Bob Siederer
10 February 2025
Hello again Science Fans!
Have you ever suddenly wondered about a perfectly normal English word that you probably use now and then? I woke up the other day with the word “bushel” stuck in my thoughts. The more I wondered about why it was there, the stranger the word seemed.
I know how the word came into my head. The night before, I was in the YouTube rabbit hole again, watching a post from a young farmer in Nebraska who was talking about how many bushels of corn from her farm she was taking to the storage facility. My subconscous must have been working on this for me to wake up with it foremost in my mind though.
Bushel is a word we used to use more often. I can remember seeing bushel baskets of apples and potatoes at farmer’s markets and in stores. You can still get them, but they aren’t as common as they used to be.
While bushel was originally the container itself, it became a unit of measure, and, of course, the size of a bushel depends on whether it is dry or liquid, and whether you are talking about an imperial or US bushel. The imperial version holds 9.6076 US liquid gallons, while the US version holds 9.3092.
Once I woke up and thought about this, I just had to look up all these facts, as well as the origin of the word (Old French), although they probably pronounced it boo-SHELL in French.
Well, now you’re down the rabbit hole with me.
January set another monthly heat record around the world, despite a colder than usual US, and a cooling La Nina current. The next four years won’t offer much help for the climate from the US as the new administration wants to pull us from the Paris Climate Accords (again!), as well as removing any reference to climate change from government websites, documents, policy, etc. If we ban the terms, the problem simply doesn’t exist.
Sigh.
In news from the animal kingdom, this cute little guy is a Mount Lyell shrew. Apparently they are very camera shy as no photographs of them exist…until now!
These shrews live in the high Sierra Nevada and were first identified almost 100 years ago. Some UC Berkeley and University of Arizona students decided to try to capture them on film, and succeeded.
There’s another thing you probably don’t think about much, and that is how, as a young child, you learned to distinguish one word from another. Think about it. When we speak, our words don’t have space between them, yet over time we learn to identify where one word ends and another word begins. It turns out we aren’t the only species to learn this. New research finds that whales also use the same mechanism, known as Zipf’s law, to learn whalesong. This “law” applies to all languages Humans speak. And this may apply to other animals as well, not just whales.
The Perseverance Mars rover has been collecting rock samples on Mars since it arrived in 2021. The plan was to send another mission to Mars at some point that would pick up all these samples and return them to Earth. That mission is in jeopardy due to rising costs and complexity, so NASA is looking at alternative missions to the original. Of course, this will delay the return of the material a few (more) years. The latest sample, #26, is unlike anything we’ve seen on Mars before and is believed to be ancient crust that was brought to the surface through an ancient impact.
While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to send us breathtaking images from deep in space and time, a new space telescope is set to launch later this month. Named SPHEREx, it will take images of the entire celestial sky in 102 infrared colors! SPHEREx will launch no earlier than February 27, and will share the SpaceX rocket with PUNCH, a group of 4 small satellites meant to study the sun.
What a time to be an astronomer!
Have you been to the island of Santorini? When most people think of a Greek island, Santorini is probably the one they picture, and it is a beautiful place. I attended a wedding there 9 years ago. Santorini owes its existance to a volcano. Apparently, the magma under this volcano is moving, as a 5.2 earthquake this past Wednesday was the strongest of a swarm of quakes that have happened there in the recent weeks. Thousands have fled the island as a state of emergency was declared. Let’s hope things settle down.
The new administration’s attacks on science and research continue. One announcement this week that came from the National Institutes of Health said grant money for “indirect” research costs would be cut from grants, starting tomorrow. This indirect money pays for buildings, labs, equipment, and utilities. The money isn’t being totally eliminated, just cut from an upper limit of 30% of a grant, to 15%. Apparently some grant recipients are believed to use more than 30% of a grant to fund indirect costs, or even costs not related to the grant at all. So why not go after the offending institutions and leave the rest alone?
Why, indeed.
Have a great week in Science! I will be back in two weeks.
Bob Siederer
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