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Posts Tagged ‘Science’

Thoughts du Jour

Posted in Miscellanea, tagged , , on May 17, 2023| Leave a Comment »

H₂O

Water, water everywhere. Water accounts for about 60 percent of the body weight of an adult male human and about 55 percent of an adult female. We are born consisting of about 78 percent water. By age one, our water content is down to about 65 percent.

Your lungs are 83 percent water, your muscles and kidneys 79 percent, your brain and heart 73 percent, your skin 64 percent, and your bones 31 percent.

The water in your body is plenty busy. It serves as a building material for cells, flushes out waste, lubricates joints, absorbs shock, helps maintain you at the right temperature, carries nutrients and oxygen where they need to go, and forms saliva, which allows you to eat.

To remain properly hydrated, an adult male should consume a little over three quarts of water per day. An adult female needs a little over two quarts per day.

Fascist Theocracy

Some years ago, the CNN program Crossfire featured the strained concept of a liberal, a conservative, and a centrist arguing about things. The idea was ridiculous. I never watched.

Two Crossfire episodes became rather famous. In 2004, John Stewart berated Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for partisanship in lieu of honesty. And in 1986, the late Frank Zappa said conservatives want to establish religious fascism in America.

Zappa said this:

The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy. And everything that’s happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe.

When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion, and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right-wing, almost toward Attila the Hun…

Zappa allowed the sentence to trail off there, point made.

Zappa understood that government-sanctioned morality is poison. When you mix church and state, you get the Taliban, al Qaeda, Sharia Law, and today’s Republican brand of christo-fascism.

Hyperbole? No. This spring, the Texas Senate passed a bill requiring that all public schools display the 10 Commandments. It passed another bill setting aside time every school day for Bible-reading and prayer.

That is such an Orwellian example of fascist theocracy, it makes my teeth hurt.

Busy Bees

We usually think of bees in terms of hives, queens, buzzing, swarming, and such, but many bee species, such as carpenter bees, are solitary, not social. And they’re just as important pollinators as honey bees and bumblebees.

Also fascinating: many solitary bees have evolved to specialize in and pollinate specific plants.

Most solitary bees live only one season. In the fall, a female will prepare several underground chambers, stock them with pollen and nectar, lay her eggs, seal them, and depart to die over the winter.

In the spring, her pupae will remain underground and delay emerging until their specialty plants are active. How the buried pupae know when conditions are right topside is something the experts would really like to know.


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Thoughts du Jour

Posted in Miscellanea, tagged , , on April 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The Question

For a time, a question bobbed around in my head, but went unaddressed because loftier thoughts prevailed. When it finally rose in the hierarchy, I gave the matter some attention.

The question is this: why have humans subjected dogs to selective breeding so vigorously, to the point that over 300 breeds exist in a wide range of sizes and shapes, many of which are, I submit, senseless and cruel, YET the 40-odd recognized breeds of housecat have been subjected to very little selective breeding, and cats vary in appearance only in minor ways?

The answer, which I probably should have known, is simple and logical.

Dogs, in addition to being companions, are capable of performing many useful services for us. Hence, we have bred them accordingly — to herd, to guard, to hunt. The many and varied goals of selective breeding gave us today’s many and varied dog breeds. Poor choices and all.

Cats, on the other hand, perform only two tasks: they serve as companion animals, and they control pests (and, of course, murder an appalling number of harmless and useful living things). For those two tasks, cats perform perfectly well as they are; we had no need to modify them.

Simple and logical.

Origin Story 1

Is the world’s longest river the Nile or the Amazon? Well, it depends on how, and by whom, the measuring is done. And the answer is debatable.

For a long time, the Nile was considered the longest at about 4,200 miles from headwaters to mouth, compared to the Amazon at 4,100 miles. But even the experts can’t agree on a precise methodology for identifying a river’s source. For example, does a source count if the flow halts in dry seasons?

In addition, previously unknown sources keep popping up. In 2014, a team identified a spring in Peru as an overlooked headwater of the Amazon. Its discovery, they say, makes the Amazon longer than the Nile by about 80 miles.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the 2014 study was partially funded by the Brazilian government.

