Science reporting relevant to current events with an emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area
Hello again science fans,Aloha hou e ka poʻe ʻepekema, SPACE Comets are fickle. They can delight with their brightness, or they can disappoint with their fading. The above long-exposure photo was taken last week in the Southern Hemisphere, but we northern folk will likely be able to see the comet starting Thursday just after sunset … Read more
Hello again science fans, CLIMATE Multiple States continue to suffer deaths, power outages, floods, and destruction from Hurricane Helene. Over 80% of climate scientists agree that climate change is a crisis and is contributing to the strength of hurricanes. Just as earthquake simulations have led to building codes that help protect us, hurricane simulations are similarly leading to … Read more
Image credit: SpaceX Hello again, science fans.Hallo nochmal, Wissenschaftsfans.(Over 40,000 Bay Area residents speak German at home.) SPACE He emerged and then retreated back to the interior. He was not a groundhog, and his retreat does not suggest we will have 6 more weeks of winter. Jared Isaacson and fellow Polaris Dawn crew member, Sarah Gillis, … Read more
Green Water 01: A fully-electric 10,000 tonne container shipImage: China Ocean Shipping Company Hello again science fans.Bonjour à tous les fans de science.(Over 45,000 Bay Area residents speak French at home.) CLIMATE Above is the world’s second all-electric cargo ship. It’s 120m long, 24m wide, and has the battery capacity of a thousand Model Y … Read more
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