Hello again science fans,
Здравствуйте еще раз, любители науки!
(Over 50,000 Bay Area residents speak Russian at home.)

ENVIRONMENT

“You can’t always get what you want,” and you can’t always see what you want. That is thought to be why Brown Pelicans are starving in California. These prehistoric-looking birds hunt for fish near the water’s surface, then plummet out of the sky to trap them in expanded mouths. When the ocean’s surface is choppy, pelicans are perhaps unable to see fish near the surface. It may also be true that fish avoid the top meter of water when it’s choppy. International Bird Rescue takes care of hundreds of starving Brown Pelicans when such water conditions occur. BTW, i insisted that “Internation…

Dave Almandsmith
August 19, 2024

Hello again science fans,
سلام بازهم علاقمندان علم
(Over 50,000 Bay Area residents speak Persian at home. Only about 60% of Bay Area residents speak English at home.)

ARCHAEOLOGY

The 6 tonne “Altar Stone” of Stonehenge may have been quarried and transported about 750 km from northern Scotland about 48 centuries ago. That’s a long way during an era before the invention of the wheel. Transport by sea to southern England would have been far easier than an overland route, and is consistent with archaeological evidence of sea trade during that era. [Since you are a SciSchmooze reader, i’m guessing you strongly doubt UFOs did the heavy lifting.]  A team of miner…

Hello again science fans,
안녕하세요 과학 팬 여러분, (Over 60,000 Bay Area residents speak Korean at home.)

BIOLOGY

Above is an artist’s representation of a flagellar motor that spins a bacterium’s flagella. The spinning flagella propel the bacterium through water. The colorful squiggly things represent proteins. The big wheel isn’t big. It would take 10 million of them side by side to span a single centimeter (0.4 inch). A typical rate of spin is 30,000 rpm, or 500 times a second. When you get the chance, come back here to watch this über-fascinating 23-minute video about this amazing bit of biomechanics.

A new study estimates that LUCA lived less than half a billion years after the formations of planet Earth. LUCA stands for Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA was a…

DAVE ALMANDSMITH
8 Jul 2024

Hello again science fans. विज्ञान प्रेमियों को पुनः नमस्कार।. (120,000 Bay Area residents speak Hindi at home.)

BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY

Occasionally, ants get injured by predators, or from fighting, or from skate-boarding. Rather than drag around a broken, bleeding leg, an injured ant will request an amputation by another ant. Afterall, it’s pretty easy getting along on only 5 legs – or so i’m told. Since ants don’t go to med school, amputating a fellow ant’s leg must be an instinctual behavior that is encoded into its DNA. ¿How does that work? We don’t know. 

Consider the Bar-Tailed Godwit. After it leaves the nest, a youngster fattens itself up, departs its home in northern Alaska and flies 11,00…

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 spacesuits are leaking coolant. Besides that, the entire complex was threatened by the explosive breakup of the Resurs-P-1 satellite last Wednesday. That satellite’s 6.5 tonnes of debris are spreading out – trave…

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 from the fossil fuel industry – which is the source of plastic manufacturing. Yes, they are exploring technologies to improve the recycling of plastics, but according to the United Nations Development Programme,  less th…

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, today’s whales have an unbroken oceanic existence dating tens of millions of years before our lineage diverged from that of chimpanzees. This 22 minute video presents the challenges and methods involved …

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 – Livestream – 03/28/2024 04:00 PM
3. Perlmutter, Campbell and MacCoun on Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense – 03/28/2024 05:30 PM

There is a lot of news about the upcoming total solar eclipse on April 8. If you are planning to travel to see it, here’s some advice that you may find useful. If you haven’t made travel plans yet, you may be out of luc…

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, Denisovans are named after the Denisova Cave in Russia where hominin fossils were discovered that differ genetically from Neanderthals and us. The De…

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 Enhanced Fujita Scale. 

Last year was the warmest year on record.

However, if you are he…