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 usual program, Lick Observatory is offering behind

Bob Siederer
1 June 2026

Hello again Science fans!

I’ve been overseas for a while. Thanks to David for swapping dates with me last month. While I was able to keep up with calendar updates while I was away, finding time to reliably write the newsletter wasn’t going to be easy. But I’m back now, and over my jet lag (I think).

This weekend marks the unofficial start of summer here in the US. We tend to mark summer as running from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This year that means the longest possible summer period, as Memorial Day is as early as it can be, and Labor Day is as late as it ca

SciSchmooze

Hello again Science Fans!

I’ve been thinking about the Artemis missions for a while. I’ve been wondering why we’re going back to the moon, somewhere we already visited several times, instead of going somewhere more challenging and uncharted, like Mars. If you think about it, the challenges of the Apollo program were greater than those today, given the technology limits of the time. The flight computers were rather basic back then, requiring programming at a machine language level. They we

Hello again Science Fans!

The vernal equinox occurred Friday morning, ushering in the astronomical start to spring in the northern hemisphere. However, if felt more like we skipped spring and went straight to summer in the western US, what with highs in the 90s this past week. The heat wave is an example of extreme weather pushed by climate change, according to climate scientists. The temperature reached 110 F in the Arizona desert on Thursday, marking the highest March temperature ever recorded in the US!

To add to the situation, La Nina is finishing and forecasters predict not only 

Bob Siederer
23 February 2026

Hello again Science Fans!

Let’s start with a little biological history. On this date in 1997, scientists in Scotland announced that they had successfully cloned a mammal for the first time. The animal was a sheep named Dolly, shown above with the embryologist who led the cloning research. Dolly was born on July 5, 1996, but public announcement wasn’t made until February 22, 1997. Dolly was cloned using a cell taken from a mammary gland of an adult sheep, and was named after country music singer Dolly Parton, proving the Scotts have a sense of humor. She went on to give birth to six normal lambs and was euthanized at the age of six due to lung disease unrelated to her cloning. Dolly’s preserved body is on exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland since 2003, the year of he

Bob Siederer
26 January 2026

Hello again Science Fans!

Before we get into the news, here are my recommendations for this week:

1. COP30 Debrief: Reflecting on Belém and the Road Ahead - Livestream, Tuesday 1/27 at 11:00 AM
2. admin's Blog Add new comment Read More

Bob Siederer
12 January 2026

Hello again Science Fans!

2026 is certainly off to a wild start. From the kidnapping of Venezuala’s president and his wife by the US Government, to the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, to the psuedo-science surrounding the new inverted food pyramid, there has hardly been a quiet minute. And, of course, those aren’t the only three things that happened in the last two weeks.

The Christmas Eve rain and wind storm did very signifigant damage to Lick Observatory, a Bay Area landmark atop Mt. Hamilton. Winds that reached 114 mph 

Plus some SciSchmooze history 

Bob Siederer
29 December 2025

Hello again Science Fans!

I hope you all got through this week’s storms without damage. It was a couple of wild nights of wind and rain around here.

I want to start today with some history, or at least my recollection of it. Herb Masters originally started what turned into the SciSchmooze about 20 years ago. He was frustrated that organizations were all scheduling events on the same nights, while other nights remained empty. So his initial newsletters were intended to help various groups around the Bay with scheduling. That g

Bob Siederer
24 November 2025

Hello again Science fans!

How is it Thanksgiving already? Where has this year gone? When I was growing up in the northeast US, Thanksgiving seemed like a logical progression of the weather into winter. Later, when I moved to south Florida, it appeared as a surprise every year, as it was still summery there. It couldn’t possibly be the start of the Christmas season, what with 80 degree temperatures still common!

Here in northern California, we’re somewhere between the two extremes of heat and cold, but we really haven’t had cold days until this week, at least not what constitutes cold for us!

Bob Siederer
27 October 2025

Hello again Science fans!

Up until 10 years ago, ripples in space-time, predicted by Albert Einstein, remained theoretical. On September 14, 2015, at 4:00 AM, the two LIGO observatories, one in eastern Washington State, the other in Louisiana, detected the signatures of two black holes colliding and merging, and cosmology changed forever. What had been Einstein’s prediction had now been proven. LIGO, and similar installations around the globe, have since detected gravitational waves over 300 times. That discovery, which only lasted 1/5 of a second, was the first, and justified the investment in the observatory in the first place.