A block from home, the smell accosts you. You look around the dark street for the stray dog that’s rolled in dead skunk then topped off the treatment with a wallow in fresh excrement. There is no dog. You reach the stairs, ascend to the porch, and the putrid scent intensifies. Check your feet — […]
Life + Outdoors
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Growth and Decay
Begin with one bacterium capable of dividing each hour. After 10 hours there will be 1,024 bacteria (2^10). That’s an example of geometric, or exponential, growth. If the colony is confined to a small jar of food, and half that food is converted into those 1,024 bacteria in 10 hours, you can imagine their leader […]
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Easiest. Arrangements. Ever.
For the last month, I have stood guiltily by and watched my flower garden fade. The daisies, feverfew, butterfly bush and catmint have bloomed so aggressively that I couldn’t possibly keep up with them. After hacking his way through the flowers to get to the chicken coop recently, my husband meekly suggested that I could […]
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Osmosis is Awesome
Sap drips from the leaves of my indoor banana plant. Osmosis is the process that raises that sap against gravity. Osmosis causes our kidneys to retain more water in our blood after a salty meal. Reverse Osmosis (RO) is the preferred method for producing fresh water from ocean water. The U.S. is second only to […]
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Clearing the Air
Allie Hostler, public information officer for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, is very worried about the hazardous conditions in Hoopa caused by the smoke from the large wildfires, which have been burning in the hills above eastern Humboldt County. “There is a general air of anxiety when the smoke gets into the valley,” said Hostler last […]
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Eureka’s Top Toto
In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West tells Dorothy, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” For some reason, the Wicked Witch of the West had a beef not only with Dorothy, but with Toto, too. Every time she encounters Dorothy, she has to mention poor little Toto, […]
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Concretions
Meter-sized spherical rocks decorate Bowling Ball Beach three miles south of Point Arena in Mendocino County. They have gathered there into rows on a corrugated wave-cut platform eroded into inclined sedimentary sandstones. These hard spheres are not boulders abraded by rivers or surf, but are erosion-resistant calcite-cemented spheres eroded directly from those inclined softer sandstones. […]
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Arms Race & Species
Herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles, sheds much light on the nature of evolution. Consider the range of body plans and lifestyles among salamanders (amphibians with tails). They commonly hatch from eggs in water or moist places, though a few species give birth to live young. Some are confined to water and use external […]
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Choses du Jardin
A couple of months ago, I spent an afternoon at the di Rosa Preserve, a private art collection housed on a lovely piece of land between Napa and Sonoma along the Sonoma Highway. The collector, Rene di Rosa, is almost 90 years old. His collection of modern art, which now totals over 1,700 pieces, fills […]
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Si, PV and LED
Silicon, PhotoVoltaics and Light Emitting Diodes are of growing importance. Here’s how they work, using the analogy of a playground slide (or RAMP). Throw kids up onto it so they slide down, pile up at the bottom, and circuit around for a repeat. In photovoltaic cells, solar photons do the throwing and the kids are […]
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Vegetative Matter
In February, a couple dozen of our friends and relatives made the windy, rainy trek to Humboldt County for the grand reopening of our bookstore. It was yet another winter family gathering. They’ve been here before at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and now, after having made the journey in February, they probably think that Eureka has […]
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Big Fish
It wasn’t enough that Bill had caught an almost 28-pound lingcod that afternoon: It had a head the size and shape of a bulldog, and he strained to hoist it above his shoulders for the cheesy, but required, photograph of a grinning hunter and his vanquished prey. Instead, he kept thinking about the fish he […]