This is a slightly different interpretive poster for the Colorado Plateau, which includes better discussion of the rock layers that compose the place. Please click on the image for a larger view. You should be able to read even the finest print. Use your browser’s Back button to return here. WC’s trip hastily visited only…
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…
In the hierarchy of crises facing America: the pandemic, a criminal, petulant president and mistreatment of a subset of our citizens are all second tier problems. Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat, jeopardizing our future on this planet. WC is sure you don’t want or need another crisis, but this is one that should…
A bird with a 5.0-6.5 meter wingspan? How can WC not want to see it through his binoculars? WC was lucky enough to take a trip to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. On that trip, WC was even luckier to see a Wandering Albatross, the largest flying bird by wingspan alive on the planet today.…
There’s an ironic saying: “Fusion is the power of the future… and always will be…” Fusion, the energy cycle that powers our sun, seems like a perfect source of electric power: more energy than nuclear fission, no dangerous radioactive byproducts, fueled by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. One gram of hydrogen is…
Sigmund Freud’s ideas about human psychological and sexual development are pretty much discredited now. But if they weren’t, and if you wanted a litmus test for whether someone has moved beyond Freud’s phallic stage, you’d send them to Kodachrome Basin and see how they reacted. The attraction of Kodachrome Basin and Utah’s state park are…
Much of the beauty and spectacle of the rock formations of the American Southwest is a product of the ubiquitous Navajo Sandstone. In a layer ranging from a thousand to more than two thousand feet thick, and displaying a whole palette of colors, it’s the secret sauce for places like Zion National Park, the Vermillion…
No, not the Rolling Stones’ song about depression. This blog post is about wind turbines. And about science. And about simple solutions. As WC has argued before, there are no environmentally pure ways of generating electricity. Every source available to current technology carries an environmental price: nuclear power’s radioactive waste and high risk; coal’s poisonous…
Almost twenty percent of human-generated methane – 105 million metric tons per year – come from leakage in fossil fuel production, distribution and use. It’s the largest single source of human-made methane discharged into the atmosphere. Methane – CH4, natural gas – is a powerful greenhouse gas, some 20 to 80 times more powerful than…
It’s embarrassing, but astronomers cannot find 90% of the apparent mass in the Universe. It’s awkward. Astronomers call it “dark matter” since it apparently neither radiates light or reflects light. It seems to be invisible. As you might imagine, there are lots of theories as to what that dark matter might be. One theory was…
WC had a question from a reader, noting that WC writes about plate tectonics “all the time” but has never explained what makes the various plates move. Oddly enough, plate tectonics as a geological theory was well developed before the mechanism that causes the movement was understood. If the evidence for plate tectonics was not…
WC went out comet chasing last Friday night. To escape the light pollution in the Boise metropolitan region, WC and Mrs. WC headed out onto the Snake River Plain, at the westerly end of the Morley Nelson Birds of Prey area, along Swan Falls Road. We found a bumpy, dusty side road, and settled in…
Wickersham’s Conscience reader AB passed along a link to an article that proposes using Wandering Albatrosses as spies to sleuth out illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean. Can we think about this, please? Some background. The Wandering Albatross is a gravely threatened species. They are also one of the largest flying creatures on the planet:…
Terry Pratchett’s fictional tyrant of the city of Ankh-Morpork, Havelock Veterinari, was asked how to control the City’s burgeoning rat problem. The City had a bounty on rat tails, and for a while it seemed to be helping. The number of rats declined, and so did requests for bounties. But then the rat population seemed…
The United States has no monopoly on stupid. There have been dozens of cell phone tower arson events in the UK and mainland Europe. Why are Europeans burning cell phone towers? Because the arsonists think the cell phone towers are spreading COVID-19. So the nut jobs are burning cell phone towers to prevent the spread of…
