Posts

February 20, 2013

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11:58 AM | Parícutin: “Here Is Something New and Strange”

Imagine a pastoral scene, seventy years ago in Mexico. On a sunny February day, a woman and her son watch over their flock of sheep from the shade of oaks; her husband strides across his fields toward a pile of branches that need burning, while his helper completes a furrow. The oxen begin to turn; [...]

February 19, 2013

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10:00 PM | Speedy Beet

There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But, in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from ever feeling familiar, to keep push his listeners to a kind of psychological limit.

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9:40 PM | Hives of Scum and Villany

Yours truly, writing for Wired Magazine: Luke Skywalker is a bumpkin. Before heading off to fight the Empire, he apparently never gets much farther than a country store that sells power converters. Over the course of three movies, his every foray into urban-ness strips away a layer of naïveté, shattering his innocence so utterly that [...]∞

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6:30 PM | Fifty states with equal population

Neil Freeman redrew the United States so each state had an equal population. Bonus: He also named ‘em. According to Freeman, I live in Casco and was born in Menominee. Freeman joins a proud tradition of rejiggering state borders. ∞∞

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5:10 PM | What Nuclear Bombs Tell Us About Our Tendons

Audrey Carlson, reporting for NPR: A big reason the Achilles is such a foot-dragger at getting better is that the tendon tissue we have as adults is basically the same as we had when we were teenagers. That finding was published earlier this week in The FASEB Journal. But how the researchers figured that out is every [...]∞

February 18, 2013

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8:36 PM | Virtual Chinook

Chinook (from geography-dictionary.org; edited for metric units & accuracy): The warm dry wind which descends downslope on the lee side of a mountain range. It is warm from the compressional heating [...]

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5:45 PM | Two bears, mountain lion visit L.A. suburb

Los Angeles Times: No one was hurt, and the animals quickly returned to the wilderness. (Via Jon Christensen.) ∞∞

February 15, 2013

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8:08 PM | Floating Islands to the Rescue

Lisa Palmer, reporting for the New York Times: Environmentalists have filed lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency to press for tighter standards for nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. Worried that the agency might step in with new mandates, farm groups are weighing a temporary solution: floating islands that could process the nutrients before they reach the [...]∞

February 14, 2013

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7:16 PM | Going With the Flow

Michael Kimmelman, reporting for the New York Times: Water management here depends on hard science and meticulous study. Americans throw around phrases like once-in-a-century storm. The Dutch, with a knowledge of water, tides and floods honed by painful experience, can calculate to the centimeter — and the Dutch government legislates accordingly — exactly how high [...]∞

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5:38 PM | Earth From Space

Truly an amazing show. I’d say that even if I didn’t work for NOVA. Worth a watch. ∞∞

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9:58 AM | Interlude: What Vehicles Say About Temperatures Within a Volcanic Blast

In our previous installment regarding the effects of the May 18th, 1980 Mount St. Helens directed blast on vehicles, we learned a valuable lesson. I will call upon commenter Angusum from Boing Boing to sum up: “The main thing we learn from studying vehicles trapped in the path of a volcanic eruption is that you [...]

February 13, 2013

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8:14 PM | Water, water everywhere, but not enough to farm

Robert Frederick, writing for PNAS: Today, there are already several regions around the world where demand for food and water exceed local supply. But human populations continue to grow in these regions because of the global market for food: exporting food also virtually transfers the water needed to grow that food—called “virtual water”—from production areas [...]∞

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7:24 PM | Where will sea levels rise the most?

Peter Aldhous with another great interactive for New Scientist. ∞∞

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5:10 PM | Are African-Americans More Vulnerable to Climate Change?

J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society, writing for Ebony: Climate change is one of the greatest environmental challenges we face today and this will not change in the years to come. In 2004, the Congressional Black Congress Foundation (CBCF) issued a report entitled, “African Americans and Climate Change: An Unequal Burden” and [...]∞

February 12, 2013

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5:05 PM | ■ What I learned from the blizzard

Snowfall has many magical qualities, among them the ability to hush a bustling city and, in sufficient quantities, make time stand still. This past weekend’s blizzard did just that—it stopped life in its tracks. Everyone’s plans went out the window (and landed in a mounting drift, I assume). Meanwhile we all sat—contently I hope—waiting out [...]

February 11, 2013

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11:41 PM | Where’s all the snow?

We spent a few days in the Rockies last week, on a memorial trip for a family member we lost last year. We were surprised at what appeared to be [...]

