Observant walkers strolling down Ninth Street in Eureka between A and L streets may have wondered about the occasional incongruent circular metal discs anchored into the south sidewalk bearing the words “CALIFORNIA DIVISION OF HIGHWAYS,” “HUM-101” and the date 1971. Incongruent because Ninth is outside Caltrans jurisdiction. In fact, the discs are centerline markers of […]
Field Notes
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Living with Cancer
“It may be tough to convince patients, even those with an incurable disease, that the best approach is not to kill as many cancer cells as possible but as few as necessary.” — James DeGregori and Robert Gatenby, Scientific American, August, 2019 When his wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with metastatic cancer, veteran science reporter George […]
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Graphene:The Future ofDesalination?
“Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner was plagued by the same predicament as many people today who live near the ocean: They’re short of fresh water and unable to drink from our planet’s salty oceans. The problem is seawater is about 3.5 percent salt by weight but our kidneys […]
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Lunar Boondoggle?
We are in the middle of another space race, according to Vice President Mike Pence, “just as we were in the 1960s.” No, not with those Sputnik-launching Ruskies this time. Today’s race is with the Chinese. In his speech to the National Space Council earlier this year, Pence cited, as evidence of China’s lunar ambitions, […]
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Apollo Plus Fifty
“… this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon … No single space project in this period will be … more important for the long-range exploration of space.” — JFK, May 25, 1961 “I’m not that interested in space.” — JFK, Nov. […]
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Seven Puzzles for the Seventh Month
The Old Bridge Four people with one flashlight between them have to cross a rickety two-person capacity bridge in the next 17 minutes before a hurricane destroys it: Alice (who takes one minute to cross), Bill (two minutes), Cassie (five minutes) and Dave (10 minutes). It’s pitch black, so anyone crossing needs the flashlight. How […]
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Global Population and Kids
The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives, including education and contraceptives. — Hans Rosling, Factfulness Quick quiz to get us started. There are 2 billion children under 16 alive today. According to the United Nations, how many under-16-year-olds will be alive in the year […]
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Terraforming Mars
Last week, we looked at the difference between “terraforming-lite,” warming Mars to the point where it has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and liquid water oceans, and “full terraforming,” where it has an atmosphere with sufficient oxygen (and minimal CO2) that humans and animals can breathe. Because we can do a whole lot on Mars […]
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Terraforming Mars
Say the word quickly and it doesn’t sound that difficult. We know how to warm Earth (unfortunately) so it shouldn’t take much to warm much smaller Mars. After that, it’s just a hop, skip and jump to create a breathable atmosphere, and there we have it, Earth Two. A second chance to get it right […]
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The Universe: Whodunnit?
Cosmology is essentially a whodunnit but, unlike your typical 600-page detective yarn, this story doesn’t unfold clue by clue until the denouement in last few pages. The puzzle — basically, “How the hell can we explain our presence here?” — is more cryptic than ever. For all the thousands of brilliant minds working on the […]
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Sunshine Vitamin vs. Skin Cancer
It’s a conundrum: Ultraviolet B radiation from the sun is both the best source of vitamin D — the “sunshine vitamin” — and the the major cause of skin cancer. Get enough sun-mediated vitamin D and your’re courting melonoma; too little and the rest of your body will suffer. Vitamin D facilitates absorption of bone-building […]
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Our Worst Mistake, Part 2
Last week, we looked at anthropologist Jared Diamond’s claim that the Neolithic Revolution, when most hunter-gatherers settled down to become farmers, was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Since Diamond popularized this “revisionist” thesis, sociologists and anthropologists have seized on it to explain everything from the subjugation of women (not generally […]