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.

Absurd: ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

MEDICINE / HEALTH

Several individual States [California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, & Washington] and the City of New York joined the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network, GOARN. Wisconsin announced its intention to do the same. ¿Why? Because the

Hello again science fans,
Salam sejahtera sekali lagi kepada peminat sains,
About 300 million people speak Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia.

This SciSchmooze focuses on fun.

The explosion of ping pong balls pictured above is one of hundreds of fun stunts – science stunts – Mark Rober has created over the years. He – a former NASA engineer – is now in the m

The SciSchmooze

Greetings again, friends of science,
Sempa xitlajpaloca, nohuampoyohua tlen ciencia,
Nearly 2 million people speak Nahuatl (Eastern Huasteca) in Mexico

Every year with the coming of the month of May, the catchy tune of the Lusty Month of May becomes an earworm. The song is from Lerner & Loewe’s Broadway musical “Camelot” starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet. (The above link, however, is for a slightly bowdlerized version of the song from the 1967 Warner Brothers movie of Camelot.)

On Saturdays, i join a group of folk at the Grocery Outlet in San Pablo at 11AM to protest actions of our current federal administration. The number of protesters keeps growing. The percentage of the drivers of passing cars that honk or wave keeps

The SciSchmooze

Greetings again, friends of science
Mwapoleni nakabili, ifibusa fya sayansi
[About 6 million people in Zambia, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo speak Bemba.]

ENVIRONMENT

Last Wednesday - Earth Day - a bill was scheduled for approval in the U.S. House of Representatives: The Endangered Species Amendments Act. The bill called for fast-tracking the removal of protections from endangered species whose numbers were recovering. It was an act of hubris to put this to Congress on Earth Day, but fortunately it was withdrawn at the last minute

Greetings again, friends of science,
科学を愛する皆さん、改めてご挨拶申し上げます。

Tidbit: The population of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area is about the same as California’s.

“They lie.”

That was the Australian’s response when i mentioned that nearly all meteorologists concur that global warming is happening. Rather than dispute this, i merely pointed out that scientists are focussed mostly on understanding how things ‘work’, not on picking sides. Then i quickly changed the subject and we enjoyed a good long conversation.

This exchange occurred during our ongoing tour of Japan and South Korea. Besides drinking in art, history

The SciSchmooze

Dave Almandsmith
2 March 2026

Greetings again, friends of science,
Kwaziwai zvakare, shamwari dzesainzi,
[15 million people speak Shona, one of 16 official languages of Zimbabwe.]

When the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the ‘2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding’ in February, it was abundantly clear it was done to favor the fossil fuel industry. That’s hardly surprising since 85% of oil and gas PAC money went to

Dave Almandsmith
2 February 2026

Welcome, glad you are reading this.
Mwaniriziddwa, musanyufu nti osoma bino.
[Over 10 million people speak Luganda in Uganda.]

Subscribe to the SciSchmooze at Bay Area Science. Heck, sign up your friends too. It’s free. 

Reid, Christina, Jeremy, and Victor are leaving for the Moon next Sunday. Their spacecraft will loop around the Moon twice and return to Earth on or about February 19th. However, those dates could be pushed back out of an abundance of caution.

Here is a

Hello again, friends of science,
Bongu mill-ġdid, ħbieb tax-xjenza,
[Spoken on Malta, Maltese is an Arabic dialect with some vocabulary borrowed from Sicilian, Italian, and English.]

It’s a new year. Our Earth completed another circuit of Sol, our star, the Sun.

The Sun, traveling at 828,000 k/hr around our Galaxy’s center, completed another 0.00000156th of a degree. Since its formation, our Solar System has made almost exactly 20 circuits of the Galaxy; each circuit taking about 230 million years.

Good news:  There are over 250 active lawsuits against the Trump Administration. Many of those aim to counter its assaults on climate initiatives and medical scien

Hello there, friend of science
こんにちは、科学の友よ
[It is estimated that 30,000 Bay Area residents speak Japanese.]

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The federal government’s ‘war on meritocracy’ sidelines those who achieved their merits via formal education. They are being replaced by those who have instead achieved wealth and renown: the eleme