Featured Links - November 27. 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Swans on the bay

• The most powerful cosmic ray since the Oh-My-God particle puzzles scientists. "Scientists spot a particle of intense energy, but explaining where it came from might require some new physics." The particle had an energy of 240 exa-electron volts. I was curious what its mass would have been so I asked Windows Copilot. It gave me an answer of 4.27 x 10^-16 kg, which is roughly 2.5 x 10^11 protons. I was impressed with the answer and the included explanation. 
• See the photos that made National Geographic’s ‘Pictures of the Year’. The photos are the main reason I read National Geographic. 
• Something Unexpectedly Cool Happens When You Use Banana Peel as an Ingredient. "... a study last year found that if banana peels are blanched, dried, and ground into a flour, they can be turned into baked goods that taste just as nice, if not better than wheat-based products."
• Study examines how massive 2022 eruption changed stratosphere chemistry and dynamics. "When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022 in the South Pacific, it produced a shock wave felt around the world and triggered tsunamis in Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru and the United States. It also changed the chemistry and dynamics of the stratosphere in the year following the eruption, leading to unprecedented losses in the ozone layer of up to 7% over large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the University of Maryland."
• There’s trouble below at Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Why am I not surprised. 
• AI finds formula on how to predict monster waves. "Using 700 years' worth of wave data from more than a billion waves, scientists have used artificial intelligence to find a formula for how to predict the occurrence of these maritime monsters. Long considered myth, freakishly large rogue waves are very real and can split apart ships and even damage oil rigs."
• Aliens Are Out There — But They Probably Don’t Care About Us. "Science and astronomy are more and more pointing to the fact that there is other life out there. Here's why we haven't seen it yet."
• Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes: A Diary of an Influential Life. "Begun to improve his own technique, piano exercises that Glass wrote over decades are the subject this month of a new book, a concert and dances."