Quite a few articles for this month and a day earlier too! I just wanted to get this done before getting back to writing about movies.

• Unless you live under a rock, you’d be aware that the biggest science news this month has been the landing of Philae on a comet 500 million kilometers away from Earth as part of the Rosetta mission. There are many, many articles on this, so this one from The Guardian is just a suggestion. I strongly recommend watching one of the many animations made that describe the incredible 10-year journey. Unfortunately the lander ran of power shortly afterwards due to poor positioning. Hopefully it will wake up again when the comet moves closer to the Sun.
• This next article is a more challenging read. Appearing in Quanta Magazine, it discusses the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinite number of universes for which the constants are set at different values. This is meant to answer the anthropic question of why is it that the constants in our own universe seem uniquely tuned in such a way that would support our existence in it. I’m doubtful about the scientific value of this line of thought but I can’t deny that it makes for fascinating reading.
• On a more practical note, this article from IEEE Spectrum, discusses a plan to install what are in effect powerful servers in privately owned buildings to serve as heating systems. The individual pays for the hardware but the cloud computing firm pays for data connection and maintenance costs. It’s a neat idea but as the comments point out, the homeowner has no control over the server’s computing load and therefore no control over how much heat it generates which makes it unreliable as a heating system.
• Next we talk about gravity anomalies, the real kind caused by unusual geological formations, not the fake kind caused by retarded future humans. This article from The Economist covers how pigeons can sense the Earth’s gravitational field and use it to help them navigate even when they are in unfamiliar locations. The experiment used a massive crater which causes unusual variations in gravity. Pigeons were released both inside the crater, and outside of it where there were no gravity anomalies. The pigeons outside all found their way home quickly. The pigeons who started from inside the crater tended to get lost.
• Finally just because GamerGate is still ongoing even though activity has died down by quite a bit, here is an article from The Telegraph discussing how girls in the 12-13 year old age group seem to outperform their male peers in using a simplified programming language for making video games. Granted, it’s a study with a very limited scope but it at least suggests that there is no biological reason why women cannot be at least as proficient as men in programming, traditionally a male dominated profession. Just check out the comments section if you don’t believe that there is a gender problem in the technology sector. Lewis’ Law is in full effect here.