Tech Net News 05-25-2019

human-cell-3
Credit: Allen Institute

Our next club meeting on June 4th, 2019, will focus on Field Day. We have exciting plans in store, including a new location—with air conditioning—and great opportunities to get on the air. Get ready, and join us for our next meeting!

There’s one notable contest this weekend, the CQ WW WPX Contest, CW weekend. What’s this? It’s a CW contest where countries count for more points, but callsign prefixes are multipliers. If you’d like to be part of a new and different “country,” possibly a rare one, then this contest is for you.

In news from the world of ham radio:

The Dayton Hamfest was, reportedly, great…but the Atlanta Hamfest has been cancelled.

In much of the world, 6 meters isn’t a ham band. An experiment will take place on June 13th to help European officials decide if hams there can share the band with existing users. This is a complex event. More details can be found at the ARRL website.

In news from the world of science:

We’ve all seen simple, textbook diagrams of how cells divide, a process known as mitosis. Now, scientists have completed a complex, 3-d animation of what’s really happening inside the cell, down to the detail of individual molecules. Mitosis: its now even more awesome!

If you think you’ve seen a parrot or a parakeet outside, you’re probably right. Feral parrots are becoming more and more common in the U.S. In at least one case, this could be beneficial to an endangered species. Biologists, however, worry about the consequences.

Geologists have discovered the largest underwater volcano in the world, near the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. The volcano is half a mile high and more than 3 miles wide. It may have produced the largest underwater eruption yet known…as well as a famous, mysterious underwater noise, a giant hum that circled the world.

And there’s been new fossil news this week, too. But it hasn’t been a giant dinosaur that’s made news; instead, its microscopic fossils of a billion-year-old fungus that have been making waves. It looks like fungus might have been the earliest form of multi-cellular life…maybe.