September 24, 2023

BOB SIEDERER

Hello again Science Fans!

Just before 7:52 AM (PDT) this morning, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned the sample recovery capsule (SRC) containing material from the asteroid Bennu to a desert area in Utah. This is a remarkable achievement. First, they had to get to Bennu, which involved some complicated orbital mechanics. Then they had to orbit the asteroid, the smallest space object ever orbited by a satellite. Next, they had to successfully obtain a sample of the asteroid’s surface, deposit it in a container, and close the lid. Tha

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Time, and where am I?

I’m currently writing from UTC+2, also known as Central European Summer Time at the moment (UTC+1 in the winter).

A few days ago, I stood on the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory in Greenwitch Park, London and learned about the history of time as we know it today. Before there was standardization, each location had their own way to measure time. Nothing was coordinated. Imagine the chaos! T

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Have you ever heard of Eunice Foote? No? She’s someone we all should know more about, and she was the subject of the Google Doodle on July 17th (pictured above), on what would have been her 204th birthday!

Eunice was a women’s rights activist. She was the first woman to be published in a physics journal. In 1856 she wrote “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays”, a paper that laid out the basics of climate science. Three years after the publication, scientist John Tyndall would be credited for laying this groundwork, not Foote. It wasn’t until the 2010s that her work began to be recognized.

Hello again Science Fans!

It has been a busy week in both Science and the world.

One year ago this past week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade.

This weekend, the mercenary military Wagner Group almost staged a coup in Russia before retreating under promises of immunity.

The Summer Solstice occurred on Wednesday morning, the first day of astronomical summer in the northern hemisphere.

The world watched as rescuers from Canada and the US trie

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First off, thanks to Herb for filling in for me last month while I was traveling. Today we have a lot of catching up to do!

Happy anniversary to The Sierra Club which was founded on this date in 1892 in San Francisco!

Some of you are old enough to remember the beginnings of the “space race”, with the US pitted against the Soviet Union to see which one would be the first to create the technology to get man to the Moon. In 1959, we still didn’t know if humans could survive in space, so on this date Able and Baker, two monkeys, were laun

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This past Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, a UN organization) released their final report on the climate. Basically, we’re on the brink of irrevocable damage to the planet. The UN Secretary General said “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

My first thought is “where’s he been”? 

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