Fresh off a Grammy for Wild and Clear and Blue, the trio put out a record of what they sound like in a room, which is where three-part harmony either holds or doesn't. Aoife O'Donovan walks through the songs and her recent guest turns. A little older than our usual news, included here simply because it's lovely.

Scottish fiddle and cello shouldn't make this much rhythm between them, but Fraser and Haas have been proving otherwise for a quarter of a century. The review singles out Haas's writing, which is worth noticing if you know her mainly as the engine under Fraser's tunes. An August review, here as a bit of decoration.

HPTS is the small, invitation-only workshop where the transaction-processing and storage crowd says what it really thinks, and Murat's trip reports are the next best thing to being there. The disk numbers from Dropbox are the bit to stop on: capacity has outrun bandwidth so far that reading a whole drive now takes about a day and a half.

An argument any kernel maintainer will recognise: the code that everything else depends on deserves the most patience, not the least. Zhang borrows from the slow food movement and ties effort to blast radius, which is a tidy way to say what reviewers have long felt. It is from July, but it has aged into exactly this moment.

A central banker explaining, in plain terms, why the numbers and the national mood have stopped agreeing. Scanlon asks the questions you would want asked and lets him think out loud. The low-hire, low-fire labour market is the phrase to remember.

Corvids keep embarrassing the primates. Two carrion crows named Iggy and Lemmy, which is reason enough to read it, beat monkeys handily on a classic perception task, and their neurons gave the game away within 70 milliseconds. The open question of why bird brains run so fast is the fun part.

A Jordaan side street, a room full of self-playing pianos and a library of punched paper rolls: music stored as holes, which is practically a storage format. Volunteers run it, and the tours are by people who love the machines. Bonus history about who once ran a roll factory in the neighbourhood.

Somebody built a whole alternate-history wargame universe on top of LEGO, gave it away, and grew a community that writes fiction and draws art for it. The designer's point that bricks are the perfect prototyping medium will ring true to anyone who has ever hacked something together. The included squadron instructions are a nice touch.

OSIRIS-REx brought back pieces of Bennu, and now the lab has explained a long-standing puzzle from orbit. It is a good example of sample return earning its keep: you can measure a rock from a spacecraft, but you need it on a bench to see why it behaves the way it does.

Strictly useless and completely delightful: decoding QR codes by hand, error correction and all. It is the same pleasure as reading a hex dump, and you come away understanding what the little squares are actually doing. The human-readable QR variant at the end is a fun twist.

The one conference where the people who write the code that keeps spacecraft alive compare notes, and the talks go up on YouTube afterwards for the rest of us. Registration just opened and the call for abstracts is live, so if a kernel person ever wanted an excuse to talk to the JPL crowd, this is it.

Hell Creek is T. rex country, so it is a nice change to meet a 12 kg neighbour with a weak bite and a sliding jaw that probably preferred fruit. The comparison to a living parrot is the bit that makes it click. Also a reminder that a nearly complete skull can sit in a collection for over a decade before its story gets told.

We tend to tell bird evolution as a straight line towards the sky, and this one walks right off that script. Barely past Archaeopteryx on the family tree, it already had stubby arms and runner's legs, plus a raptor-style sickle claw for good measure. Bird science with a dinosaur chaser.

Plenty of people will tell you the economy feels weird; Scanlon actually draws the wiring diagram. The useful idea here is how three separate stories, energy prices, the data-centre building spree and government borrowing, push on each other. Calm, numerate and free to read.

An Orkney fiddler, a grim Scottish ballad and a Boston-heavy band of players, which makes it a neat bridge between two of this feed's favourite places. Listen for how the strings carry the story while the voices stay plain. She animated the video herself, too.

A builder took LEGO's Monet set and reworked it into a moody night-time palette, then wrote up which part swaps worked and which colours turned out to be liars next to their neighbours. It is a good look at colour theory done in plastic, with a comment from the set's designer about how many bridge colours they tried.

Textbooks insist there are no green stars, and for good physical reasons. This one cheats: it swallowed pieces of its old planetary system, and the sodium they left behind soaks up orange light. The survey also found pink and yellow white dwarfs nearby, so the night sky is a little more colourful than advertised.

