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When I was a young geology student, I learned the basics of petroleum production as they were then understood. Deep layers of sedimentary rocks, including shale, were the “source rocks” for hydrocarbons. The source rocks were too difficult to exploit directly – it just wasn’t economical to mess with them. But through natural processes, the petroleum and natural gas in the source rocks sometimes migrated to “reservoir rocks.” From Saudi Arabia to Texas, the name of the game was to sink wells into reservoir rocks and extract...
Alcoholism runs in part of my family. I lost a grandfather to it, and a couple of others in the family have been affected by it to greater or lesser degrees. Perhaps something like that is true for you, or maybe you have a friend or coworker who wrestles with the malady. This is a challenging time of year for alcoholics trying to stay sober. New Year’s Eve alone can be a real test. But medical researchers are investigating new ways that doctors may be able to help people not drink. One method, recently written up by NPR’s “Sh...
As every school child knows, counting the growth rings in a tree tells you how old the tree is. But some samples of wood can tell you even more than age. That’s because some trees live in difficult environments. They grow best only when there is a good year in terms of precipitation, temperature, and the like, so they have growth rings that are quite uneven. Some are thick, representing good years for growth, while others are quite thin from when times were tough. In the southwest U.S., a lot of work has been done with t...
Cooking is part necessity, but it’s also partly cultural. The way we cook says a lot about the societies we live in and the traditions that influence our families. I know that a lot of what I do in the kitchen is an echo of what my mother taught me. When I crack an egg into a mixing bowl, I scoop out that last little bit of raw egg white in the shell with my finger and scrape it off on the edge of the bowl. My mother grew up in the Great Depression and learned not to waste food. Some of her habits have been passed down to m...
This week all of the globe enjoys roughly 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of night. The “reason for the season” relates to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. During summertime, our planet’s north pole points mildly toward the sun and those of us in the northern hemisphere get more than 12 hours of sunlight. During the winter the north pole is pointed away from the sun and the southern hemisphere enjoys more sunlight while we northerners shiver in the dark. Now, at the start of fall, we stand at the in-between time. I’ve be...
When my dog and I walk along the Snake River during the warm seasons of the year, we can both come home with a tick or two. I’m used to feeling those little legs on my skin or scalp and picking off the critters. If I’m lucky, I get to them before they attach and start sucking my blood. Because I’ve been doing this all my life I don’t get stressed out about ticks, but I do know they can carry certain diseases. Recently the Shots Website of National Public Radio reported that scientists have made an advance about an unusual...
“Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting.” So begins Stuart Firestein’s book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science.” Part of the core message in the book about how science should work is wrapped up in a brief story about a physicist named Isidor Isaac Rabi. When Rabi came home from school each day his immigrant mother didn’t ask him what he learned, but rather whether he had asked any good questions in class. That approach to thinking about learning helped propel Rabi to enormous professiona...
Scientists have been hard at work in recent years combating a significant disease of wheat. Stem rust is caused by a group of nasty fungal organisms that can infect wheat plants and devastate yields. In some cases up to 100 percent of the crop can be lost. The battle between stem rust and agricultural researchers isn’t new. Sometimes the tide runs in one direction, sometimes in another. At the end of the last century the advantage went to the fungus side. In Ethiopia and Uganda in 1998 and 1999, a new type of stem rust a...
I recently pulled some weeds in my yard. Sometimes I’m glad to have a little simple work where I can see progress, even if the effects of my labor are only temporary. I can only do a little bit at a time, having to take it slow due to arthritic knees. But one thing about pulling weeds in August stands out even when taken in small doses: it’s hot work. With the sun beating down on us, warming the whole nation, it’s easy to wonder if solar power will some day replace fossil fuels as our mainstay energy resource. That could...
We live in a time in which most animals are relatively small. If you think back to your exposure to the Ice Age, perhaps in elementary school, you may remember big mammals like the mastodon and the saber tooth tiger. Less famous but equally big was a deer the size of a modern elk and a beaver the size of a black bear. In sum, our ancestors – the people alive in the Ice Age – were small compared to a number of the animals around them. Dinosaurs are also famously large. How dinosaurs grew to be as large as they did has alw...
Each year at this time thousands of tourists embark on cruises along Alaskas stunning coastal waters. If they are lucky, the tourists experience dry weather, relatively calm seas, and breathtaking vistas. In some places the ships can get up close and personal to dramatic scenes of glaciers “calving” ice that breaks off and falls into the ocean. Although I’ve hiked up to glaciers in the Rockies and walked across them, I’ve never seen them entering the sea. I’d like to do that and have the notion recorded on my “bucket l...
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a nasty disease that attacks the central nervous system. Various people with MS experience different symptoms, and even for one person symptoms may vary over time. Some common complaints of people with MS are numbness, coordination and balance issues, vision problems, dizziness, depression, hearing and memory problems, and fatigue. MS ain’t for sissies. The cause of MS has long been a mystery. It’s likely that both genetic and environmental factors combine to determine who will come down with the...
