It’s been a while since WC wallowed in some serious technogeekery. You’ll need your geek on for this post… Galaxies like Andromeda and our own Milky Way spin more rapidly than should be possible. At the observed rotational speeds they exhibit, they should fly apart, centripetal force overcoming the gravity that holds them intact. It’s…
This is a new, sometime feature, where WC will share with readers both an especially silly email and WC’s reaction to it. Here’s the email: I read in a Twitter thread that solar panels drain the sun’s energy. Is that true? Let’s think this through. The sun radiates energy in all directions, not just towards…
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” 1959…
HPAI is Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, specifically HPAI A(H5N1), a virus that is spreading around the world at an astonishing rate. The primary vector for the spread of this strain of HPAI is wild birds, resulting in peak infection rates at the time of spring and fall migration. As bird migration surges, HPAI spreads, More…
The Arctic Ringed Seal is one of five subspecies of the Ringed Seal, a circumpolar sea mammal dependent on sea ice and snow drifts on top of the sea ice. The Arctic Ringed Seal is threatened across its entire range as polar sea ice vanishes. The females pup – give birth and nurse their new…
Myelination is the process by which axons are given a myelin sheath. The myelin sheath functions as an insulator, a bit like insulation on a copper wire, except that the myelin sheath also nourishes the nerve that it surrounds. The myelin sheath allows longer, thinner neurons, more rapid transmission of nerve impulses, tighter packing of…
Tick season is about to start. Ticks in Idaho spread among other diseases, West Nile virus, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, tick-borne relapsing fever and tularemia. Lyme disease gets all the press, but so far the tick species that transmits Lyme disease, Western Blacklegged Tick, is found only in North Idaho. Still who wants a blood-sucking…
The view in this Webb Space Telescope photo is of a fraction of one degree of the night sky, of an area that appears empty to the unaided human eye. It’s not empty; instead, it is packed with hundreds of galaxies, each with millions to billions of stars. Many of those billions of stars have…
In 1963, astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified a strange stellar object. It was a remarkably bright star of the 12th magnitude, yet its red shift implied it was extremely far away. That, in turn, implied the strange object was impossibly bright across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Schmidt called his discovery a “quasar,” a quasi-stellar radio source.…
WC has already noted that Ingenuity, the solar system’s most famous helicopter, has reached the end of her life. On her 72nd and final flight, she suffered some kind of unknown failure and broke one of her helicopter blades on a Martian sand dune. Perseverance, the Mars rover that carried Ingenuity to Mars’ surface and…
As geologic hot spots or mantle plumes go, the Bowie Hot Spot isn’t exactly a gusher. The Hawaii hot spot may have produced Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, the tallest mountains, measured from the base, on Earth. That’s a whole lotta lava. The Bowie Hot Spot has yet to break through sea level.1 The Bowie…
Year Scientist Change 1543 Nicholas Copernicus Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium places the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the solar system 1650 Galileo Galileii The Milky Way was composed of stars like the sun; our sun was not unique 1750 Thomas Wright Nebula first identified as clusters of stars like the Milky Way…
Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known. Attributed to the spouse of the Bishop of Worcester (or Birmingham), likely apocryphal1 Very few scientists have had a greater impact on our understanding of our world than Charles…
Warning to readers: This is a necessarily gruesome post. For a long time, WC has held most firearm-packing citizens in disdain. An appalling percentage of them are “shooters,” vandals and fools who shoot signs, buildings and non-game critters for the sick pleasure of the experience. Those who are not heavily armed vandals don’t make any…
There’s no easy explanation for the Bolaven volcanic field in southeast Laos. Geology understands three things can create volcanism: (1) subduction nearby, forcing one tectonic plate under another; (2) a mantle plume, a “hotspot” like the Yellowstone plume; or (3) extensional faulting, as in the basin and range province in the western U.S., where the…
