DAVE ALMANDSMITH
30 JUN 2024

Hello again science fans! Xin chào một lần nữa những người hâm mộ khoa học! (2% of Bay Area residents speak Vietnamese at home)

I keep humming to myself, “Oh Lord, stuck in orbit a-again.” (With props to John Fogerty, a former El Cerrito teen) Not only is the Starliner crew - Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore - stuck in the orbiting International Space Station, none of the crew can even take a stroll outside since the ISS 

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

Bob Siederer
March 24, 2024

Hello again Science fans and welcome to another SciSchmooze!

There are 87 events on the calendar over the next two weeks. My picks include:

1. Wonderfest: BLACKBERRY and Corporate Psychology - 03/26/2024 05:00 PM
2. The Psychology of Misinformation and Its Remedies&nb

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

Bob Siederer
Feb 26 2024

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.

Back in the day, namely 46 BC, the Julian cal

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 

Hello again science fans!

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 “

Dear science aficionado,

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

Dear reader,
Welcome aboard for a flight on this week’s SciSchmooze. {Snacks optional.}

CLIMATE

¿Why is the climate conference taking place called “COP28”? Because it’s easier than calling it the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference Of the Parties #28. ¿And why is it being held in Dubai, a country where fossil fuels account for over 4% of its revenue?  [The United States is the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels - Ed.]; a country that denies entry to travelers who ‘might’ protest government policies?; a country that does not confer upon its own citizens the right to protest? However, things change - at least temporarily.