WC’s sixth grade teacher, the late Jerry Norum, had the class perform an experiment after a classmate, Jeannette, said the classroom was too cold. He placed three plastic trays of water in the front of the class. One had hot water, almost too hot to put your hand in, but not hot enough to scald.…
Does it seem to you that this White-faced Ibis is smiling? It isn’t, of course. At the physical level a semi-rigid bill, four times the length of your head, doesn’t lend itself to the human rictus we call a smile. And that tiny head doesn’t have a lot of room for much intellect, let alone…
Most readers will realize that you can’t photograph a black hole. Photographs involve capturing light from an object. By definition, by general relativity, a black hole doesn’t radiate any light that coiuld be photographed. The photons – the light – can’t emerge from the powerful gravitational pull of the black hole. But a black hole…
Most of Oregon is igneous rock. Pretty recent igneous rock, as geologists measure time. It’s almost embarrassing. While some of it is pretty well understood, parts of all that volcanism are unexplained. The stratovolcanoes of the High Cascades? Subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate and Pacific Plate. The lava that flowed into the Pacific…
This nifty animated GIF shows movement of the magnetic north pole, the bigger green dot, from 1965 to present. You’ll notice two things immediately: (1) it has moved a long ways over that interval, and (2) the rate of movement has accelerated in the most recent time. A recent survey by a Canadian–French international collaboration…
Archaeologist Robert A. DePalma, working in Southcentral North Dakota, has found the best evidence yet that the dinosaur killer, the huge meteor that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, leaving the Chicxulub crater, did indeed kill the dinosaurs. He has found, entombed in the rocks of the Hell Creek Formation, the archaeological equivalent of a smoking gun.…
The reporting on the spread of the invasive Asian Long-horned Tick, verges on the hysterical. “Vicious species of tick.” “Bloodthirsty hordes.” “Ravenous swarms.” Sounds like a lousy (sorry) Grade-B horror flick. But there are some scary aspects to this recently invasive species. First, unlike native North American ticks, this species can reproduce parthenogenetically; it can…
