The quiet Sun is the bit solar physicists used to treat as wallpaper between the exciting active regions. Lift a telescope above most of the atmosphere on a balloon and the wallpaper turns out to be full of wiring. Worth noticing is the claim that surface twisting shapes the threads, which is the sort of cause-and-effect that coronal heating models have been short on.

A short one, but the rule here is that anything from the flight software crowd gets through. The call for abstracts went out earlier; now you can actually sign up to sit in the room where people swap war stories about patching code a hundred million kilometres away.

Keeping a lone positron alive is a bit like keeping a soap bubble in a room full of pins, so the endurance alone is impressive. The real point is precision: an isolated antiparticle you can watch for weeks is how you compare matter and antimatter closely enough to catch them disagreeing, if they ever do.

A proper field note from Ipoh, just down the road in birding terms, about a bird most people drive past without a second look. The interesting bit is the asynchrony: in one flock some birds are in full ginger breeding dress while others have barely started, and the species is now breeding further south in Perak than the books used to say.

Everyone who has watched Jepsen take apart a database has wondered whether it's luck. This Morning Paper write-up of Majumdar and Niksic's POPL 2018 paper says no: for the bugs that need only a few partitions in the right order, random exploration covers them with high probability in a modest number of tests. A nice bit of theory explaining something practitioners already trusted.

Doom gets the credit for squeezing miracles out of old hardware, but this author argues the city builders did something harder: simulate an economy, not just draw walls. A good read on the tricks game programmers used when every cycle was spoken for.

A war fought mostly over lumber, with militia, surveyors and a great deal of indignation, and settled by diplomats before it really got going. It explains why the top of Maine looks the way it does on a map, and why the largest county east of the Mississippi is up there at all.

Before Conan Doyle's dinosaurs became the template, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History was writing his own lost-world fiction with fresh science folded in. The essay is honest that the book is a slog, which is part of the fun: you get the history of the genre without having to finish the novel yourself.

A 1677 book of alchemy with no text at all, just engraved plates, which makes it the IKEA manual of the Philosopher's Stone. This copy belonged to Carl Jung, who naturally read a great deal into it. Look for the couple working side by side at the furnace: the 'humid way' was apparently a two-person job.

A sleepy amateur race in County Meath, a single phone line, and one man who had thought very carefully about both. Damn Interesting tells it at length and with obvious relish; it's one of those Irish stories that gets better every time it's told in a pub, and this is the long version.

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.