China 2016, Days 6 and 7

The weather in Chengdu has been very unforgiving lately, with highs topping 35 Celsius and lows no lower than 25 Celsius. We decided to head for cooler weather in Yunnan Province, south of Sichuan Province. We spent most of Day 6 indoors, before heading to Chengdu Airport for a flight to Lijiang, Yunnan. The flight was very short, but also …

Support scientific research from the comfort of your own home

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a very cool citizen science project called Old Weather. This project was a massively crowdsourced effort to analyze historical weather patterns, based on observations recorded in ships’ logs. At any given time, hundreds of volunteers were logged on to the website, transcribing scans of these logs and noting data such as date, location, …