PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Will o the wisps explained

    We may finally have a full explanation into how will ‘o wisps work. We knew methane and other swamp gasses were involved, but how did they ignite?

    As with the static electricity produced by stroking hair, fur, or carpet in the right conditions, the microlightning results from a buildup of opposing charges until the field created is strong enough to make them leap a gap.

    High-speed imaging reveals the source of the charge as the surface of tiny bubbles of methane, which become either positively or negatively charged as they move through water, split, and combine. The charge concentration appears to survive the bubbles’ escape to the air. When the spark jumps the gap between a neighboring positive and negatively charged bubble, it leads to non-thermal oxidation, releasing energy from the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen, but mostly as blue-violet light rather than heat.

  • AI for science research

    Top AI technologists are spurning major offers to start an AI focused company specializing in advancing science

    Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move.

    As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

    “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”

  • Playing SimCity 2000 as adult

    SimCity 2000 was a fun sandbox game as a kid, and looking back, building an airport first wasn’t a good choice. Ars Technia played the game with an adult lens.

    Can I live my values by sparing some money in a tight budget for homeless shelters or anti-smoking initiatives? Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood? Do I really want to spend more money and land space on solar power plants, or is a little pollution from the cheaper coal plant worth the trade-off?

    While these kinds of decisions plague me now in a way they never did as a child, the trade-offs I don’t have to make in SimCity 2000 also stand out. If I want to build a train line in SimCity 2000, I can literally pause time and just drag the tracks across the entirety of downtown. Here in the real world of suburban DC, I’ve watched as construction of the Purple Line light rail has dragged on outside my window for years, snarling traffic and running up costs in the process.

  • Closed captions are all the rage

    For various reasons is it any surprise closed captioning keeps growing in popularity?

    The poll suggests many young adults use subtitles because they are watching in noisy environments, whereas older adults choose them to better hear or understand what is being said.

    That makes sense to David Barber, a sound editor and mixer and president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors.

    “Part of it is cultural,” Barber says. “What the younger kids are doing is, a lot of them will multitask. They’ll listen to music while they’re watching a show. So they’re catching bits and pieces of this, bits and pieces of that. I think they probably are half-listening and half-watching. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

  • A school in Kentucky banned phones. And the kids started talking to each other

    A school in Kentucky banned phones. Unsurprisingly, they interacted more, and surprisingly, library circulation went up.

    “There is definitely a different feeling,” Neuss said. “It’s hard to quantify something like that. But it’s noticeable when you talk with students, walk through the hallways and go into classes.”

    What is easier to quantify is the immediate impact of the ban on students’ use of the school library. In the first month of school this year, students took out 67 percent more books than the same month last year, with 533 books checked out in August 2024 and 891 books checked out in August 2025. That’s for a student body of 2,189.

  • A conservative concentration of media power

    Margaret Sullivan with an astute and sobering take on the consolidation of conservative media power:

    In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five.

    For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center.

    But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information?

    As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the ultra-rich.

    As President Trump moved this week to clear the path to sell the platform’s US assets to a group of American investors, the metastasizing reality of media-by-oligarchy threatened to become even more extreme.

  • Interesting Bars

    Interesting Bars, A cool website where you can search for interesting bars in a city. I suppose it’s still being populated as mid-sized cities aren’t represented.

  • The story behind the blinking guy meme

    A random moment made Drew Scanlon famous, and uses the fame to raise money for multiple sclerosis.

    An avid cyclist who enjoys rides through Marin, he’s participated in a charity bike ride for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for 10 years. At this point, he’s raised more than $300,000 for research into the disease, which disrupts the central nervous system and can result in symptoms ranging from memory difficulties to chronic pain. 

    “I’m continually floored by how many people still react so generously to it,” he said of the meme, citing a $5,000 donation this year thanks to promotion through his social media channels (he has 81,500 followers on X, and the domain blinkingguy.com redirects to his donation page).

  • Drones tracking shoplifters

    Is sending a drone after a shoplifter really the best thing?

    “Instead of a 911 call [that triggers the drone], it’s an alarm call,” says Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now directs Flock’s drone program. “It’s still the same type of response.”

    Kauffman walked through how the drone program might work in the case of retail theft: If the security team at a store like Home Depot, for example, saw shoplifters leave the store, then the drone, equipped with cameras, could be activated from its docking station on the roof.

    “The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button,” he says, “and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car.” 

    The video feed of that drone might go to the company’s security team, but it could also be automatically transmitted directly to police departments.

  • Sushi’s rise in the USA

    Sushi’s popularity continues to grow.

    Once a small niche of the seafood business, sushi is now the industry’s growth leader.

    Most of that growth is not happening in $300-per-head omakase restaurants (though those are proliferating). It is happening in gas stations and big-box stores, bowling alleys and stadiums, U.S. Army commissaries and amusement parks.

    Retail sushi, also called “deli sushi” because of its usual location in supermarkets, is one of the fastest-growing segments in supermarkets overall, according to Circana, a market research firm. In 2024, retail sushi was a $2.8 billion business, up 7 percent from 2023