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Passing the Summer Solstice with the SciSchmooze

OceanGate Titan

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


Laying Truth to SciSchmooze

Hello Science Fans,

I hope you are looking forward to the longest day of the year this week. This Tuesday June 21 at 7:57 AM marks the spot where the sun will be a its northernmost point for the year. It will rise about 5:47 AM and set at 8:34 PM. This marks the end of spring, and the beginning of summer with the longest day of the year. It will be 14 hours 47 minutes between sunrise and sunset or 5 hours 14 minutes longer than it was at its' shortest just 6 months ago. I often wonder how things were figured out before we had the benefits of so many great scientists and equipment.

Hello Science Fans,

I don't want to direct bad wishes to other countries or part of ours but, I'm glad it wasn't us that woke up to orange skies this time


Smile for the SciSchmooze

Tiangong & ISS crews (Frank Rubio is off-camera)

Hello again, dear reader,

SPACE

While we were Earth-bound this last week, 17 out of Earth’s 8 billion people were in orbit - a new (if soon-to-be-exceeded) record. ¿How high an orbit? Consider the standard (in the U.S.) 12-inch globe. They were orbiting 4 tenths of an inch above its surface. The thickness of a piece of standard copy paper represents the thickness of our atmosphere in which humans can populate - 14,000 feet.

Memorial Day SciSchmooze

Able, a seven-pound rhesus monkey, and Baker, a one-pound squirrel monkey, both females. Photo credit: Life Magazine

Hello again Science Fans!

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


A Brief Moment in Time with the SciSchmooze

Science Timeline Posterbook

Greetings Fans of Science and Reason,

Does it seem like the last week has been a blur or is it just me? Of course it turns out to be insanely complicated! I’m always amazed how differently the same event can be perceived by various observers, even if they are close friends or family. Of course a portion of this is based on how we got to where we are! (Sorry, I just h


Moms SciSchmooze Too!

Chien-Shiung Wu was a particle and experimental physicist; Wu worked on the Manhattan Project where she helped develop a process for separating uranium metal into U-235 and U-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion.

Hello Mothers and the sons and daughters of Mothers,

I hope everyone is having an excellent Mother’s day. Did you get up early and make a fine cup of Kopi Luwak for the mom of the house? Let’s be honest here. None of us would be here without mothers or science. I like to think we celebrate scie


SciSchmoozing to Infinity

Solar panel production in Dalton, Georgia [Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg]

Dear science aficionado,

Join us in another romp through recent (and not so recent) science revelations. But first, “Infinity.” Somehow i missed the Netflix movie, “A Trip to Infinity,” when it came out last year. Carve out 80 minutes this week to watch it. You won’t be sorry. The movie reminded me of a book i ‘absorbed’ during my senior year in high school: “One Two Three... Infinity” by George Gamow. In 1956 Gamow was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for popularizing science. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Carroll, and Steven Pinker credit the book with informing or downright setting their careers. It was largel


SciSchmooze Softcore Smorgasbord

Hot ‘soft’ core of Mars with seismic wave paths - NASA

Greetings, dear reader. I trust you will find some delectable items in this week’s science smorgasbord.


SPACE

Learned geophysicists years ago concluded that Mars has a hot liquid inner core, unlike Earth with its hot solid inner core. They calculated that Mars’ gravitational pressure is insufficient to make molten iron solid, as is the case with our home planet. But there’s nothing like good data: the seismometers on NASA’s Insight mission clinched that theory using 

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