Geologists generally agree that “cratons” are the older and more stable part of continental plates. Most geologists think cratons have two parts, a shield and a platform. The shield is usually characterized by deep lithospheric roots; the shields in continental tectonic plates are usually much thicker, two to four times as thick, as their cousin…
Since he was just a pup, about 30-45 minutes after wolfing down a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, WC would be asleep on the couch. In the late 1970′s, a physiologist who was WC’s Thanksgiving guest explained it as a reaction to all of the tryptophan in turkey meat. Just before he dropped off to sleep. As…
Lucy is a NASA unmanned spacecraft en route to the trojan moons of Jupiter. Lucy’s orbital path was plotted to take it by two main asteroid belt asteroids along that very long, four year voyage. Lucy passed the first of those two asteroids on November 1, a small object, about half a mile across, called…
Everyone “knows” about antimatter. It powers fictional starships, makes fictional super bombs and is the substance of fictional alternate universes. It’s all fiction. What antimatter does do is annihilate any real matter that it encounters. Antimatter is in most ways the exact opposite of ordinary matter. It’s made of antiparticles instead of ordinary particles. The…
Scientific American, in an article dated October 2, 1869 – that’s not a typo – discussed the arsenic eaters of Styria, which today is a state in Austria. Apparently, there were individuals in Styria who consumed small doses of arsenic trioxide – ratsbane – in the belief that it would protect them from all diseases.…
With any luck, this is the first time “hotrod” and “cratons” have been used in the same sentence, let alone in a title, of an article purportedly about geology. But there is some evidence that in the Neoarchean, a geologic era some 2.7 to 2.5 billion years ago, a portion of modern day Australia was…
In a sense, all birds are dinosaurs, theropods that survived the Cretaceous Event, the dinosaur killer. But some birds are more dinosaur-like than others. For a few species, evolution seems to have stopped altering them, leaving them largely unchanged for more than 65 million years. WC will offer four examples. Hoatzin are leaf-eating, colorfully feathered…
One day the goddess Juno perceived that it suddenly grew dark, and immediately suspected that her husband, Jupiter, had raised a cloud to hide some of his doings that would not bear the light. She brushed away the cloud, and saw her husband, on the banks of a glassy river, with a beautiful heifer standing…
Charles Darwin once wrote to a colleague that “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” But that didn’t stop him from deducing and developing the idea of sexual selection as a mechanism of natural selection and a part of the process of evolution. Darwin probably didn’t imagine…
The James Webb Space Telescope certainly wasn’t primarily designed to photograph Earth’s cousin planets. And it can’t photograph Venus or Mercury at all; both are too bright and too hot. But it’s nailed the rest. Remember these photos are in near-infrared, the wavelengths that Webb uses because IR penetrates dust clouds better than visible light.…
Ratites are flightless birds. While flight is the very definition of a bird, there are Aves that don’t. In the case of Ratites, they have abandoned or evolved away from having “keels,” the ridge on their sternum or breastbone that supports flight muscles. Or never developed a keel at all; see below. WC has encountered…
For a long time, really since the first Mars probes, the Red Planet was thought to be geologically dead. Sure, there were extremely impressive geologic features that showed Mars had been geologically active in the past. It’s hard to argue that point when there’s the volcano Mons Olympus that’s more than 21 kilometers tall (2.5…
Okay, a fruit-eating, nocturnal, cave-dwelling, echo-locating bird whose calls sound like a man being tortured. Nothing to see here; move along. Evolution has some ‘splainin to do. Oilbirds – the species’ hatchlings are heavier and fattier than a full-grown adult, and were rendered for oil on occasion; hence the common name – are distant cousins…
The chemistry of magma – molten rock – is unbelievably complex and only incompletely understood. In the case of the suite of minerals called plagioclases, it’s more accurate to say it is barely understood. It’s cheeky for a guy who slept through Mineralogy to even attempt to describe this,1 but when has that ever stopped…
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at. uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as…
Wickersham's Conscience 
You must be logged in to post a comment.