The DARC Lecture and lab is coming up, and it’s going to be a fun one: we’ll be focusing on Anderson Power Poles, and there will be lots of easy, useful projects to build. Let us know which ones you’re interested in!

There aren’t too many contests this weekend, but there’s a QSO party in Arkansas, as well as a Straight-Key Century Club Sprintathon.

There’s only been one really good ham radio news story this week, but it’s a pretty fun one: hams helped local officials track down a local mad scientist who was operating an unlicensed, short-range radar on 315 MHz…just in case anyone came to his door when he was in his laboratory.

In news from the world of science:

Ambopteryx is now the second bat-winged dinosaur known to science. Flying is apparently so awesome that it keeps evolving over and over again. I should get a pilot’s license!

Wasps have caused me no small amount of pain. But besides stinging us over and over again, they are also solve problems that show they’re smarter than they look. New research shows that they can intuitively understand “transitive hierarchies:” If A > B, and B > C, then A > C.

The Roman Empire? Bah! A whippersnapper! And who’s this “Charlemagne” kid, anyway? If you’re the oldest tree in the east, everything after Psamtik I is old news.

An extinct bird came back from the dead, 136,000 years ago. Pretty cool!

It’s often said that, “life finds a way.” Unfortunately, sometimes what life is finding a way to do is to spread radioactive fallout across the deepest parts of the ocean floor.