Origin Story 2

Wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea) is a hardy plant native to the rugged coasts of Europe. In most habitats, other plants easily muscle it out, but it thrives unchallenged along sea cliffs due to its high tolerance for salt and lime.

Wild cabbage is notable for producing a flower spike that is up to seven feet tall and topped with bright yellow flowers. It is even more notable for being the origin plant of a boatload of nutritious vegetables that are super rich in such good things as vitamins and fiber.

The ancient Greeks and Romans probably were the first to develop new varieties of B. oleracea. Today, its cultivars fall into eight groups: (1) cabbage, (2) collards and kale, (3) broccoli and cauliflower, (4) Chinese broccoli, (5) Brussels sprouts, (6) kohlrabi (turnip cabbage), (7) sprouting broccoli, and (8) Portuguese cabbage.

So, chow down on your choice of the many healthy cultivars of wild cabbage. I recommend kielbasa and cabbage, or roasted Brussels sprouts, or baked cauliflower. With cheese sauce.

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Useless Facts

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , , , on April 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »

More “Useless Facts for Inquiring Minds.”

● Wolf packs range in size from two to 30 members and average about 10. The number varies with such factors as the availability of prey in the territory. In most cases, a pack consists of parents and a season or two of offspring.

● Abraham Lincoln was a licensed bartender.

● Change for a dollar bill can be made in 292 different ways. 293 if you count swapping a dollar bill for a dollar coin.

● The rarest color combination among humans is red hair and blue eyes. Both are recessive traits; only about 17 percent of us have blue eyes, and less than two percent have red hair. Blue-eyed redheads make up about one percent of the population.

● The ears of an elephant radiate heat to help the animals stay cool. Elephants also spray water on themselves with their trunks, after which they may roll in the dirt to add a layer of insulation.

● The northernmost community in the US is Point Barrow, Alaska.

● The soft drink Sprite was introduced in West Germany in 1959 by the Coca-Cola Company. Back then, it was part of the Fanta line and was called Fanta Klare Zitrone (Fanta Clear Lemon). It was renamed Sprite when introduced in the US a few years later to compete with 7 Up.

● The world’s fastest animal is the peregrine falcon, which swoops down on its prey at an average of 185 mph. The highest measured speed: 242 mph.

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One Billion Elephants

Posted in Miscellanea, tagged , , , on March 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Of the numerous ways we humans have botched our stewardship of the planet, it’s fair to say that the most egregious is our failure to address the global warming crisis. The Greenhouse Effect will turn the Earth into another Venus, but — oh, well.

Another of our monumental disappointments, although not at such a hair-on-fire level, is our use, overuse, and misuse of plastics.

Plastic is, literally, both a blessing and a curse. It proved to be adaptable, useful, and cheap, so we embraced it without reservation or caution. Now we are drowning in it.

Let me start with a definition. A polymer is a strong, elastic material consisting of long chains of molecules. It is common in nature; the cell walls of plants are made of cellulose, a natural polymer.

In 1869, American inventor John Wesley Hyatt created the first man-made polymer. He did so while seeking a $10,000 prize offered by a manufacturer of billiard balls. To its credit, the company wanted to find an alternative to elephant ivory.

Specifically, Hyatt treated cotton fiber (cellulose) with camphor. The result was celluloid, a partially synthetic polymer that could be molded into various shapes before it hardened. The substance was, in other words, formative. Plastic.

Hyatt’s discovery was groundbreaking. It provided an abundant new material to use in place of wood, stone, metal, etc. Although cellulose was only partly synthetic, the idea was celebrated as a way to preserve natural resources.

The first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was created in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist. Bakelite contained no natural molecules. It was durable, heat-resistant, easily moldable, and ideal for mass production. The plastics revolution was underway.

Worldwide, the chemical industry invested heavily in developing more and better types of plastic. By World War II, the US military had switched from glass and silk to acrylic and nylon.

The production of plastics in the US tripled. Plastic soon replaced steel in cars, paper in packaging, and wood in everything. Plastic was a miracle — cheap, safe, and sanitary.