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8:57 PM | Landsat 8 reaches orbit

Landsat 8, formally known as the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, successfully reached orbit today. If all goes well during the break-in phase, the new satellite will continue what is the longest-running Earth observing program. ∞∞

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8:24 PM | What Do Urban Sounds Do to Your Brain?

Jennifer Barone, writing for Discover Magazine back in 2009: We live in a sonic world, immersed in vibrations that stimulate microscopic hair cells deep inside our ears. This unseen energy influences our mood, our learning, even our health. We experience it as comforting music, as information-laden speech, or—all too often—as irritating noise, a by-product of [...]∞

February 10, 2013

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8:42 AM | Darwin: Geologist First and Last

(Happy Darwin Day! I figured today of all days would be a good one for reposting this from ETEV. It’s been slightly updated and modified from the original, in case you already knew Charles Darwin was a geologist (because you’ve read David Bressan’s post, right? Right??) and wish to spend your time playing spot-the-differences. Isn’t [...]

February 09, 2013

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5:24 PM | Landsat 8 to the rescue

Jeff Tollefson, reporting for Nature: With the passing of Landsat 5, the future of the world’s longest-running — and perhaps most influential — set of data on global change rests with Landsat 8, which is scheduled to launch next week from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. ∞∞

February 07, 2013

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5:49 PM | ■ Reading this will change the climate

It’s no secret that burning fossil fuels is changing the Earth’s climate. Emissions are bolstering the planet’s greenhouse effect, which is raising temperatures around the world. But it’s not an even warming, and neither may it all be entirely attributable to emissions alone. The heat produced from burning fossil fuels may play a role in [...]

Zhang G.J., Cai M. & Hu A. (2013). Energy consumption and the unexplained winter warming over northern Asia and North America, Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1803

Citation

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10:53 AM | Interlude: When Vehicles Become Part of the Geologic Record

The conversation might have gone something like this: Geologists: “Hey, boss person, we need to order vehicle parts and then destroy them. For science!” Boss person: “Ummm… okay.” The thing is, things happen to vehicles when they’re caught up in a directed blast. What the volcano did to them can tell us a lot about [...]

February 06, 2013

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7:52 PM | You Can Never Go Back to Nature

Annalee Newitz, with a wonderful piece at io9: You cannot yearn to get back to nature if you don’t believe that you are fundamentally not a part of it. Throughout my childhood, and in my adulthood, I never had a strong yearning to spend weeks camping or take a days-long backpacking trip. At times I [...]∞

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7:29 PM | Historic Gardens Can be Urban Biodiversity Hotspots

Maria E. Ignatieva, writing for The Nature of Cities. Over the two decades heritage parks in Europe have been re-evaluated and have begun to be seen as highly valuable urban biodiversity hotspots. Historical parks are not only witnesses of different historical art periods but also are refuges for rare flora and fauna. Very often they [...]∞

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5:51 PM | What Sea Level Rise Will Mean in Boston

Emily Badger, reporting for the Atlantic Cities: Now Boston must begin to contend with the reality that it could be even more vulnerable than New York to rising sea levels. Much of Boston was historically built on land filled in and created out of estuaries and wetlands, and the ocean itself. Logan International Airport was [...]∞

February 05, 2013

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10:35 PM | Speed

We live our lives at human speed, we experience and interact with the world on a human time scale. But this hour, we put ourselves through the paces, peek inside a microsecond, and master the fastest thing in the universe.

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8:00 PM | External Airbags Designed to Save Cyclists, Pedestrians

Clever solution. New cars are already designed with pedestrian safety in mind (it’s one reason why front ends are taller and rounder than before), but this would go a step beyond, protecting people from unyielding windshield impacts. ∞∞

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7:08 PM | What rail traffic tells us about electricity generation.

U.S. Energy Information Administration: The record increase in U.S. crude oil production during 2012 and the significant decline in coal use for domestic electricity generation were reflected in the movement of those two commodities by rail last year. Crude oil and petroleum products accounted for the biggest increase in railcar loadings among commodities in 2012, [...]∞

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4:54 PM | Stranded on the Roof of the World

Moving to evade the worst of Mother Nature may feel foreign to many of us, but for some it’s a way of life. Photographer Matthieu Paley documented the nomadic lifestyle of the Kyrgyz in Afghanistan and Pakistan as they seek out pastures for their livestock and trading for their livelihoods. ∞∞

February 04, 2013

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7:08 PM | Lava consumes subdivision

Speaking of retreating from forces of nature, NASA brings us this pair of images from Hawaii, where the Royal Gardens subdivision was slowly consumed by lava oozing from the side of Kilauea. The top aerial photograph shows what the Royal Garden subdivision looked like on February 19, 1977. The grid-like pattern was a network of roads [...]∞