David Almandsmith

Welcome dear science-appreciative reader, When Avian Influenza H5N1 is detected in one chicken on an egg farm, it and all of the tens of thousands of other chickens there are destroyed. Over 50 million birds in the U.S. were destroyed this way last year. ¿Why not vaccinate chickens? It isn’t expensive. It’s because eggs and chickens sold … Read more

Thank you, dear reader, for joining us again and for your kind comments. Christmas Island Rat, Wooly Mammoth, Passenger Pigeon, Thylacine (a marsupial: carries newborns in a pouch). These animals are extinct but efforts are currently underway to “bring them back.” In each case, researchers are compiling the complete genomes of the extinct animals using … Read more

Happy New Year. Thank you for joining me today. As technology promises better and longer lives, the ‘situation on the ground’ is dismal for much of the world’s 8 billion people – but over the long arc of history, “it’s getting better.” As we and our neighbors and our children tune into how alike we … Read more

Dear reader, so glad you’re reading this. Let me start by laying out some work we need to do. I love maps of all kinds. The map above is based on Pew Research data of the percentage of people who agreed that “certain people can cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen … Read more

Lunar Eclipse – Election – Asteroid Hello, my fellow Earthlings. So glad you are reading this. Tuesday at 0-dark-30 the entire moon will be fully covered by Earth’s shadow. (2:17 a.m. Pacific) It will begin emerging from the shadow at 3:42 a.m. Andrew Fraknoi has provided an informational page on the event Tuesday at 7 a.m. … Read more

Hello again, dear science fan, No one – arguably – knows more about ghost hunting than Kenny Biddle. At this year’s SkeptiCal, he shared stories from his ghost-hunting forays, including the techniques and the electronic instrumentation he used. Some years ago, however, Biddle did a turn-around, climbed out of the ghost-hunting rabbit hole, and became a … Read more

Happy Labor Day dear reader, I recall the first time i saw a geochron clock on the wall of my hometown bank. Instantly i knew where in the world there was sunrise, sunset, night, and day. It lifted me for several minutes from living in a town in California with a few thousand others to … Read more

Hello again science fans, Daniela Rößler (‘ß’ is a double-s symbol used in Deutschland) has gathered fascinating data suggesting that jumping spiders might actually dream while sleeping. ¿Sleeping spiders? Well, yes. Just about every animal has been observed in behaviors that seem to indicate sleep. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is associated with dreaming in humans, … Read more

Bless you, Étienne Klein, for bringing levity and wisdom to us last week. Levity came in claiming that his photo of a slice of chorizo was a JWST photo of Proxima Centauri, and the wisdom came in the physicist’s following Tweet: “Well, when it’s time for the aperitif, cognitive biases seem to have a field … Read more