Kedonganan Beach in Bali, Indonesia. Credit: Agung Parameswara/Getty Images
Hello again science fans! 科学迷们,大家好!(7 out of 100 Bay Area residents speak Chinese at home.)
ENVIRONMENT
The photo of a Bali beach covered in plastic waste (photo above) is in stark contrast to my mind’s eye image of the renowned Indonesian vacation paradise. If you watch TV with advertisements, you’ve probably seen colorless squashed plastic containers arise into pristine pastel plastic receptacles in an ad from America’s Plastic Makers. It is disingenuous hype f
Hello again science fans! Kumusta muli mga tagahanga ng agham! [Three out of every 100 people in the Bay Area speak Tagalog/Filipino at home.]
BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY
In 1967, Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that sounds made by male humpback whales were complex arrangements that lasted as long as 30 minutes before being repeated. Multiple males even sang in unison. From year to year some ‘phrases’ were replaced by new ones. ¿Language? More recently we’ve learned that brain anatomy suggests whales could be capable of language. Also, t
Face of a Denisovan based on DNA alone. Credit: Maayan Harel/Hebrew University
科学迷们,大家好!(Hello again science fans!)
Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis) and Denisovans (H. denisova ??) interbred at various times and places. (The “??” following H. denisova refers to the current situation where insufficient Denisovan fossils exist to firmly classify them.) Modern humans interbred with Neanderthals so today we H. sapiens have varying snippets of DNA derived from Denisovans. Also, study of blood types of these three groups suggest that Rh incompatibility may have affected the health of some hybrids. (By the way, D
JWST NIRCam image of SN 1987A, the remnants of a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Hello again Science Fans!
This year is a leap year, when one day is added to the calendar to account for the difference between the tropical year and the common year. The tropical year is the time it takes Earth to make one complete orbit around the Sun, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds. It would be pretty difficult to have a calendar that matched that exactly, so we use the common year length of 365 days. That means we fall slightly behind the actual year by almost 1/4 day. So every 4 years (with exceptions) we add one day to the calendar, that being February 29, to get back in synch, more or less.
14th and Mission, San Francisco, 12/31/2023. (Gideon Rubin/Patch)
Hola, fans de la ciencia,
“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Hurricanes and tornadoes and floods, oh my! ¿Tornadoes in California? Yes. Nine tornadoes were documented in California during 2023 with Los Angeles County getting three of those. A friend’s house in SoCal had part of her roof torn off during a storm in early January leaving a 5 meter strip of metal flashing grotesquely twisted. Several of her close neighbors had metal panels ripped off their carports at the same time. ¿Was that a tornado? There’s not enough evidence to know but if so, it only qualified for an EF0 rating on the
I hope your new year is off to a pleasant start and i trust the new year will bring joy along with a few minor unavoidable travails and challenges. And if learning new things brings you joy - read on!
¿If an advanced species of vertebrate arose hundreds of millions of years ago and invented - all in the space of only 10,000 years - agriculture, mathematics, automobiles, jet airplanes, atomic power, and spaceflight before self-destructing, how would we know about it? That’s the crux of the thought experiment called the “
Another journey around the Sun is at its end. It is safe for me to say that each of us experienced delights and suffered hardships in this latest orbit, but unlike rocks and boulders we undoubtedl