Category: Science

Here is the next batch of my super-heavy element panels.
I’m up to 112 now. Six more to go!

Here are the next three elements that I had made little panels for, to add to my extended ‘Elements’ picture collection.

Life is short for these, the elements with the heaviest atoms. Their atoms emerge from high-energy nuclear collisions, usually with scant time for detection before they break up into lighter atoms.

My current digital picture project is to add slides to my set of pictures for the elements. The pictures I have are scanned from the 1965 book ‘The Elements’, published by TIME-LIFE magazine.

At that time (1965), the elements up to Lawrencium (atomic number 103) were known. By 2002, scientists had created and identified all the ones up to Oganesson (atomic number 118).  The periodic table of elements is now ‘full’ (see picture below).

I hope the nuclear physicists are not just playing with their particle accelerators, but are contributing to the quest for the world’s first fusion reactor (that can produce gigawatts of energy). We need to save the planet.

Here are some scans from the 1965 book (Oxygen, Iron, Copper and Radon).
I had text blocks (from the book) for Einsteinium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium and Lawrencium), but wanted to add in pictures for them.
For the rest up to Organesson, I will have to make brand new up text blocks, as well as pictures.

 

 

‘Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!’ – Radio message from David Johnston (30), United States Geological Survey (USGS) volcanologist who was killed by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State, May 18, 1980 at 8:32 AM

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It’s 40 years on, and Mount St Helens is still an active volcano and under constant surveillance. From the USGS website: The 1980 eruption jump-started interest in the study of explosive eruptions and monitoring efforts to improve warning systems that help mitigate hazards. The eruption underscored the importance of using as many monitoring tools as possible to track unrest and eruption activity.

The last supermoon of 2020 is out tonight, and its color was a rich cheesy yellow, from my vantage point here.

Here is a pair of pictures that I found on Twitter, of the International Space Station transiting against the Sun, and against the Moon.
The scales of the pictures are the same!  .. our Sun is gargantuan, of course — its diameter roughly 400 times that of the moon —but it is also 400 times further away from Earth, than the moon.

Here’s my blurry photo of the full moon. It’s the pink moon, and it’s a supermoon*.

*A full moon closer than usual to Earth, so it looks a little larger. It’s called pink, because of the bloom of ground phlox this time of year (a pink flower common in North America).

Researchers from the University of California Irvine discovered that during landing, toads’ muscles adapt to the varying intensity of impact. As the creatures hop over longer distances, their landing muscles increasingly shorten in anticipation of larger impacts. UC Irvine biologist Emanuel Azizi says that toads are ideal for studying jumping and landing because they’re so good at it, and that studying them provides the basic science on how muscles respond during high-impact behaviors like landing or falling. [Video clip by University of California @uofcalifornia on giphy.com].

P.S. Also: it’s Saturday, so the stock market cannot go down.

It’s the first day of the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Rat, and a new start to rotating through the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac.

The coronavirus outbreak, and the lockdowns in place in multiple cities in China, are dampening the celebrations in the country’s Mainland badly, though.

Here we are again, with national coverage of the massive wildfires in California, and scenes of their total destruction. I’m not sure the preventive power outages from Pacific Gas & Electric have helped that much. (The largest ever: 2 million+ people without power for 5 days of intentional outages).

It seems it will take a combination of hardening PG&E’s electric grid (example: metal powerline poles instead of wood), aggressive cutting of trees & shrubs near power lines, and designating high-risk areas as out-of-bounds for new development or even for rebuilding.  The last few years, Governor Gavin Newsom and his predecessor have already poured an extra $1.2 billion into new planes, helicopters, more firetrucks and vegetation thinning.

Hurricane-strength winds (more than 80 mph), had made several of the fires spread rapidly, making them into blow torches that light up the tinder-dry vegetation.

I played a little social tennis tonight on the Woodland Park tennis courts. We rained out on both Tuesday and Thursday of last week, so it was great to finally get out and play.

And hey! the muscle memory from many years of playing tennis is still there, sending signals to the old muscles and creaky bones— to run down that incoming shot, and strike it, so it goes back over the net.