Hello again Science fans! I hope you all had enough turkey (or whatever you chose to eat)! When I was in school, we were told that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by Native Americans and European settlers to give thanks for the harvest. While that celebration did happen, that isn’t really the origin of the Thanksgiving holiday. It was about Union progress in the Civil War! Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains.
It is about time to talk about something I mention from time to time, and that is how this newsletter and online calendar work. It is worth a refresher for those of you who might be new to the SciSchmooze.
The Bay Area Science Calendar is a volunteer-run project managed by a very small group of volunteers who are interested in science education and skeptical thinking. We monitor around 100 different websites from organizations around the Bay Area that are associated with science in one way or another and that put on events that are open to the general public. Most are free, some are not. When we find an event that might be of general interest, we add it to our calendar (https://www.bayareascience.org/calendar).
We make updates to the calendar throughout the week as events come to our attention. Most Sundays, we publish the SciSchooze newsletter, which you are (hopefully) reading. It contains some of our thoughts, links to interesting articles and websites that we’ve come across, and a snapshot of events on the calendar in the next two weeks.
I say hopefully because Substack says roughly half of you open the newsletter each week. I’m told that half is a very high percentage for mass mailings, but I would hope it would be higher.
We hope you find what we’re doing useful, and we would love to hear from you (email calendar@bayareascience.org, or click on the “contact” link at the top any calendar page).
Should you decide to attend an event, always click through from the calendar to the actual event page to see if there are any updates. Some events are weather dependent and schedules, locations, and even speakers sometimes change at the last minute. Nothing makes us sadder than to get a note from someone who says “I drove all the way to (insert location here) only to find the event had been canceled.” Often we don’t know about the cancellation, but we do our best to keep our calendar updated when we learn of changes. Also, from time to time, we make mistakes in the time and place information, so it is smart to double check that before you leave the house too. We don’t usually sponsor events ourselves. We just consolidate information and relist it in one place, so you don’t have to.
One more caveat…unless the host website says attendance is restricted, we assume the event is open to the general public and we list it. Stanford University has recently started indicating whether the public is able to attend specific events or not. UC Berkeley does not generally list this. So for seminars at UC Berkely, it is probably a good idea to contact the organizers to make sure you would be welcome. Contact information is on the Berkeley web page for the event.
By the way, if you know of an organization we aren’t tracking, please let us know who they are. And you can submit events yourself, using the “Submit an Event” link at the top of any calendar page. Just fill out the form and submit it. The event won’t show up on the calendar until we review it. Should you need to change something, just contact us and we’ll make the change. Unfortunately, the software we use doesn’t allow you to make changes to an event you submitted once you hit the button, but we’re happy to make the update for you.
COVID-19 is still around. The Omicron variant family is now 2 years old! After an increase in cases in August and September, followed by a slight drop, the case rate is ticking up again. Here’s an update on Omicron and other things COVID-related.
Last weekend, planet Earth most likely exceeded a key warming threshold for the first time. On Friday (11/17), global temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by more than 2 degrees celsius. Not good!
You have no doubt heard that we’re in for a strong El Niño event this winter, possibly ranking in the top 5 on record.
It has been over three years since the CZU Lightning Complex Fire burned through a huge swatch of the Santa Cruz mountains, including Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Much of the news of recovery in the park is good, with almost all of the old-growth Coastal Redwoods in the park are green again. Here’s an article about a presentation given at a symposium held by the Santa Cruz Mountains Bioregional Council recently discussing the park’s recovery.
As a youngster, I was always excited when my family received the new Burpee Seed Company catalog in the mail. I have no idea how we got on that mailing list, but I enjoyed reading the descriptions of the various flowers and vegetables we could grow if we simply placed an order. That calendar included a “plant hardiness zone map” put out by the US Department of Agriculture. Go guess what happened? Climate change has also changed the map!
Back on August 27, I wrote about time and my thoughts while standing on the Prime Meridan in Greenich Park, London. Next year is a leap year where we add one day to the calendar to account for differences between our calculated clock and the actual revolutions of the earth around the sun. Occasionally, officials add a leap second to make minor corrections. Are you ready for the leap minute?
Let’s turn to space. There’s been a lot of discussion about putting hotels in space, neighborhoods on the Moon, and even excursions to Mars. There are some bodily indignities to think about before you sign up! Here’s an opinion piece about reproduction in space, and why the space billionaires funding all this expansion might be better served exploring some of these issues.
The Lucy mission is charged with exploring mysterious asteroids, and the first images of Dinkinesh have come back. Surprise! Instead of being one asteroid as astronomers thought, it is actually two, with the smaller one orbiting the larger one.
We have a variety of volcanoes on Earth, but nothing compared to Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s four largest moons. Data from the Juno probe has allowed scientists to draw a map of the hot spot locations for the first time.
NASA isn’t the only space agency with a new, powerful telescope in the James Webb Space Telescope. The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope has just beamed back its first images, and they are spectacular.
Of course, the JWST images are spectacular too. Here’s a Beginners Guide to looking at the Universe, an interactive article using Webb images.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and have a great week in Science, as well as a happy and healthy holiday season!
Bob Siederer
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