Turkey Trot is THIS THURSDAY! Some of us have already had an early Thanksgiving dinner, so it might be easy to forget…but don’t. Set your alarm early, and bring a friend if you want to. Randy, KE5JIT, has reported that he has enough hams to fulfill the requests from the YMCA, but that walk-ins are welcome and will be put to work.
The Dallas Marathon is coming up on Sunday, December 15th, and the event needs your help. If you haven’t signed up, please head over to https://sites.google.com/site/dallasmarathoncomms/volunteering/sign-up and register. The Marathon is a great event to participate in if you’ve just gained some experience at the Turkey Trot.
Tom, KE5ICX, is looking for a new net control for SKYNET. If you’d like to give it a try, please contact the club.
And finally, don’t forget that there is no Lecture and Lab for November, December, or January. If you weren’t there today, you didn’t miss it.
The contest calendar has only one item, and it’s a big one: the CQ WW DX CW weekend is going on now. If you’re capable of contest-speed CW, get to work.
There’s a fair amount of news from the world of amateur radio:
If you want to learn more about emergency communication, the ARRL’s introduction to emergency communications can now be taken at your own pace without waiting for a mentor or a specific registration window.
WRC-19, which ended yesterday, has established a magic band for all of Europe!
Myanmar might be on the air, maybe, if you can hear it. Noted DXPedition-er OH2BH has permission to get on the air as XZ2D, effective about two days ago. He’s in a mangrove swamp, so his noise floor should be very low.
And AO-7 is celebrating its 45th birthday! In fact, he world’s oldest functioning communications satellite would like to sell you a lab coat or a pair of gold cuff-links in a special charity auction.
In news from the world of science:
Cats and dogs might not want to live together, but it looks like dogs can give the gift of life to birds: bone fragments from deceased dogs have been used to help birds achieve superior healing of broken wings.
I am a strong skeptic about the idea of life on Mars, because life on Earth is everywhere: if life exists, it spreads out and does things you’d never imagine, even inside solid rock. However, I’m not as right as I think I am. Scientists studying a hot, acidic geothermal vent in Ethiopia have found a place on the Earth’s surface where no life, not even those crazy ocean-vent bacteria, can exist at all.
But in happier news, it looks like life on Earth uses molecules that are pretty common all over the universe. Ribose, a sugar key to both DNA and RNA, has been found in meteorites.