Bob Siederer
10 August 2026

We generally don’t send out more than one newsletter a week, but occasionally omit something important and timely. So here’s a quick SciSchmooze extra to cover two astronomical happenings this week.

This Wednesday evening and Thursday morning one of the better meteor showers of the year, the Perseids, will be visible. The shower is caused by Earth’s passage through the debris trail of comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle each August. This year, the shower will occur at the same time as a new moon, so the night sky will be darker than usual, meaning more meteors should be visible.

Andrew Fraknoi has provided details and viewing instructions for the Perseids here.

Also, on August 12 a total solar eclipse will be visible over much of Europe. We won’t see anything he…

The SciSchmooze
Lili Galilean
10 August 2026

Greetings, fellow carbon-based computing units!

“The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”
— Leonardo da Vinci

With another San Francisco Marathon officially in the books, thousands of runners are currently nursing sore calves, proudly displaying their finisher medals, and slowly regaining normal metabolic baseline. Winding through 26.2 miles of foggy coastlines, steep city gradients, and an iconic sunrise crossing over the Golden Gate Bridge, the SF Marathon is widely considered one of the most scenic—and biomechanically demanding—urban races in North America.

First run in 1977 with a humble field of fewer than 1,000 entrants, the event has expanded into a global spectacle drawing over 30,000 runners. And …

Dave Almandsmith
3 August 2026

Hello again appreciator of science,
Ahoj znova, milovník vedy,
[Over 300 million people speak a slavic language]

BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY

Let me share what i recently learned about some extremes of human perception. One to two percent of people are ‘super-recognizers’. They easily recognize people years after a brief encounter. [Definitely NOT me.] People with prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing anyone; even their spouse or their own reflection in a mirror.  Also there are people with aphantasia – they cannot bring to mind the appearance of anything. They simply cannot create a ‘mental picture’ of a person, a top hat, a fire extinguisher, a camel, a…

SciSchmooze

Bob Siederer
27 July 2026

Hello again fans of Science!

I’ve just returned from a long road trip. Maybe I’m outside the norm about this, but I enjoy long drives. I always have. I rarely listen to music, or audio books. I enjoy the quiet reflection such time can give.

The scenery doesn’t change much from year to year, but it does change over the course of hundreds miles…from lush, green forests to farmland, then grasslands, then dry desert, from flat lowlands to mountains and everything in between.

One other thing that can change is roadside hotels, both existing ones being remodeled and new ones being added. Both bring the science of design to bear on what should be fairly straightforward…a qui…

Dark matter, gravitational waves, and fifty years of looking outward.

Kishore Hari
July 20, 2026

Greetings science fans!

I was visiting friends in Seattle over the weekend and had the good fortune to get an impromptu tour of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, home to two of the most ambitious experiments to study dark matter.

The first is ADMX, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment. The QCD axion, originally proposed in the late 1970s to solve a problem in particle physics, was quickly identified as a promising dark matter candidate. ADMX searches for axions the way you might search for a radio station: using a strong magnetic field and a cold, precisely …

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Lili Galilean
13 July 2025

Greetings, fellow observers of the physical world!

As we cross the halfway mark of July 2026, the global temperature isn’t the only thing hitting a fever pitch. With the 2026 World Cup barreling through its high-stakes knockout rounds, the high-intensity drama on our screens is matched only by the invisible, brutal engineering tournament happening directly beneath the players’ cleats.

This week, we are pulling our focus out of the clouds to examine two very different kinds of competitive arenas: a physical tournament of highly engineered grass, and Big Tech’s brand-new multi-agent “idea tournaments” designed to automate hard science. Grab a cold drink—it’s time to break down the mechanics of the game.

1. World Cup Turfs: Enginee…

6 July 2026

Greetings, science aficionados,
Salutojn, sciencamantoj,
[Esperanto is spoken today by over 2 million people, usually as a second language.
L.L. Zamenhof published this ‘created language’ in 1887]

Let’s open a fascinating chapter of Public Health at a time we were confronted by an earlier deadly pandemic: Polio

Poliomyelitis – Infantile Paralysis – Polio – has been with us for over 4,000 years, but it did not become a major killer until the advent of modern sanitary practices. This paradox is attributed to the existence of multiple strains of the virus that are (1) mostly harmless, (2) easily contracted in less sanitary community conditions, and (3) confer immunity to a less common but deadly strain.

Lili Galilean
29 June 2026

Greetings, fellow carbon-based computing units!

This week, we are pulling our heads out of the abstract digital clouds and smashing them squarely into a massive pile of wet rocks—exploring how an ancient Roman architectural masterpiece is helping Silicon Valley solve its most pressing modern environmental crisis.

From Ancient Aqueducts to Green Data Centers

When we think about the current artificial intelligence revolution, we tend to picture lines of code, complex neural networks, and racks of high-powered graphics cards. We rarely think about concrete.

Yet, the literal foundation of the digital cloud is incredibly physical. To power the massive compute clusters required for modern AI models, tech giants are building gargantuan data centers at…

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Kishore Hari
22 June 2026

Greetings science fans!

Father’s Day has me thinking about mentorship and the people who don’t just advance their field but spend their lives making sure the next generation can, too.

Bruce Alberts is one of the great biochemists of his generation, a pioneering researcher in DNA replication who went on to serve for 12 years as president of the National Academy of Sciences and to edit Science magazine. But alongside all of that, he insisted that science education was a place scientists needed to get personally involved. He has argued that “science education should be about learning to think and solve problems like a scientist, insisting, for all citizens, that statements be evaluated using evidence and logic the way sci…

Bob Siederer
15 June 2026

Hello again Fans of Science!

Before we get into the news this week, a few housekeeping items:

• Lick Observatory, one of the South Bay’s hidden gems, sustained substantial damage during the winter when winds as high as 114 mph tore much of the roof off of the dome over Christmas, 2025. Recovery work has been ongoing, and the Observatory is happy to announce that a modified summer program schedule is happening. Usually, Lick holds talks and concerts on select weekend nights that include viewing through both the 140+ year old, 36 “ Great Refractor and the Shane Reflector telescope. While the Great Refractor was not damaged, it is out of commission as construction continues on the dome. So instead of the usua…