But soon enough, reality intervened. Plastic doesn’t conveniently biodegrade and disappear as do most natural materials. Plastic just piles up.

As early as the 1960s, an alarming amount of plastic waste was polluting waterways and accumulating in landfills.

Although we humans have acknowledged the problem, we have not dealt with it even remotely well. That’s no surprise, because plastics are crucial and profitable to business, industry, and government.

Accordingly, other than rolling out feel-good efforts at recycling, we have done little to rethink the production of plastics or to mitigate the waste problem.

Some relevant statistics…

A few years ago, a study by several universities found that, by 2015, humans had generated 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic.

For perspective, 8.3 billion metric tons is equal to the weight of 822,000 Eiffel Towers, 80 million blue whales, or one billion elephants.

Of that 8.3 billion metric tons, 6.3 billion has been discarded as waste.

Greenpeace says we have recycled roughly five percent of our plastic waste. About 79 percent is sitting in landfills.

Every year, Americans discard 35 billion plastic bags and pieces of plastic packaging.

According to the EPA, we recycle a mere 10 percent of the plastic bags we use.

Every year, an additional eight million metric tons of plastic waste finds its way into the oceans.

Since 1988, scientists have been aware of several massive and growing garbage patches in the oceans of the world. For the most part, the patches are comprised of bits of microplastics, plus pieces of larger plastic items — pens, toothbrushes, plastic bags — that are slowly fragmenting into microplastics.

The largest of the patches, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, covers about 620,000 square miles. Some of the plastic floats on the surface in island-like clumps, but a far greater volume is suspended underwater, out of sight.

Why is the plastics crisis essentially in limbo and not being addressed intelligently? For the same reason the global warming crisis isn’t being solved: too many entities, primarily corporations and governments, profit from the status quo.

What to do? How should shrewd, enterprising, forward-thinkers — people with connections and resources — approach the problem of plastics?

For starters, they should take advantage of plastic’s pesky longevity. Find ways to use it to construct things that we want to last — highways, runways, sidewalks. Homes, schools, office buildings.

In addition, they should look for solutions that (a) make more sense than using plastics and (b) yield better profits.

In that regard, the British startup Pulpex may be onto something promising.

Recently, the UK alcoholic beverage company Diageo (Guinness, Johnnie Walter, Smirnoff) founded Pulpex, a “sustainable packaging” company that has developed a container made of wood pulp.

The Pulpex container is a bottle made of paper. As such, it is biodegradable and easily recyclable after use. Assuming the manufacturing costs are suitably low, that makes it a potential replacement for plastic and glass.

Pulpex pressure-forms wood pulp into bottles of the desired size and shape, then seals the interior with a food-grade coating. Reportedly, Pulpex bottles are made of renewably-sourced wood and can be any shape, size, or color.

Among the first commercial products to be rolled out in Pulpex containers are Diageo’s own Johnnie Walker Black Label, Heinz Ketchup, and Castrol Motor Oil.

The Pulpex model is a simple and smart idea — a positive step.

On the other hand, it doesn’t address the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste our species already has discarded.

Which, for perspective, is equal to the weight of 661,500 Eiffel Towers, 60 million blue whales, or 750 million elephants.

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This Just In

Posted in Regular Features, tagged , , , on February 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »

NAPLES, FLORIDA — Biologists have captured an 18-foot Burmese python in the Florida Everglades that weighed 218 pounds, the heaviest on record.

Burmese pythons are an invasive species from Southeast Asia first found in the Everglades in the 1990s. The snakes have no natural enemies and threaten a range of native mammals, birds, and reptiles.

The captured snake was a female carrying 122 developing eggs, which were destroyed along with the mother. A postmortem showed that the snake’s last meal was a whitetail deer.

Importing the pythons was banned by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012, but the snakes thrive in the South Florida wetlands. Their current population is about one million.

Over 1,000 Burmese pythons have been eliminated in Florida since 2013. Typically, biologists implant radio transmitters in male snakes, which always seek out the largest females, and follow the signals. Eliminating females is considered the best way to interrupt the breeding cycle.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — A South Korean software engineer marked the demise of Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s much-maligned browser, by erecting a tombstone with the epitaph, “He was a good tool to download other browsers.”

