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…
It isn’t very often WC writes an obituary for a star, especially a red supergiant star. In fact, this is the very first time. Because it is the first time astronomers have watched the final days of a red supergiant star and observed as it exploded into a Type II Supernova. The star in question…
Okay, WC admits that in the giant scheme of things to be depressed about, the pending lumping together of bird species hardly makes it on the radar of even dedicated birders. But WC laments the discovery of the genetic basis for variation among the three Redpoll species, and the news that the genetic variation among…
Before we get to today’s blog post, here’s a reminder to vote for the Wickersham’s Conscience 2021 Hypocrite of the Year. In 1969, Dr. Ray Sheldon, in the course of circumnavigating North and South America, sampled the water columns across a vast stretch of the Earth’s oceans. What he discovered was that across all of…
The IRIS Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program has some very spiffy visualization of earthquake activity that captures the movement of the surface of the earth in the course of an earthquake. Check out this display of ground movement from the Honshu earthquake: Here’s the more recent deep earthquake in Peru: WC understands many readers…
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…
Beringia is a term used for the area where the vanished Ice Age land bridge existed, connecting Asia and North America, now drowned under the Bering Sea. It’s also applied to the region’s shores and islands today. The four (possibly five) subspecies of Rock Sandpiper all breed in Beringia. One such subspecies, ptilocnemis, breeds on…
There is increasing evidence that solar superflares are more common and much more severe than we thought. Superflares are events triggered when our sun produces an immense flare of particles and radiation, orders of magnitude greater than normal. Superflares matter because when that energy strikes the Earth’s magnetosphere, it can wreak pure havoc on our…
Ingenuity was an afterthought, at most an experiment approved by doubtful NASA brass, a proof of concept by a few smart NASA engineers. It’s become the little helicopter that could. An unqualified success that has exceeded even the most optimistic hopes of its designers by orders of magnitude. Ingenuity, of course, was the specially-designed helicopter…
Jamie Lauren Keiles recently has a long feature story in the New York Times on his love of motorcycles and his first trip to Sturgis, South Dakota for the gigantic motorcycle rally there. That story and a recent conversation with a friend brought to mind an older blog post which explains, far better than Mr.…
July has been a hot, smokey haze, and WC isn’t jut talking about the Idaho weather and air quality. But whatever, it’s behind us now, and it’s time for WC’s usual end of the month look back at stuff WC did write about but needs follow up on, didn’t write about but maybe should have,…
We’ve lost most of the folks in this poster. WC kept it because it included his friend Ken Philip. But it’s also served as a kind of snapshot of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ astonishing depth of scientific talent in the 1980s. The most recent loss doesn’t appear on this poster but could: Neal Brown,…
WC understands that most folks refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 don’t have rational reasons.1 But on the chance that facts can overcome irrational behavior and unreasoning fear, WC wants to point readers to the data. WC shares with Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen the faint hope that simple numbers can move people to get…
WC has written about the Dunning-Kruger Effect several times before. The thesis is simple: If you are dumb enough, you don’t know how dumb you are. The implications are not simple, and if you live in a democracy, the implications are pretty concerning. Benjamin Lyons et al. have taken the implications one step further and…
DESI is the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. It’s the most sophisticated attempt yet to understand Dark Energy, the label given to the mysterious and very poorly understood force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. At the risk of oversimplifying, DESI is the world’s most sophisticated spectroscope attached to the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at…
WC thinks it might be instructive to compare two science/social experiments that are happening in American society as you read this. Sometimes such a comparison can be insightful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been administered to about seven million Americans. That’s the single-dose, anti-COVID vaccine approved by the Food & Drug Administration for emergency…
(WC recognizes the mass media have picked up on the three astrophysics papers that are behind this story. But the mass media have gotten it stupidly, hopelessly wrong. WC makes an effort to clarify. Doubtless, real astrophysicists will sneer at this effort, but at least it distinguishes between the elliptical galaxy M87 and the black…
WC has posted a lot of political posts lately. While discussion of those issues is important, it can also bring even more stress to readers’ already stress-filled days. So, subject to the Magpie Principle, WC will endeavor to focus a little more on nature, birds and nature photography the next few weeks, to “depressurize” from…
WC’s house was graced with visit by an adult male Anna’s Hummingbird on February 15. A lovely visitor in all that snow and rain. Which helps inspire this post. Anna’s Hummingbird has experienced an impressive range expansion over the last century. The species once nested only along the Pacific slope of northern Baja California and…
January probably set some kind of record for sheer volume of news. It was exhausting: the pandemic, a seditious insurrection in the U.S., a new president. WC is going to ignore all that in this month’s recaps and focus on stuff that might have gotten lost in the sheer volume. As always, no journalism was…
Drop a large vase on a stone floor. It shatters, of course, pieces go everywhere. Now cover the fragments with 5,000 feet of layered sand, basalt, mud and gravel. Let it sit for 20 million years. Allow tectonic forces to then fault the mile-thick pile, shifting some it vertically and some of it horizontally. Allow…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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