We have a special SKYNET tonight! Don’t forget that special guest Dr. Steve Townes will be interviewed by our very own Kelley K5KTX this evening. Be there!

And don’t forget that HAM-COM is still going on. Please come on out tomorrow and visit the club table, even if you haven’t signed up. You can also support the vendors who’ve stuck it out all three days–and there’s lots of good stuff for sale, including embroidered DARC shirts, jackets, and hats.

On the air, we’ve got one of the most laugh-inducing QRP contests coming up tomorrow: the Cookie Crumble! It’s fun, unique, and tasty. Invented by two SOTA/NPOTA enthusiasts, the Cookie Crumble sounds like some goofy fun. The ARRL June VHF contest is in progress now, too.

We’re also looking for Tech Net net controls. If you’d like to try it—no long-term commitment required—please email w9ve, that’s whiskey nine voice of excellence, at netzero dot net.

In the world of science:

2018 is the Year of the Bird and for June, the recommended action is pretty simple: cut down on your use of single-use plastic products. Do you like seeing water bottles littering parks, or plastic shopping bags floating down rivers? Probably not—and neither do birds, fish, dolphins, turtles, or anything else, really.

This news is generating a lot of buzz: a well-designed experiment has shown that bees understand the number zero. That’s the kind of result that really stings. When I was a lad, it was believed that only humans understood zero. Then they had to include other primates. Then birds. Then dolphins. And now, insects!

NASA’s recent discovery of carbon-based molecules on Mars is pretty cool; organic chemistry is interesting, whereas most inorganic chemistry is pretty simple and boring. But it’s important to remember that this is not a smoking gun for finding life on Mars. Not yet, at least.

What’s new? New trinos! Old trinos are boring. They walk around in bell-bottom jeans and ask you if you’re “hip.” Neutrinos, on the other hand, are providing more and more evidence that there’s more to physics than meets the eye.