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…
Citizen science is important. In the face of increasing threats to the environment, federal and state funding is simply inadequate to monitor, let alone resolve, the avalanche of threats and challenges facing officials charged with protecting the environment and the flora and fauna that need and use that environment. One part of those efforts is…
Most readers know about the Yellowstone Mantle Plume, the “hot spot” that has given us the Yellowstone caldera and, not long ago in geologic time, some very scary eruptions. The mantle plume is the source of the heat that makes Yellowstone National Park what it is today. Research on the geologic history of the mantle…
In 2014-2015, when large areas of the North Pacific were warmer than at any time in recorded history, there was a massive die off of Common Murres across the North Pacific region. Some 62,000 dead Common Murres were found, projecting to a total die off of as many as a million birds. Almost all of…
(WC’s family tree doesn’t include even a trace of Irish blood. Besides that, in law school, WC’s apartment was across the street from the biggest, loudest Irish pub in the city. So WC generally takes a pass on all things St. Patrick. You can doubtlessly find abundant Irish content elsewhere on the Web.) Yes, there…
This is an immensely complex area of medicine. WC is not a virologist or an immunologist, although he has read fairly widely in those fields. Additionally, to make this discussion manageable, WC has necessarily simplified but not, WC hopes, over-simplified. WC’s recent post on two Idaho legislators’ effort to block use of all mRNA vaccines…
WC was able to challenge Geology 101 – 103 and so missed the introductory geology courses at the University of Oregon, derisively called “Rocks for Jocks.” “Challenge”? Maybe that’s no longer a thing. But back in the late Pliocene, when WC was an undergraduate, you could meet the course requirements of any entry level science…
About 56 million years ago, the Earth experienced something called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The Earth’s atmosphere warmed by about 6.5° C, and sea surface temperatures by about 5° C. There was serious ocean acidification, which is associated with very high CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It’s too long after the Dinosaur Killer’s cataclysmic…
In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, there was a mighty struggle in the nascent science of geology. Biblical literalism had insisted on a young earth, created less than 10,000 year earlier, and a literal, world-spanning Noachian flood. As the evidence for a much older earth accumulated, and the evidence against a global flood…
A reader asked why some of the gulls currently being featured in recent Return of Bird of the Week series have a red spot on their bill. More recently, Mrs. WC reminded WC of a classic avian behavioral study closely related to the reader’s question. So, what’s up with the red spot? It’s not blood,…
Naomi Orestes is a professor at Harvard, and writes a monthly column for Scientific American. In a recent column, she noted that climatologists have consistently under-predicted the rate of climate change in the Arctic. In fact, it seems to be warming about four times as fast as most models have predicted. Some reports have it…
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…
Motmots, the fourteen species of the family Momotidae, are colorful, long-tailed birds of Central and South America. Like Kingfishers, they nest in long tunnel-like burrows in dirt banks, but they are not closely related to Kingfishers. For such a colorful, charismatic bird, they are remarkably poorly studied. As just one example of the challenges presented…
The oldest complete written sentence has been identified. It’s written in the Canaanite language, about 1,700 years ago. There are earlier writings, but they are simply names or sometimes the owner of the object. This artifact was found at Tel Lachish in Israel, once a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE. The artifact…
WARNING: Still more geeky geology ahead. And, WC acknowledges, some pretty serious oversimplifications of complex stuff. WC has written about seismic topography before, the evolving technology that uses the seismic waves from earthquakes to analyze subsurface geologic features. The technology has even been used on Mars to study xenogeology, albeit in a more simplified form.…
WARNING! Seriously geeky geology ahead. Most folks who were exposed to even a little bit of geology in school understand vaguely the idea of plate tectonics. They get the basic idea that big chunks of the surface of the earth are somehow moving around. But there are lots of non-obvious parts of the science of…
When New England fisherman grossly overfished cod to the edge of extinction, they finally did the sensible thing and completely closed down the cod fishery in the North Atlantic. The complete closure was very hard on the New England fishing industry; fisherman went bankrupt, communities were economically injured and the bitterness lasted a long time.…
The Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) appears to have been an unqualified success. Based on preliminary analysis of the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid that was the target of NASA’s satellite, Dimorphos’ orbit was significantly altered. Before DART, Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos took 11 hours and 55 minutes; post-impact, it’s down to 11 hours and…
This post is for Ron Dudley, retired biology teacher,, astonishingly good bird photographer and, WC is pleased to to report, a good friend of WC’s. Ron is recovering from surgery at present, and this blog post is WC’s way of wishing him a speedy recovery. Most parasites are SLiPs. That is, they are Simple Lifecycle…
In the last month, Typhoon Merton has made an unprecedented, devastating run into the Bering Sea. Hurricane Iona did severe damage to Canada’s Maritime provinces. And Hurricane Ian has battered Florida as one of the worst storms in that state’s long history with hurricanes. It’s the consensus among meteorologists that the remarkable severity of these…
On the long list of things you need to worry about is the problem of PFAS. “PFAS” is an acronym for perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl substances. It’s a class of chemicals composed of long chains of carbon molecules very strongly bonded with fluorine atoms, and they are damned near indestructible. Other chemicals break down by bacterial…
Some humans ain’t human, some people ain’t kind You open up their hearts, and here’s what you’ll find A few frozen pizzas, some ice cubes with hair A broken popsicle, you don’t wanna go there — John Prine, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” Fair and Square, 2005 WC admits to an occasional fascination with some appallingly…
While WC recently answered readers’ questions, in that effort WC held one question out to address is a separate blog post. You’ll see why. Why do you write about geology so often?When WC was in undergraduate school, in the late Pleistocene, he took a minor (sorry) in Geology. One of the classes was on plate…
Warning: Serious biological technogeekery ahead. For much of earth’s history, the only form of life was single-cell, primitive bacteria. Those early primitive cells are called prokaryotes. Basically, they were small sacks of fluid with the contents mixed together, higgedly-piggedly. Sometime about 1.5 billion years ago, a few lucky prokaryotes ingested or otherwise acquired another cell…
In principle, at least, the use of seismic – earthquake – waves to understand the interior of a planet is less complicated than it first seems. You’re probably familiar with bats’ use of echolocation to navigate the night skies: they emit high-pitched squeaks, and then use the reflections, the echoes, to navigate and find prey.…
WC will celebrate this Friday the 13th, a day founded on superstition, by following up on a series of seriously geeky science subjects. Black holes, even galaxy-sized black holes, have magnetic fields. You can give yourself a headache thinking too long about that. Black holes, which are as real as an earthquake, have always felt…
There have been two recent images from the Mars Rover Perseverance and its amazing little helicopter companion, Ingenuity, that reminded WC that for all the faults and challenges of these modern times, we really do live in an age of miracles and wonders. The first was the images of one of Mars’ two tiny moonlets,…
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a…
Readers already know that in 2021 the Republican Party had enthusiastically opposed every governmental effort to limit the casualties from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s just part of what WC believes to be the Republicans’ tendency over the last few years to embrace policies and positions that are contrary to survival. WC will offer a few…
In engineering, a “single point failure” is a term for any step in a multi-step process which, if it fails, craters the whole project. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), from launch to deployment at Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2) involved hundreds of single point failure risks. Hundreds of motors, cables, moving…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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