Two decades of LTTng, and its maintainer still cannot upstream it piece by piece because the kernel will not export symbols with no in-tree user. Jake Edge's write-up is a fair, detailed look at a real engineering knot rather than a flame war. Anyone who has carried an out-of-tree module will nod along.

A buried crater off the English coast that geologists voted against in 2009 turns out to be the real thing after all. The clinching evidence came from shocked quartz in old oil-well rock cuttings, which is a lovely example of industrial leftovers settling a scientific argument. Close enough to the Dutch coast to count as neighbourhood news, give or take 45 million years.

Two of this feed's favourite things in one small build: a speeder bike wearing a tyrannosaur as a body kit. It is compact enough to actually build this weekend, and the write-up explains the pipe-frame trick underneath. The final jaw detail left out of the instructions is the kind of nerdy footnote worth reading for.

Forensic palaeontology at its finest: researchers measured serration spacing in bite marks, corrected for the angle of the bite, and named a likely suspect. The size gap makes the case, since a turkey-sized raptor was not taking down a half-tonne tyrannosaur, but it would happily clean up after one.

Not every dinosaur find is a skeleton; sometimes it is one 37 mm bone that moves a timeline by tens of millions of years. Worth noticing how much careful phylogenetic work can hang on a single centrum, and how honest the authors are about not naming it.

Opportunity's distance record stood as a monument to plucky persistence; Perseverance matched it in about a third of the time. The interesting part is why: the rover drove itself with autonomous navigation for over 90 percent of the trip. A nice milestone for onboard software as much as wheels.

Ken Shirriff is back at the die photos, this time walking through the 8087's add and subtract microcode line by line. Systems people will enjoy the two-pass normalisation scheme and the candid description of the special-case handling as spaghetti. It is a reminder that IEEE floating point was hard-won silicon before it was a standard.

Pure late-90s energy: no unlocked bootloader, so a Symbian app loads a kernel, switches off the MMU and jumps. The display works by replaying messages sniffed from Nokia's own driver. The open puzzle, a mystery reset a few minutes after boot that may be the baseband watching over things, is the kind of bug kernel people lose weekends to.

A properly hopeful bird story from the neighbourhood: every rediscovery here is from the Philippines, Indonesian Papua or Papua New Guinea. Each came from patient local birders and guides with a camera rather than a big expedition, which a solo birder may find encouraging.

A cosy detective story: one of the earliest recorded cases of space weather affecting technology turned out to be dated before the railway in question existed. Physicists checked timetables and magnetometer records like historians, and the case closes neatly.

Archaeology with a wagging tail. The clever detail is that hairless dogs lack certain teeth because of the same gene, so even bare bones can reveal the breed. The diet results suggest these pups were fed more like children than like the other dogs.

Proof that the best fieldwork sometimes happens in a storeroom. A scrap of skull the museum bought in 1924 turns out to be the first megaraptoran ever found in Europe, which redraws the map for a whole family of big-clawed hunters. Bonus points for a name that translates as unconquered female warrior.

Amateur astronomers pointed a telescope at a well-photographed patch of sky for about a hundred hours and found things nobody had catalogued. Fitting timing for late October. Look for the faint blue wisps; those are the new arrivals.

Every kernel hacker's archaeology dream: someone cleans out a room and finds a nine-track reel labelled with what may be the only surviving copy of Fourth Edition UNIX, the first one mostly rewritten in C. The story is worth it for the reminder of how much of our history lives on fragile media in forgotten cupboards.

A local bird with a solid-ivory battering ram on its face and a call that speeds up into maniacal laughter audible kilometres away. The section on males jousting in mid-air is the highlight. Also worth noticing the Malay folk name, which hints at what people thought that laugh sounded like.

A short, affectionate history of the Cambridge room where the folk revival got a lot of its early practice. Dylan sneaking in between sets and old blues masters being brought north are the famous bits; the more charming one is how a gift shop slowly turned back into a stage.

Before anyone had a stored program, people were summing sine waves with pulleys and a wire to print a year of tides in under half an hour. It is a lovely piece of special-purpose hardware, and the American one, nicknamed Old Brass Brains, stayed in service into the 1960s.