The engineer said Explorer was “a pain in the ass,” but he was forced to use it because Explorer was the default browser for so many government and business offices.

Explorer was launched in 1995. It came pre-installed on billions of computers equipped with the Windows operating system and quickly became the world’s leading browser. But many considered Explorer to be sluggish and flawed, and by the late 2000s, Google Chrome took over as the top browser.

In June, Microsoft retired Internet Explorer to focus on the Microsoft Edge browser, which was released in 2015.

“I won’t miss it,” the software engineer said of Explorer’s passing. “Its retirement, to me, is a good death.”

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — The government of New Zealand and the country’s agriculture industry have jointly agreed to a tax on methane emissions by sheep and cattle, to be paid by farmers and the farming industry.

Currently, agricultural emissions are exempt from such taxation, and pressure has increased for industry and the government to take action.

New Zealand, population five million, is home to 26 million sheep and 10 million cows, which are the source of about half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The plan hopes to reduce methane emissions at manure treatment facilities as well as from the belching of farm animals.

Under the plan, farmers and agricultural businesses can reduce their methane taxes via such methods as using feed additives that minimize belching and placing covers on manure ponds.

Worldwide, agriculture is the largest source of methane emissions caused by human activity. In the U.S., agriculture causes about one-third of total methane emissions, and the oil and gas industry causes another third.

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Corvids

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , on November 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »

One special memory of my raft trips down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon is the behavior of the ravens living along the river. When we camped each night, their goal was to steal food, and they often worked in pairs to do it. Several times, I saw a raven dance and squawk to draw attention while another bird snatched unguarded food.

Ravens are members of the corvidae family, as are crows, rooks, jays, and magpies. Most experts consider corvids, especially crows and ravens, to be the most intelligent of all birds.

Scientists say that, despite having a brain the size of a pecan, they possess the reasoning ability of a seven-year-old human. True, one’s reasoning ability at age seven is a work in progress, but that’s still impressive.

In several experiments, crows quickly learned to drop stones into containers of water to raise the water level, either to get a drink or to bring food into reach.

They also regularly use twigs or sticks as tools, and they will drop nuts onto a highway so passing vehicles will crack the shells.

A family of crows usually consists of about a dozen birds. They are highly social and use a variety of caws and clicks to communicate. They use separate calls to tell their fellows that a threat is from a person, cat, hawk, or whatever.

Crows not only can recognize individual human faces, but also have the capacity to inform later generations about known threats.

In 2011, a team at the University of Washington trapped a dozen crows while wearing “caveman” masks. The crows were tagged and released and thereafter left alone.

For the next five years, researchers walked a designated route near the trapping site, some wearing the caveman masks and some not.

Initially, the team noted that the crows showed alarm and scolded people wearing the caveman mask 26 percent of the time. After 15 months, the figure was up to 30 percent. After three years, it rose to 66 percent. The researchers concluded that the crows were informing their peers and offspring that caveman humans are dangerous.

Conversely, crows will be nice to you if you’re nice to them. Instances have been recorded of crows bringing gifts — pebbles, sticks, etc. — to people who feed them.

Some 40 species of crow exist around the world. The one you’re familiar with probably is the American crow, although the fish crow and Tamaulipas crow also live in North America.

Thanks to their brain power and adaptability, crows are doing quite well as a species. Experts say their numbers over the last 40 years grew about 20 percent per decade. Their estimated breeding population now stands at some 27 million.

Impressive and interesting animals. And certainly not birdbrains.

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Useless Facts

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , , , , on October 16, 2022| Leave a Comment »

More “Useless Facts for Inquiring Minds.”

● Thomas Edison held a total of 2,332 patents worldwide. Today, the president of a semiconductor lab in Japan holds the world record — 5,843 patents and counting.

● English has more words than any other language.

● The average human sheds some 600,000 particles of dead skin per hour, or about 1.5 pounds per year.

● When viewed from the Earth, the Moon goes through eight phases as it progresses from new moon to full moon and back to new moon, as shown below. (The word gibbous refers to being more than half lighted, but less than full, which is the opposite of a crescent.)

