trade edition which is still available as a “new” edition.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Bound and Gagged tries to hide.
• Carpe Diem supplies an interstellar laugh.
• F Minus tries a new means of travel.
• Off the Mark is undone by a secret weapon.
• Strange Brew rates our planet.
• xkcd produced a color/size chart.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal can’t quanta-fy it.
• Tom Gauld witnesses a summer injustice.

(10) BIOPHOTONS. [Item by Steven French.] I knew the houseplants were talking about me behind my back! “All living things emit a faint glow. Could this light be useful?” in Nature.

In 2025, quantum physicist Daniel Oblak and his colleagues published images of mice that made headlines around the world. The researchers put four anaesthetized mice inside a dark chamber and pointed a sensitive camera at them. It picked up a stream of photons emitted from the animals’ skin: a light signal too faint to be seen by the human eye, but visible in the camera images as a ghostly, mouse-shaped glow1.

The mice were killed at the end of the experiment, and almost as an afterthought, the team placed the dead animals back into the chamber to image them again. This time, the glow had disappeared; aside from a few remaining spots of light, the mice had essentially dissolved into background noise. Seeing the images was “a defining moment”, says Oblak, who is based at the University of Calgary in Canada. It was as if the researchers had photographed life itself.

The study went viral. The researchers were inundated with messages, from a healer’s claim that his hands emitted light, to eyewitness reports of glowing trees; headlines around the world asked whether auras are real. Oblak emphasizes that the photons he captured have little to do with such claims, not least because the naked eye can’t see the faint emissions. He sees it instead as the mark of a long-misunderstood field finally coming of age: the study of the ‘biophotons’ produced by living cells across the tree of life….

(11) OF ALL THE JOINTS IN ALL THE WORLD. “The Mission Robotic Vehicle launched on July 21 with two seven-jointed arms meant to inspect, relocate and upgrade ageing satellites; after a year-long trip, it is meant to test whether spacecraft can become serviceable infrastructure” reports SpaceDaily.

The launch is complete. The central demonstration is not.

According to DARPA’s July 21 announcement, the spacecraft will spend about a year travelling to geostationary orbit, roughly 36,000 kilometres above Earth. Only after it arrives can the programme test whether one commercial vehicle can inspect, relocate, upgrade and extend the lives of satellites that were never meant to meet a robotic mechanic.

That gap between launch and proof is the story. The Mission Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, offers a plausible preview of future spacecraft as serviceable infrastructure, but the difficult work still lies ahead….

… Each of the two manipulator arms has seven joints and a tool drive. DARPA says the vehicle also carries interchangeable tools, sensors, lighting and flight software designed for close-proximity operations. Planned tasks include inspection, anomaly resolution, satellite relocation and the installation of small propulsion modules called Mission Extension Pods.

The programme says one of those pods could add six or more years of station-keeping life to a client satellite. That is a programme target, not yet an in-orbit result from MRV….

(12) CAPTURED MOON. “Webb telescope finds signs of ancient disaster for Neptune’s moons” – Reuters has details.

New observations of some of Neptune‘s moons and rings are providing evidence of a catastrophe that occurred billions of years ago around the solar system’s outermost planet in which a Pluto-sized interloper caused a celestial demolition derby.

Researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine the composition of three of Neptune’s small inner moons — Proteus, Larissa and Galatea — and its inner dusty rings, and detected clay minerals that one might expect to find deep inside certain worlds in the outer reaches of the solar system. These magnesium-rich minerals are known to exist on the dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in some meteorites.

“These minerals require prolonged contact between liquid water and rock to form,” said planetary scientist Ryleigh Davis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances, opens new tab.

“The moons themselves are far too small and cold for that chemistry to have occurred in place, so the clay had to come from somewhere else — the deep interior of ⁠a much larger ancient world. Finding this material on Neptune’s inner moons points to a catastrophic event in Neptune’s past that destroyed those ancient worlds and exposed their deep interiors, with the small moons and rings we see today re-forming from that wreckage,” said Davis, who worked on the study while at Caltech.

The researchers said the culprit behind this cataclysm appears to be Triton, which currently is Neptune’s largest moon but previously resided farther out in the solar system in a region called the Kuiper Belt. They said that sometime during the first billion or so years after the solar system’s formation roughly 4.5 billion years ago — a chaotic time when the large gas planets were still migrating to their current orbits — Neptune’s gravitational pull captured Triton.

Triton is a bit larger than Pluto, another Kuiper Belt resident, though smaller than Earth’s moon.

After being captured, Triton’s own gravitational forces stirred up Neptune’s original moons and caused most of them to collide with each other. Neptune’s current inner moons eventually formed from some of the resultant debris.

“The interiors of large icy moons are normally permanently hidden from us, buried beneath thick shells of water ice and accessible only through models ⁠and inference. Neptune’s inner moons may be the only place in the solar system where we can directly observe that material, because this catastrophic event essentially turned those ancient worlds inside out,” Davis said.

Triton is the solar system’s only large moon that orbits in the opposite direction of its planet’s spin. This fact provides further evidence that Triton was captured after forming elsewhere rather than forming as one of Neptune’s original moons….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The Palindromists – A documentary about the World Palindrome Championship”.

The Palindromists is a documentary delving into the world of palindromes–those peculiar words and phrases that read the same backwards and forwards. Explore palindromes in history and meet the world’s greatest palindromists as they see everything backwards while preparing for the World Palindrome Championship hosted by Will Shortz at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Danny Sichel, Bruce D. Arthurs, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]