Science reporting relevant to current events with an emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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.) Not only is the Starliner crew – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore – stuck in … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Face of a Denisovan based on DNA alone. Credit: Maayan Harel/Hebrew University 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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Hello again science fans! I hope your new year is off to a pleasant start and i trust the new year will bring joy along with a few minor unavoidable travails and challenges. And if learning new things brings you joy – read on! ¿If an advanced species of vertebrate arose hundreds of millions of … Read more