Wow, I didn’t realize how burned out I’d gotten on daily blogging. Do I still have any readers, after finishing “100 Days of Science” and then logging off for a whole week?
Well, stick with me, because I just needed a break. I won’t blog daily any more, but I’m still here! Today I’m in Raleigh, NC, after spending Mother’s Day with my Mom. This afternoon, I’m meeting a new Twitter/blogosphere connection, Bora Zivkovic, for lunch.
And tomorrow, I’m heading up to West Virginia to (visit my Grandmom and) see THAT TELESCOPE, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the world’s largest fully steerable single aperture antenna. It’s operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
I’ve wanted to see the Green Bank observatory for years. I relished visiting one of the NRAO’s other sites a while back, the Very Large Array, particularly because it happened to lie along beautiful Pieway 60 (oops, highway) near Pie Town, New Mexico …
The Green Bank array appeals to me for so many reasons. First, I love West Virginia, since my Mom’s side of the family hails from there, and I’ve visited all my life. Second, the Green Bank telescope was the first to confirm that the Huygens probe had successfully landed on Saturn’s moon Titan back in 2005, by detecting its signal. I was rooting for that mission especially because I was fond of Martin Tomasko at the University of Arizona, who headed up the team running one of the imaging instruments aboard the probe. At the time, I was following the Cassini-Huygens mission for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
I met some of the Green Bank media relations folks in January, during a poster session at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, CA. And that’s when I learned about an incredibly innovative project they have going. On Thursday I’ll tour the site and learn more about the project — and, most likely, be blown away by the spring beauty in those West Virginia hills. Check back later in the week for an update about the observatory — and maybe a little tribute to the spotted salamanders that were my childhood summer pets, because I also plan to turn over leaves on my Grandmom’s bank, and look for them …
Wow, 100 blog posts in 100 days … this has been big fun! I started this intense blogging effort in late January, when the economic slow-down made an acute showing in media outlets. I wasn’t getting paid assignments for a while, and I found myself without a regular outlet for what I love to do most: write about science. So I decided to utilize my own website! Through blogging, I’ve learned a lot about this fascinating realm called the blogosphere and explored social media outlets like Twitter. Every day, I’ve gotten to indulge my nerdy love of all sorts of science. Because I was so actively seeking story ideas, I ended up being able to propose more stories to my paying outlets (most of which have now rebounded significantly from the lull), and I even broke into a couple of new outlets, including Universe Today and Scientific American.
A lot of people have asked me what happens after the “100 Days.” The fact is, I really like blogging. I’ll continue to do it, but not every day. And certainly not on the weekends, when nobody’s reading! The blog’s new name will be unveiled after a brief break, while I enjoy the rest of my road trip with my dad to see my two brothers (right now we’re with the one in Florida).
I might not post another entry until Thursday …
Or maybe I will, and you just won’t see it.
Why? Because maybe I’ll see about borrowing this new invisibility cloak, that’s been created by researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley.
Seriously! Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak” from nanostructured silicon that conceals the presence of objects placed under it.
The rest of this post, Day 100 of “100 Days of Science,” will be about the amazing work of Zhang’s team, which takes me back to the days of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells and a fifth grade teacher, who once said anything man can imagine, we will eventually be able to do.
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Carbon dioxide, of course, isn’t the only gas we emit into the atmosphere. Methane, a highly effective greenhouse gas, belches from landfills. And about five percent of our gas emissions comprise mercury.
We get it back: About 90 percent of human methylmercury exposure comes from ocean fish and shellfish — about 40 percent of that from tuna, a predator high in the ocean food chain.
A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey has confirmed a fascinating (if a bit ominous) mercury cycle that connects the atmospheric source to our dinner tables.
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Graphic by the Montana Environmental Information Center, on the web at www.meic.org
We know we have the technology to inject carbon dioxide into the ground. Oil and gas companies have been doing it for years, as a way to push the goods to the surface.
But can we make it stay there, as a way to keep it out of the atmosphere?That’s the multi-million-dollar question.
Carbon sequestration research got a boost this week when President Obama, speaking to the National Academy of Sciences, announced major funding for 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers across the country, which will build on existing institutions working on the gamut of carbon-alternative energy solutions.
“In no area will innovation be more important than in the development of new technologies to produce, use, and save energy,” Obama said, noting that “our future on this planet depends upon our willingness to address the challenge posed by carbon pollution.”
One of the funded programs is the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The project numbers among several sprouting up across the West, part of a gathering tide of fledgling carbon sequestration tests.
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Everett Ruess. Credit: Dorothea Lange, probably
If you’re a person who loves the American West, you’ve probably had the impulse to just go get lost in it.
I mean, for a long time.
As in: forget the job, and any notions of a home or marriage … just walk, across deserts and through dusty Indian towns, down into canyons, to the tops of ridges where painted desert views lead to horizons sporting tiny bluish mountain ranges, shimmering like little mirages in the distance.
If you’re a person who loves the American West and is given to such impulses, you’ve no doubt heard of Everett Ruess, because he did that, more or less — until he disappeared.
Ruess, a 20-year-old artist and writer, wandered the Southwest in the early 1930s on a burro. For 75 years, no one has known what became of him. His legacy has traveled as a folk story through generations of backpack adventurers, passed along over campfires and between adventure-loving friends in reverent tones. Many people, like me, have toted the paperback about the mystery on their own backpacking trips.
Mystery solved.
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