The SciSchmooze

Lili Galillean
14 September 2026

Greetings, fellow carbon-based stargazers!

In introductory astronomy, we are taught a tidy, comforting binary about the debris circling our Sun:

• Asteroids are dry, rocky, metallic rubble forged in the warm inner solar system inside the “frost line.”
• Comets are dirty snowballs—fragile agglomerations of volatile water ice, frozen gases, and dust preserved in the deep freeze of the outer Solar System.

It’s an elegant classification scheme. It is also an oversimplification that modern planetary science is actively dismantling.

When you look closely at the architecture of our Solar System, the line separating asteroid from comet isn’t a hard boundary; it is an active spectrum of volatile depletion, thermal bak…

WHY NOT?

Dave Almandsmith
7 September 2026

Hello again, fans of science,

Kia ora anō, e ngā kaiwhaiwhai pūtaiao,
[About 210,000 New Zealanders can speak Maori.]

GOOD NEWS

For the first time in 75 years, the population of the flightless New Zealand Kakapo (Maori: parrot of the night) is up to 325 birds thanks to huge conservation efforts and fruiting rimu trees. These 4 kg birds only mate during years when rimu berries are abundant.

The U.S. is currently experiencing “Very Low” incidences of acute respiratory illnesses.

21 minute video of Good News: Africa electrification, Amazon rain forest preservation,…

Hello again, fans of science,

फेरि नमस्कार, विज्ञानका प्रशंसकहरू,
[In Nepal, 90% of the population speak Nepali as a first or second language. It is also spoken by many in India and Bhutan.]

SPACE

A hand-me-down went to space Sunday morning.  The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope with a decades-old mirror donated by The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is on its way to Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2.  The mirror is basically the same as the one in the Hubble Space Telescope, which also came from the NRO.  Those two mirrors were intended to be used in spy satellites developed by Boeing (with insane cost overruns, of course). Fittingly, Ms. Roman initiated the program to create the Large Space Telescope…

Bob Siederer
24 August 2026

Hello again Science fans!

August has been a month full of astronomical events, what with the total eclipse of the sun over much of Europe coinciding with the Persied meteor shower earlier this month. The fun continues with an almost total eclipse of the moon (96%) on Thursday evening, August 27 that will be visible here.

Eclipses occur when one astronomical body crosses in front of the sun with an alignment that blocks light to another body. For a solar eclipse, the Moon passes between us and the Sun at just the right distance to totally block sunlight from view, if you happen to be in the path of totality anyway.

For a lunar eclipse, Earth gets between the sun and moon su…

The SciSchmooze

Kishore Hari
17 August 2026

A love letter to the wildest place in the Bay Area, written from inside a fog bank.

Greetings, science fans!

It is Fogust in San Francisco, and I have not seen the sun in what feels like several geological epochs. Karl has taken up permanent residence. Gray has been replaced by different shades of gray.

This weekend, I took a walk out by Ocean Beach, squinting through the mist, knowing that somewhere out there, the Farallon Islands are doing extraordinary things without me.

I have never been. Most people haven’t. The islands are closed to the public and accessible only to the small crew of researchers from Point Blue Conservation Science who have maintained a …

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 …