Utah keeps doing this: you turn your back on a stretch of sandstone for five minutes and it hands over a new species. The segment is short on anatomy, so treat it as the headline and watch for the paper with the proper name and the cladogram.

Sacramento public radio wraps a day of local news with a visit from Alasdair Fraser and family, which is the correct way to end any programme. Skip ahead past the earlier segments if you only came for the fiddle; nobody will judge.

Geomagnetic reversals have been suspected of extinction crimes for decades without ever quite being convicted. This new work finds a tight cluster of flips lining up with an extinction and a flood-basalt eruption, which is still circumstantial, but it's a much nicer alibi problem for the defence.

Not a primer so much as a set of working exhibits: you get to click Next txg and watch the uberblock ring advance, then change the sector size and see the slot count fall. If you've ever explained pool import to a colleague with a whiteboard and some hand-waving, this is the whiteboard done properly.

The nice trick here is that nothing gets opened up: the GBA's old multiboot feature, built so friends could share one cartridge, now ships a synthesizer straight into RAM. No soldering iron, no sacrificed consoles, just a link cable and some very period-correct bleeps.

Every culinary revolution needs an early adopter willing to be stared at, and in Newport it was apparently an Italian marine painter. A good small story about how a whole region came round to something the rest of us now take for granted on pizza.

Most visitors photograph the green bridge with the vintage trams and move on. The trick is to come when the Danube runs low and look down, where the wreckage of the original span is still lying in the river.

Worth a look mostly for the useful footnote: these are the Clarke Foundation's own honours, not the British literary prize for the year's best SF novel. Sir Arthur would probably have enjoyed the confusion, and then corrected everyone in a long letter.

Vienna in 1907 was busy inventing modern design, and here is one of its young artists using the humble postcard to mix medieval grotesques with bright folk colour. They look like they could have been printed last week by a very good risograph studio.

Someone finally checked the sky against the canvas: in mid-June 1889 the moon over Saint-Rémy should have been fat and waning, not the crescent Vincent painted. Astronomy as art history, which is the best kind of pedantry.

Chris Thile and company returning to a Connecticut college stage is the sort of news that justifies the whole favourite-artists list. Storrs is a long way from Penang, but a Punch Brothers date on the calendar is still worth knowing about, if only to imagine the Bach-to-breakdown setlist.

No dinosaurs this time, but the next best thing: a Cretaceous lizard frozen mid-escape in Burmese amber. Behaviour almost never fossilises, which is what makes this tiny tail-drop so satisfying; the trick it shows is one modern geckos still pull on cats.

Mars is usually filed under geologically retired, so it is nice to see the planet's great canyon system still shifting. Worth noticing how far the evidence has to stretch: billions of years after it formed, the 4,000-kilometre scar is apparently not finished.

Proper Malaysian field notes, just down the road from Penang: careful watching of who is actually eating the fruit and who is only picking off insects. Sparrows and Spotted Doves at the mesocarp were new even to the observer, which makes this a nice thing to look out for next time you pass a plantation edge.

Brooker makes the case for building animations to get an intuition for how systems fail, and picks a cracking example: one replica whose storage lies about fsync is enough for Raft to lose acknowledged writes. Anyone who has argued with a disk controller's write cache will nod along.

The RepRap dream of machines that build things, scaled down to the micron. The new head is mostly off-the-shelf fibre and UV LEDs, which is exactly the build-it-in-your-shed spirit; the resulting Benchy is small enough that photographing it is the hard part.

After a summer of nervous headlines about the Davis Square building being put up for sale, the theatre's future looks settled. A century-old single-screen-and-stage palace that also hosts folk shows owning its own roof is about as cheering as Boston real estate news gets.

Some towns get statues of founders; Perstorp got its vinegar bottle, red cap and label included. The best detail is the 1994 unveiling, where a TV chef explained how to squeeze an egg into a bottle using vinegar, which is the most on-brand speech ever given.

The Le Guin Prize goes to books that imagine real alternatives to how we live, taken straight from her 2014 National Book Awards speech, so the winner is always worth a look. This year it heads to New Zealand, with a jury that includes Nicola Griffith and Fonda Lee.

A spider with a spring-loaded silk trap tuned to a single prey species, the notoriously bad-tempered green tree ant. The lovely twist is that the ants may be goaded into setting it off themselves, which is the Roman ballista, reinvented by an arachnid.

Watchhouse on a hometown bill with Hiss Golden Messenger, Tift Merritt and Karly Hartzman reads like a short history of North Carolina's roots scene on one stage. That they were doing it to get out the vote for Roy Cooper's Senate run is a fine use of four-part harmony: Carrboro's finest, putting their voices to work for the ballot box.

Herrerasaurids are about as close to the root of the dinosaur family tree as anyone gets, so even a single bone carries a lot of weight here. The interesting bit is not the predator itself but the ecosystem around it: the plant-eaters and cynodonts shifted, and the early meat-eaters apparently just carried on.

Textbook transit diagrams treat planets as tidy black discs, which is a fine approximation until a telescope is good enough to notice the edges disagree. Webb now is. The puffed-up evening side of this hot gas giant is the sort of detail that turns a dot into weather.

Black Skimmers are the birds that fish by ploughing the water with an oversized lower bill, which makes them a neat living sensor for what small fish are doing near the surface. Twenty tagged birds is a modest sample, but enough to show their commute changing.

Every big-day report wants to boast about the total; this one is happy to admit a small island means a short list, and is better for it. The few birds it does get are good ones, an Egyptian Vulture and Audouin's Gull among them, which is the solo birder's eternal consolation.

Day one was the AI-and-specs day; the back half is where the workshop gets back to its usual business of storage, failures and consensus. Note the session pointedly titled 'Hardware will save us all' and the GPU-database talk that concedes two of its three problems are being fixed by the roadmap and the third is engineering.

New hardware for a 1983 home computer standard, released because someone wanted it to exist, is exactly the spirit this category is for. The Yamaha FM chip at its heart will sound instantly familiar to anyone who heard late-80s Japanese game music.

A Great Ball Contraption module has one job, move balls from input to output, and an infinite number of ways to fail at it in front of a convention crowd. Dressing that job up as a pirate ship adds a whole new set of hazards, and the question mark in the title suggests not all of them were avoided.

Every famous invention has an unfamous inventor somewhere upstream, and Morey has a better claim than most. Notice the range: steamboat, an early internal combustion engine and even a primitive car, all from a man most people have never heard of.

Heritage rules usually save whole buildings; here they saved only the front, which leaves an ornate stage-set of arches and shells bolted onto an ordinary street. Fitting, somehow, for a shop that made funerary monuments.