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1. A DRO Fret Slotter

   French, Mark (July 2018, American lutherie)

   Want a robot lutherie apprentice? It is here today and it is cheap. But it doesn’t look like something from the Jetsons. It looks like this; a digital readout connected to a lead screw. With a friendly whirr, it will move the saw guide right up to the next fret position for you. But get your own dang coffee. 

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2. How Will Climate Change Affect Pikas’ Favorite Snacks?

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2024.1331857  

   Monk, Emily; Weatherill, Karli; Ray, Chris; Whipple, Ashley; Varner, Johanna (March 2024, Frontiers for Young Minds)

   Many animals are herbivores, which means they get all their nutrients from eating plants. American pikas are cute rabbit relatives that eat plants in the mountains. But alpine winters are harsh, so pikas spend their entire summer gathering and storing plants to eat under the winter snow. Just like people, pikas in Colorado have a favorite food: a plant called alpine avens. This plant species is a special pika snack because it contains natural preservatives called phenolics, which keep the food fresh all winter. We studied how climate change is affecting this important feature of the pika’s favorite meal. Alpine avens contains more phenolics now than it did 30 years ago, so they preserve better in storage. But there is a catch: these preservatives can be hard to digest. Studies like this help us start to understand the many complicated ways that climate change affects herbivores like pikas. 

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3. Probabilistic simulation of tornado-like loading on a low-rise building based on laboratory testing

   Wu, Xinyang; Zuo, Delong (August 2023, 16th International Conference on Wind Engineering)

   Tornadoes can cause severe damage to buildings, but it is difficult to measure tornado loading on structures due to limitation of equipment. To enable investigations of tornado effects on buildings, this paper presents a method that can be used to numerically simulate nonstationary, non-Gaussian tornado-like loading based on laboratory testing. An illustrative application shows that the proposed method can successfully simulate tornado-like loading that is statistically similar to the loading measured in experiments. 

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4. Modal Analysis on MVG Controlled Supersonic Flow at Different Mach Numbers

   https://doi.org/10.3390/pr10081456  

   Yang, Yong; Yan, Yonghua; Chen, Caixia; Wu, Qingquan; Kwembe, Tor A.; Wu, Ryan (August 2022, Processes)

   Modal analysis on micro-vortex generator (MVG)-controlled supersonic flow at different Mach numbers is performed in this paper. The purpose of this investigation is to clarify the different properties of streamwise and ring-like vortical modes, and the effects of different Mach numbers on these modes, to further understand the vortical structures as they travel from MVG down to the shock wave/boundary-layer interaction (SWBLI) region. To this end, a high order and high resolution large eddy simulation (LES) was carried out, which identified the vortical structures behind the MVG and in the shock wave/boundary-layer interaction (SWBLI) region in the supersonic ramp flow with flow speeds of three different Mach numbers 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5. The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) then was adopted to investigate the modes of the fluctuation flow field. It emerged that the streamwise and ring-like vortical modes were disparate in energy distribution, structural order, frequency and amplitude. Furthermore, it showed that as the Mach number increased, the energy of the streamwise modes increased while the opposite was true for ring-like modes; and the streamwise modal structures were altered more significantly than the ring-like modes, and the frequency of each mode scarcely varied. It was also found that the streamwise vortices absorbed energy from the ring-like vortices while they traveled from the MVG down to the SWBLI region, but the dominant frequency of each mode rarely changed during this process. 

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5. Seasons, Shorelines, and Their Effects on the Tropical Circulation and Hydrological Cycle

   https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-23-0076.1  

   McKinney, Matthew; Mitchell, Jonathan (August 2024, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences)

   Abstract This work is a direct continuation of McKinney et al., who attempted to create a planet with Earth-like temperatures and physical properties but with precipitation and circulation patterns that were Titan-like. McKinney et al. attempted to do so by changing only three basic planetary parameters: the ratio of dry land to ocean on the surface, the rotation period, and the volatility of the condensable. Each of these parameters is varied from an Earth-like value to a Titan-like one to analyze the climate transition between these two planetary archetypes. In this work, we expand on McKinney et al. by including a seasonal cycle and increasing the number of diagnostic criteria for determining Titan-like dynamics. The simulations use Earth-like obliquity and an Earth-like solar constant. We find that the presence of a dry land strip extending to at least 55°N/S is most effective at creating Titan-like climatic conditions on an otherwise Earth-like planet, such as high-latitude summer precipitation maxima and a low-humidity equator. In contrast, slow rotation and high atmospheric vapor abundance have minimal climatic impacts despite being characteristic features of Titan. Our experiments show that it is not difficult to produce distinctly Titan-like features in an Earth-like GCM with minimal changes to its fundamental parameters. This suggests that Earth-like planets could have a large range of global climate states throughout their history just through changes in topography. Similarly, Titan may have experienced more Earth-like climate states in periods where its tropics were wetter. 

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