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Smedens Bro , "The Blacksmith's Bridge", is a pedestrian and cycling bridge in central Aarhus. It was built in 1911 at the initiative of the local ironsmith and businessman Hans Peter Jensen, who funded its construction to improve access for residents of his neighbourhood.

Spanning the Aarhus River, the light grey railings rise and curve outward at both ends, framing the city's coat of arms. But the real curiosity is elsewhere.

On eight pillars at either end of the bridge, four on the inside and four facing outward, squat identical relief figures with large elongated ears, unsettlingly blank eyes, and strangely contorted faces. The pose is unmistakable: the creatures appear to be relieving themselves.

What exactly they are meant to represent remains uncertain, but they are most commonly identified as solgryller , Danish folkloric creatures associated with the sun at its zenith on the summer solstice. According to tradition, the sun pauses in the sky for precisely as long as it takes a solgrylle to finish its business.

Until a renovation completed in 2025, the figures were painted in colour and far more conspicuous than they are today. They now blend into the bridge, easier to overlook, though no less strange once spotted.

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Not so long ago, I found a stash of my old ZX Spectrum games in the attic. And rummaging through those tatty boxes - the old half-forgotten bargain bin bangers, the illicit passed-around-the-playground compilation tapes - it wasn't the games I found myself thinking about, it was the memories around them. My mind leapt back to evenings spent poring over stamp-sized magazine screenshots; the Friday night trips to Tescos and the exotic box art tempting me to part with my £2; the POKE codes and the dog-eared anti-piracy sheets; the wild classroom rumours of in-game secrets that would only reveal themselves when elaborate steps were performed. But they're not just my memories, of course; they'll be familiar to many of a certain place and time. And it's this sense of cultural nostalgia that Forbidden Solitaire captures so well.

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Science word of the day: Autotroph

Pronunciation: AW'-tuh-trohf

What it means: Autotrophs are organisms that can feed themselves with inorganic substances such as light (for plants) or methane (certain microbes). Autotrophs were the first single-celled life-forms to colonize the planet, thriving on chemicals bubbling up from the subsurface at deep-sea vents or figuring out how to harness the sun for energy. Heterotrophs (like you, me and all fungi), arrived on the scene later to feast on these DIY-ers.

How to use it in a sentence: Stromatolites, microbial mats built by cyanobacteria, are autotrophs that thrived in ancient shallow seas.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word ?

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Award-winning entomologist Dino Martins, known for his work on pollinators, shows in his latest book that even the most gruesome creatures have vital roles to play

Dino J Martins has never been able to resist the small things. The renowned entomologist and evolutionary biologist spent his formative years in biodiversity-rich western Kenya with his foster parents, Joe and Sarah Ellen, looking at birds, flowers and insects on Mt Elgon, and in Kakamega forest and Kerio valley.

He was especially transfixed by the miniature world beneath his feet – dung beetles rolling mounds of cattle dung; safari ants’ migrations across the plains; male butterflies that suck salt and other nutrients from the mud to produce “nuptial gifts” during mating; and bees pollinating the critically endangered African violet alongside crops in a farmer’s field.

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