The Moon And The Telephone

In the history of the discovery of climate change and its causes, there are many pioneers whose work in relevant areas is all but forgotten.  Some of these people are not widely known.  Others are widely known, but their climate-related work tends to lie forgotten in the archives.  For example: Edison is famous as an inventor and Langley is famous as an aviation pioneer, but both men made little-known contributions to our knowledge of heat.

Planetary waves, named Rossby waves because they were discovered by  Carl-Gustav Rossby in the 1930s, are intriguing natural phenomena that travel from East to West.

A new NASA study suggests two of the most destructive natural disasters of 2010 were completely natural and closely linked even though they occurred 1,500 miles apart.

Increasing resistance of pathogens to antibiotics is an important issue. The hunt for new antibiotics/antimicrobials is on. For example, the 10X’20 Initiative aims to develop 10 new antimicrobial drugs by 2020. But where will these new drugs come from?

The recent efforts in sequencing marsupial genomes might prove helpful. Since the young of marsupials and monotremes are relatively little developed at birth, and have to survive outside of the sterile environment of the uterus, their immune system has to be capable of dealing with potential pathogens in their environment.

When I saw some preliminary results in Nature about CERN's CLOUD experiment a while ago, I didn't regard it as interesting enough to write about.  

Seriously, does anyone not think the Sun impacts the climate by now?

I know, I know, in the 1990s it was all carbon dioxide, but it's no longer 2006 - anyone gullible enough to believe the French and the Germans insisted on a 1990 date in the Kyoto protocol based on science, rather than the fact that Germany simply had to close a few post-unification Soviet-era factories from World War II and France had already brought more nuclear plants online to more easily meet their goals, well, they were too stupid to keep their money anyway.

To celebrate a half year of effort, this is a blog on weekly blogging. Three tangibles are created by the process: the Science20 blog, a YouTube videoblog, and a chapter in a book of blogs (still under development). I will go through my technical suite used in production. The 20-25 hours per week will be broken down. Some data on the level of interest will be shown. Finally, the rewards of this work will be reviewed.

The LA Times has a really wonderful story about a small island off the coast of South Korea and an old woman who makes her living there by selling dried squid.

I can't be sure what species of squid, but almost certainly an ommstrephid--the squid family that includes our friend the Humboldt squid. Probably Ommastrephes or Todarodes, based on geography.