Hello again, fans of science,
“nuqneH, QeD parmaq,” (I found no data on how many Klingons are in the Bay Area.)

A “Stand Up for Science” gathering will be this Friday in the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza from 1 to 3PM. Come with or without a sign. Come with or without a costume. Come with or without your family and friends. But come.

Now is an especially important time to communicate with the President, the Vice President, and your three Congressional members: two Senators and a Member of the House of Representative. Here is a site for looking them up. The address for the President and Vice President is:

White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500

Hmmmm. I wonder what would happen if we all mailed letters to the White Hous…

2 February 2025

Hello again science fans!
科学ファンの皆さん、こんにちは！
(The first Japanese immigrants arrived in the Bay Area in 1869. Today about 20,000 Bay Area residents speak Japanese at home.)

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SPACE

The OSIRIS-REx Mission collected 120 grams (4 oz) of regolith (broken rock & dust) from the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and returned the sample to Earth in 2023. Just announced: chemists found organic (carbon-based) chemicals in the sample: ammonia, formaldehyde, all 5 of the nucleotide bases of DNA and RNA, and 14 of the 20 amino acids used in proteins of Earthly life. Wow! This suggests that many of the chemical precursors of life are common in the Solar System, that they are not…

Hello again Science Fans!
Salut encore les amateurs de science ! (Canadian French)
Bonjour à nouveau, fans de science ! (France French)
Bonjou ankò Fanatik Syans! (Haitian Creole)

I guess we could be considered fans, amateurs, and/or fanatiks.

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2025
Thanks to Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, 2025 is mathematically unusual.

2025 = 45²

2025 = 9² x 5²

2025 = 40² + 20² + 5²

2025 = (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)² [square of the sum of the first 9 integers]

2025 = 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³ [sum of the first 9 integers cubed]

We’ve made it to 2025, but let us raise a glass of non-alcoholic beverage t…

Hello again Science Fans!
ሰላም በድጋሚ የሳይንስ ደጋፊዎች!
(Many of the Bay Area’s 20,000 Ethiopians live in Oakland.)

The weekly SciSchmooze reliably delivers the latest in science, especially for the San Francisco Bay Area. Give friends and family a free subscription at https://www.bayareascience.org/.

As we cross over into the year 2025, it is a good time to look back at the significant stories we brought to you in 2024.

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SPACE

A recent milestone was achieved by the Parker Solar Probe: it skirted just 6 million kilometers from our Sun’s surface. The next closest probe is HELIOS 2 some seven times farther out. Parker ‘phoned home’ to say it was still healthy and is sending data back to our Earth which orbits 150 million kilometers from the neare…

Dave Almandsmith
1 December 2024

Hello again fans of science,
Dumelang hape barati ba mahlale, (Lesotho Peace Corps memories)

I trust you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving, avoided coming to blows with contrary cousins, and survived Black Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

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ARCHAEOLOGY

¿Have you been to the Mayan ruins of Copán, Chichen Itza, Palenque, Tikal, Uxmal, or others in Mexico or Central America? Well another ancient Mayan city of 30,000 to 50,000 people has been found using lidar. Given the name ‘Valeriana’, the site has over 5,000 structures dating to the 1st century C.E.

Roughly six thousand years before Valeriana, people were painting on cave walls in what now is modern day Argentina.

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BIOLO…

Dave Almandsmith
4 November 2024

Hello again, friends of science,

When the United States Constitution was adopted in 1788, the only women allowed to vote were property owners in several New Jersey jurisdictions. That ‘oversight’ was corrected in 1790 when a New Jersey law specifically banned women and non-whites from voting. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is considered to be the beginning of America’s Women’s Suffrage Movement. Internationally, the first country to extend voting rights to women was New Zealand in 1893. Women in America gained the right to vote 27 years later with the passing of the 19th Amendment.

It was not until 1960 that a woman became head of a modern country’s government. That was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylo…

October 7, 2024

Dave Almandsmith

Hello again science fans,
Aloha hou e ka poʻe ʻepekema,

SPACE

Comets are fickle. They can delight with their brightness, or they can disappoint with their fading. The above long-exposure photo was taken last week in the Southern Hemisphere, but we northern folk will likely be able to see the comet starting Thursday just after sunset on the western horizon. Binoculars will help. If all goes well, it will be visible through the end of the month. 

When light from a supernova – usually in a nearby galaxy – reaches Earth, astronomers around the world know about it within a few hours – thanks to the Internet. That’s not soon enough! Astronomers would rathe…

Hello again science fans,

CLIMATE

Multiple States continue to suffer deaths, power outages, floods, and destruction from Hurricane Helene. Over 80% of climate scientists agree that climate change is a crisis and is contributing to the strength of hurricanes. Just as earthquake simulations have led to building codes that help protect us, hurricane simulations are similarly leading to improvements.

With warmer temperatures, some mosquito species are extending their range and bringing diseases with them.  West Nile virus, Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), malaria, and dengue are some of the more danger…

September 16, 2024

Hello again, science fans.
Hallo nochmal, Wissenschaftsfans.
(Over 40,000 Bay Area residents speak German at home.)

SPACE

He emerged and then retreated back to the interior. He was not a groundhog, and his retreat does not suggest we will have 6 more weeks of winter.  Jared Isaacson and fellow Polaris Dawn crew member, Sarah Gillis, popped up (down? sideways?) from the SpaceX Dragon capsule to get an unobstructed view of Earth from 700 km away. Since the capsule’s interior was exposed to the vacuum of space, it was also an opportunity to test the four spacesuits for flexibility and ‘leakproofness’ as well as to test all of the interior equipment for their ability to safely cycle from an air pressure of 1000 millibars to zero …

Hello again science fans.
Bonjour à tous les fans de science.
(Over 45,000 Bay Area residents speak French at home.)

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CLIMATE

Above is the world’s second all-electric cargo ship. It’s 120m long, 24m wide, and has the battery capacity of a thousand Model Y Teslas (50,000,000 Wh). Like the other and smaller electric cargo ship – the Yara Birkeland – it is plying inland rivers instead of the open oceans. Ocean shipping accounts for about 3% of the world’s CO2 emissions, but don’t expect batteries to power cargo ships that cross thousands of kilometers of open oceans anytime soon. Instead, open ocean shipping is turning to wind energy. The Anemos is a 1,000 tonne cargo sailing…