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was tried by the inquisition, charged with suspicion of heresy. He was forced to recant his theory that the Earth orbited the Sun. Catholic Church dogma said the Sun orbited the Earth. Legend has it that after he recanted, while still in the presence of the Inquisitor, he muttered, “E pur si muove“ (“And yet…
A lot of sedimentary rocks are composed of other sedimentary rocks. But no rock is more obviously composed of other rocks than conglomerate.1 Geology’s technical language is both an annoyance and sometimes lovely. The language can be a barrier to understanding. WC’s geology text described conglomerate as A coarse-grained clastic sedimentary rock that is composed…
It’s Remdesivir. It’s not a magic bullet. It doesn’t cure COVID-19. It’s certainly not a prophylactic for COVID-19 (although we can expect President Trump to claim it is). What it does do is reduce the amount of time for recovery. By about 30%, based on a limited clinical trial. Remdesivir was developed as a treatment…
Growing up in Fairbanks, WC’s friend Donnie Ensinger had the annoying habit of listening to you attentively, then scrunching up his face and saying, “Nawww” in a tone that conveyed both skepticism and smart-ass.1 It could be infuriating, but it could also be pretty funny. Memes didn’t exist at the time, but if they had,…
WC encountered a car with this bumpersticker on Hayes Street in Boise, recently. WC suspects that three-quarters of Americans won’t get it. Physics isn’t a required course in high school and red shift/blue shift is pretty esoteric, even for physics. It doesn’t help you understand football, baseball, hockey or even soccer. Unless you know that…
Sometimes the way to demonstrate the utter insanity of the American health care system is to study a specific case. The late Leon Lederman provides an interesting and instructive example. Professor Lederman was one of the great physicists of the 20th Century. From the early 1950s to the first years of the 21st century, Prof.…
In WC’s Geomorphology class, on the first day, the professor (whose name WC has forgotten) told us, “If you only take one thing away for this course, it should be this: Erosion always wins.” If you need proof of that claim, you should visit Kauai, the oldest of the principle islands of the Hawai’ian Islands.…
WC, to the dismay of a number of his undergraduate classmates, has never been especially interested in either anthropology or archaeology. Partly it’s because WC believes the history of humankind on the planet can be tracked by extinction events in the natural world. WC finds history depressing enough without studying prehistory. Partly it’s just that…
American Samoa has suffered 63 deaths – and counting – with 58 of them children age four or under. 90% of the 3,728 cases are in children. 20 more children are hospitalized in critical condition. You own these deaths, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Your delusional thinking and well-known name greatly contributed to low vaccination rates…
It’s the most remote object in the solar system, well in to the Oort Cloud, yet photographed by satellite. It’s in the Kuiper Belt, a doughnut-shaped cloud of lumps of ice and rock left over from the creation of the solar system, that extends from approximately the orbit of Neptune out another 20 astronomical units…
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…
It’s been a while since WC wallowed in geeky sub-atomic goodness. So let’s wade into some particle physics for a change. As WC has noted before, physics can’t seem to find 95% of the universe. That’s embarrassing. Visible matter seems to constitute only about 5% of the universe. Dark matter – a placeholder name, not…
The search for a room temperature superconducter continues. And physicists have found one that works at 44° F. Yes, really. Lanthanum Hydride, LaH10 superconducts at beer temperatures. There’s a catch, of course, as the asterisk in the title suggests. LaH10 is a superconducter at 44° F – actually, it only exists – if it’s at about…
Lithium is dangerous stuff. The nucleus of lithium, consisting of three protons and three or four neutrons, verges on instability; it has the lowest binding energies holding the nucleus together of all the stable elements. That’s why lithium deuteride is the fusion fuel in some thermonuclear bombs. Lithium salts are used to treat bipolat disorder.…
It seems increasingly likely that humanity’s inaction in the face of the existential threat of anthropogenic climate change means we are going to have more than than the 2° Celsius of global temperature increase that climatologists regarded as manageable. So, without in any way conceding that humanity’s CO2 emissions must be reduced, it’s time to…
