10 for today starts in Vesuvius and ends in Africa over 300,000 years ago.

Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia
via Arts & Letters Daily: Jo Marchant in the Smithsonian Magazine Photographs by Henrik Knudsen

The charred papyrus scroll recovered from Herculaneum is preserved in 12 trays mounted under glass. Here is PHerc.118 in tray 8. The scroll was physically unrolled in 1883-84, causing irreparable damage. (Henrik Knudsen)
A revolutionary American scientist is using subatomic physics to decipher 2,000-year-old texts from the early days of Western civilization
It’s July 12, 2017, and Jens Dopke walks into a windowless room in Oxfordshire, England, all of his attention trained on a small, white frame that he carries with both hands. The space, which looks like a futuristic engine room, is crowded with sleek metal tables, switches and platforms topped with tubes and boxes. A tangle of pipes and wires covers the walls and floor like vines.
In the middle of the room, Dopke, a physicist, eases the frame into a holder mounted on a metal turntable, a red laser playing on the back of his hand. Then he uses his cellphone to call his colleague Michael Drakopoulos, who is sitting in a control room a few yards away. “Give it another half a millimeter,” Dopke says. Working together, they adjust the turntable so that the laser aligns perfectly with a dark, charred speck at the center of the frame.
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An 'interstellar immigrant' asteroid is going 30,000mph in the wrong direction
via the Big Think blog by Ned Dymoke
In a curious case of interstellar immigration, astronomers have found an asteroid that came from outside our galaxy hurtling around Jupiter. Now, there are millions of asteroids that circle Jupiter and most of them are in two huge clusters. But this asteroid — named 2015 BZ509 or 'BZ' for short — is going the wrong way.
Best part? It's been doing that for about 4.5 billion years. It was attracted here initially by the sun's gravitational pull (who wouldn't be?) and decided to stick around, but wanted to do so in its own way.
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A Short Analysis of A. E. Housman’s ‘Tell Me Not Here, It Needs Not Saying’
via Interesting Literature
‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’ is one of the most famous poems from A. E. Housman’s second volume, Last Poems (1922). In this poem, which comes near the end of the collection, Housman reflects on his relationship with nature, before concluding that, although nature does not care or even know about him, he feels a close bond with it.
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Egypt Under Roman Rule – Roman province
via About History by Alcibiades

After the death of Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh, Egypt fell under the direct control of Rome. The first contact, between Rome and Egypt, had occurred much earlier, in the time of Ptolemy VI. During his reign, Egypt was threatened by Antiochus IV, a Seleucid king. Antiochus’ army was closing on Alexandria. Ptolemy VI received help from Rome and managed to regain control. Later, Ptolemy XI awarded Cyprus to Rome, and in return, the Roman general Cornelius Sulla placed him on the throne. After the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, the defeated general Pompey sought refuge in Egypt, but Ptolemy XIII had him executed, hoping that he would win Caesar’s sympathies. However, this backfired, and Caesar stayed in Egypt, supporting Cleopatra VII against him. Egypt became a client-state to Rome, but it was still self-governed. After Caesar was killed, Cleopatra sided with Mark Antony against Octavian, but they were defeated, and Cleopatra committed suicide in 30BC. This ended the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Egypt became Rome’s “breadbasket”.
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Smashing black holes at the centre of the Milky Way
via the OUP blog by Alessia Gualandris and Manuel Arca Sedda

Hubble-Spitzer composite of the galactic centre (full-field) by NASA, ESA, Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and S. Stolovy (Caltech). Creative Commons Attribute 4.0 via Spacetelescope.org.
The centre of the Milky Way is a very crowded region, hosting a dense and compact cluster of stars—the so-called nuclear star cluster—and a supermassive black hole (SMBH) weighing more than 4 million solar masses.
A star cluster is an ensemble of stars kept together by their own force of gravity. These large systems are found in the outskirts of every type of galaxy, being comprised of up to several million stars. Nuclear clusters constitute a special variety, since they are found at the very centre of galaxies, including the Milky Way, and they are much heavier and denser than ordinary clusters.
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Benedict Arnold’s ‘Villainous Perfidy’
via Arts & Letters Daily: Gordon S Wood in the weekly Standard

George Washington described Benedict Arnold’s treason as an act of ‘villainous perfidy.’ In this lithograph, Arnold—seated because of his injured leg—is depicted persuading British major John André to hide documents in his boot.

Getty

It was once common knowledge, the story of Benedict Arnold—that extraordinarily successful patriot general who abruptly turned against the American Revolution. Because he had been so trusted by George Washington, Arnold was regarded as the worst of traitors. Indeed, his very name became synonymous with treachery and treason. Not so anymore. Nowadays many young Americans have no idea who Arnold was, and even those who have vaguely heard of the name have little sense of what he did and why “Benedict Arnold” has been a byword for betrayal through much of our history.
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"The Philosophy of Beards" from 1854
via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson

Behold The Philosophy of Beards, a short 1854 book on the allure, upkeep, and clear moral superiority of the beard.
The Public Domain Review found this gem scanned at the invaluable Internet Archive, and have a terrific writeup describing why this weird tome is oddly telling of its Victorian times:
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A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’
via Interesting Literature
‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s best-known poems: it is simultaneously both a war poem and a poem about Irishness, and yet, at the same time, neither of these. To unpick these paradoxes, a bit of analysis of the poem is required.
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Humans today are more homogeneous looking than our ancestors
via the Big Think blog by Paul Ratner
Early humans did not all come from the same place and they varied much more physically than the humans of today. An upcoming paper says that it’s time to “radically rethink” how our species emerged. There was a period of time when a number of very different Homo sapiens populations lived alongside each other, exhibiting both archaic and modern features.
The scientists make this claim in particular relation to the region they studied, an area from Morocco to South Africa in the period of about 300,000 and 12,000 years ago. One pillar of their reasoning steps from the discovery of early Homo sapiens fossils in Morocco last year. Those were dated to 315,000 years ago, and had a combination of characteristics.
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