Dave Almandsmith
4 October 2026

Hello again, fans of science,

Hallo allemaal, wetenschapsliefhebbers!
[Nearly 30 million people speak Dutch as a first or second language.]

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MEDICINE / HEALTH

The ‘Barbie Peptide’ [caricatured in the above graphic] is just one of dozens of peptides being promoted as cures and enhancements, but in most cases totally lacking in vetting through clinical trials.  [One exception is semaglutide (Wegovy / Ozempic).]  Many of the commercial peptides come from China with no assurances as to safety or whether any peptides are even present in the package.

¿And what is a peptide?  They are ‘short’ chains of amino acids.  Proteins are long chains of typically 300 to 400 amino acids that must fo…

WHY NOT?

Dave Almandsmith
7 September 2026

Hello again, fans of science,

Kia ora anō, e ngā kaiwhaiwhai pūtaiao,
[About 210,000 New Zealanders can speak Maori.]

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GOOD NEWS

For the first time in 75 years, the population of the flightless New Zealand Kakapo (Maori: parrot of the night) is up to 325 birds thanks to huge conservation efforts and fruiting rimu trees. These 4 kg birds only mate during years when rimu berries are abundant.

The U.S. is currently experiencing “Very Low” incidences of acute respiratory illnesses.

21 minute video of Good News: Africa electrification, Amazon rain forest preservation, Ear…

Hello again, fans of science,

फेरि नमस्कार, विज्ञानका प्रशंसकहरू,
[In Nepal, 90% of the population speak Nepali as a first or second language. It is also spoken by many in India and Bhutan.]

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SPACE

A hand-me-down went to space Sunday morning.  The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope with a decades-old mirror donated by The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is on its way to Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2.  The mirror is basically the same as the one in the Hubble Space Telescope, which also came from the NRO.  Those two mirrors were intended to be used in spy satellites developed by Boeing (with insane cost overruns, of course). Fittingly, Ms. Roman initiated the program to create the Large Space Telescope…

Dave Almandsmith
3 August 2026

Hello again appreciator of science,
Ahoj znova, milovník vedy,
[Over 300 million people speak a slavic language]

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BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY

Let me share what i recently learned about some extremes of human perception. One to two percent of people are ‘super-recognizers’. They easily recognize people years after a brief encounter. [Definitely NOT me.] People with prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing anyone; even their spouse or their own reflection in a mirror.  Also there are people with aphantasia – they cannot bring to mind the appearance of anything. They simply cannot create a ‘mental picture’ of a person, a top hat, a fire extinguisher, a camel, a…

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]

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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.

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

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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 United States officially withdrew from the World Health Organization [WHO] in January. Absurd.

Another deadly outbreak of an Ebola virus is underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Uganda. There are 471 known cases and 84 confirmed deaths but the numbers are climbing exponentially. A third of al…

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 middle of creating public school science curricula complete with teacher training materials – a $60 million endeavor – to be supplied completely free. He has years of experience making science fun and will soon be sharing that fun in schools world-wide.

If you have gone to a demonstrat…

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 …

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.]

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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 since it lacked sufficient support across both sides of the aisle. The Trump administration continues, however, to gut the Environmenta…

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.

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“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, customs, architecture, geography, and non-alcoholic Asahi, i notice the cars. Most of the cars in Japan are di…