● British author Agatha Christie (1890-1976) featured her famous detective Hercule Poirot in 33 novels, 50 short stories, and one play. Christie was honest about the character. She once described Poirot as “a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep.”

● The word karaoke comes from the Japanese words karappo, which means empty, and oke, a shortened form of okesutura, which means orchestra.

● July 4 is the day in 1776 when the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence. However, the vote to do so took place on July 2. John Adams and several other founding fathers believed that we chose the wrong day to honor.

● The average adult bald eagle weighs 14 pounds and is about three feet long. Its wingspan, however, is a full seven feet.

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Trivia Questions o’ the Day

Posted in Regular Features, tagged , , on August 15, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The Questions…

1. What is a baby puffin called?

2. What is the Ocean Ridge?

3. Only one variety of turtle cannot retract into its shell. What is it?

4. Spam is a brand of canned cooked pork created by Hormel in 1937. What two words were combined to create the word Spam?

5. What are the only mammals capable of flight?

The Answers…

1. A puffling.

2. The Ocean Ridge is a 40,000-mile-long mountain range that encircles the globe, 90 percent of which is under water. Formed by the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, it has been compared to the stitches on a baseball. It is one of the defining features of the planet, but ironically is little known.

3. The sea turtle.

4. Spiced and ham. Despite its reputation, Spam was vital during the Great Depression because it was a cheap and nourishing meat product.

5. Bats.

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Trivia Questions o’ the Day

Posted in Regular Features, tagged , , , on June 25, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The Questions…

1. What is the world’s largest known living organism?

2. What online service has the most users?

3. The term living room surfaced in the late 1800s. What were living rooms called before then?

4. When sea otters sleep, how do they keep from drifting away from each other?

5. Fireflies (Lampyridae), known for emitting light through the chemical process of bioluminescence, are classified as what type of insect?

The Answers…

1. The largest known organism is a massive network of honey mushroom fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) that occupies about 3.4 square miles in eastern Oregon. It is thought to be 2,400 years old. Locals call it the “humongous fungus.”

2. Facebook, which has an astounding 2.9 billion users. That’s more than the populations of China (1.4 billion) and India (1.3 billion) combined.

3. Mostly, they were called parlors, from the French verb parler (to speak) because that’s where people sat and talked. In the 1500s and 1600s, they sometimes were called drawing rooms — short for withdrawing, in the sense of withdrawing there for privacy.

4. They hold hands.

5. Fireflies are a variety of soft-bodied beetle.

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Useless Facts

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , , , on May 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

More “Useless Facts for Inquiring Minds.”

● Russia is massive, extending across eight time zones and bordering 14 other countries. But its economy is puny — roughly equivalent to the combined GDPs of Belgium and the Netherlands.

● The average automobile contains 30,000 parts, counting bolts and screws.

● The main ingredients of the spread Nutella are sugar, cocoa, and hazelnuts. A medium-size jar of Nutella (26 oz.) contains about 97 hazelnuts. Annually, 25 percent of the world’s hazelnut crop is used to manufacture Nutella.

● Europa, the fourth-largest of Jupiter’s 80 known moons, is slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon. Its surface is believed to be largely a crust of ice. Beneath it, scientists now think, is a liquid ocean that holds more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

● The first sharks evolved about 400 million years ago, which makes them 50 million years older than the earliest known trees.

● In the card game of whist, and in the game of bridge that evolved from it, a yarborough is a hand of 13 cards with none higher than a nine. The term is named for the 2nd Earl of Yarborough (1809-1897), who regularly bet 1000-1 against being dealt such a hand. He usually won; the probability of being dealt a yarborough is 1 in 1,828.

● The rubber band was invented in 1845 by Stephen Perry of the rubber manufacturer Messers Perry and Co., London.

● Polar bears have two layers of fur: a dense undercoat for insulation and a coarse, protective outer coat. Both layers are colorless. The bears appear white because the hairs are transparent, and they reflect all wavelengths of light instead of absorbing some and manifesting color. Polar bear skin is black, which absorbs sunlight for warmth. Mother Nature is a smart cookie.

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