More than 20,000 radio hams are expected at the Dayton Hamvention next week, the largest Amateur Radio conference in the Western Hemisphere and the biggest convetnion Dayton. I'll be there.

While people are worrying about how to plant vegetable gardens for self-sufficiency, why not a Dovecote? The self-sufficient country estate had one to raise hundreds of pigeons for eggs and squab dinner. They ate the young ones - full sized, not yet able to fly, about 1.5 months old.

Reuters is reporting that one person died and several others were taken to hospital after a mystery illness hit passengers on a Canadian long-distance train.

• First response planners say major disasters and communications tops their list of concerns.
• Seven new ham radio cubesats are in space.
• BPL appears dead in Dallas Texas.
• Scouts get ready for Hamvention 2008.

Listen to the audio or read the news below.

ARRL reports that Current has sold its Dallas, Texas BPL system to the hosting power company for $90 Million. The power company claims it will only use the system to read meters and detect outages. The system had already been configured to not use Amateur Radio frequencies, and was silent when not in use. It was not a source of interference to hams, although it might have been so to other radio listeners. I guess that BPL can't distribute broadband with sufficient speed, to enough users at once, to be economical. In their article, ARRL digs the Bush administration for identifying BPL as a "third wire" to bring network services to consumers.

Will this high atmosphere ash/dust enhance or prevent further global warming?

Unlike their research activities, scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Catalysis in Rostock have successfully found a CO₂ neutral way to extract hydrogen from formic acid at room temperature for direct use in existing fuel cell technology.

A Florida aeronautics professor has invented a disc shaped flyer that uses a "plasma actuator" for maneuvering. It still needs to be helped with a little helium though.

Just plain weird

"In fact, the platypus sex chromosome is derived not from other mammal sex chromosomes but from bird sex chromosomes."

In somewhat of a follow up to Small Chips for Big Computers, climate scientists are calling for the G8 to band together and fund a couple hundred million dollar 'Manhattan Project' to provide the computing power necessary for them to produce more accurate models that can incorporate things like "Atlantic hurricanes and European droughts to El Niño's and the ice ages" which they are unable to do with current technology.

A quick update, recently on the wires about bees:

AP offers

A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.

Last year's survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.

As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

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User Beryllium Sphere® pointed out this literature study of claims that serif type is more legible than sans-serif. The conclusion seems to be that it's a matter of personal preference and that there is in general no agreed-upon scientific structure for defining legibility of text.

Unlike the sand of Earth, which comes from rock decomposition and erosion, researchers think that the "sand" On Saturn's moon Titan falls from the atmosphere as tiny hydrocarbon particles, where it fuses together at the surface into small pieces just large enough to form good sand for dune making.