The name “natural gas” might be a puzzle. After all, how could there be such a thing as unnatural gas? The reason we call natural gas what we do has to do with history. There was a day that people made burnable gas by heating coal. The gases that came off the coal were piped around cities where they did things like light street lamps and even power cook stoves in homes. Coal gas had its downside. For one thing, it often contained carbon monoxide. And it took energy to make the gas, so it never could be truly cheap. Hap...
Modern veterinary science is a technically advanced field. Some animals receive not just X-rays, but sophisticated scans like MRIs. If you visit a large veterinary hospital you will find cats getting chemotherapy and dogs on the receiving end of complicated surgeries. Naturally, a lot of the training vet students receive is focused on the “hard science” parts of what they will do as practicing veterinarians. But there’s also a softer side to veterinary medicine, one that’s increasingly being recognized where vet student...
As any child can tell you, the Mesozoic Era ends with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most geologists think the cause of that extinction was the impact of an enormous meteorite that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. As the theory goes, the impact was so large it led to global changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Smoke and dust raised by the collision blocked the sun’s light for a time, making temperatures drop and plants die off. Many species of both plants and animals didn’t live through the crisis, as par...
Today there are lots of options in the grocery store when it comes to apples, from the traditional varieties like Jonathan and McIntosh to newer varieties like Honeycrisp and Jazz. Where do all these new varieties come from? The answer is that there are horticulturalists always at work doing the labor necessary to breed better apples that span a wide gamut of qualities. These days that means scientific breeding done at agricultural research and extension centers. Recently I met with Prof. Kate Evans of Washington State Univer...
Sometimes “solid rock” turns out to be anything but sturdy stuff. Limestone and a couple other related sedimentary rocks are common in some parts of the country, including in Florida. The chemistry of limestone and groundwater can combine to make for sinkholes, or vertical holes in bedrock that can open up quickly. Sinkholes are caused by the fact that groundwater, percolating downward from the land surface, is acidic. And acids eat away at limestone, dissolving it. That means over time limestone bedrock can start to res...
There are two features of this time of year that make my heart glad. One is the rapidly increasing length of the day. In September we lose daylight quickly, but in the spring we gain it all back just as rapidly. Although the same pattern is repeated each year (so you’d think I’d be used to it) I’m always somehow surprised and delighted when we get to this time of year and have early sunrises and spreading daylight in the evenings. The other part of this time of year that gladdens my soul is the singing of birds. Start...
There’s a new debate in paleontology, one that took me by surprise but that shows nicely how some science works. There’s a particular type of ancient fossil called the “Ediacara fauna” found in rocks about 550 million years old. The term Ediacara is reference to a place in Australia where the fossils were located and well-described. In a complex tale that unfolded over decades both before and a bit after the Australian discovery, similar fossils were found around the world at several locations. In time people connected the se...
By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters Contributor A friend of mine recently returned to the U.S. from deployment with the National Guard in Afghanistan. One of the first things he did when he reached a military base in Texas was to buy a cup of espresso. He even took a picture of it and posted it on the Internet. Good coffee was a sure sign, he said, he’d returned to civilization. The magic in coffee is caffeine, a stimulant that keeps us coffee-drinkers going back for more every day. Many of us know that a dose of caffeine makes us p...
Eighty years ago my mother was in grade school where schoolroom paste was made by mixing a little flour and water together. Memories of that simple glue came back to her when she and I recently stood in my kitchen, mixing two small batches of flour and water. First I mixed regular “better for bread” flour with water in a little dish, then I did the same with special test flour made from a new type of durum wheat. The first mixture was a pasty, lightest-of-light-tan color, the second had a pale but clearly evident yellow hue...
BA few weeks ago I lost the use of my toilet and learned firsthand just how much I missed it when it wasn’t there. My plumbing went out of order when the pipe between my house and the city’s sewer line in the street collapsed. Pipes like that belong to the homeowner, so it was my responsibility to get it fixed. It took about a week for the workmen to come and replace it. During that week I had to go to the local fast food place to use the facilities. It got old fast. More than 2 billion people around the world today don’t hav...
We Americans are often told to eat more fruits and vegetables. Particularly this time of year, when New Year’s resolutions are still in strong force, a lot of us are trying to do better about what we eat. A breakfast of half a grapefruit and some peanut butter on a piece of toast sounds like it would be good for you, doesn’t it? For millions of Americans who take prescription drugs, the answer may be no – such a breakfast might even be quite problematic for your health. The difficulty arises because of certain effects in the...
By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters Contributor To a geologist like me, it was most notable by its absence in the political campaigns that lurched to their conclusions in November. I’m talking about an energy plan with real teeth, one that addresses everything from national security to the cost of energy to greenhouse warming of the planet. The best-known geologist in the country is T. Boone Pickens. He’s been in the energy business for decades – he’s now in his 80s – and he is still tirelessly devoted to pointing out to all who will li...
Medical science increasingly has some evidence of a principal your mother warned you about: there really is too much of a good thing. A few folks throw themselves headlong into aerobic exercise. Most of these hard-core endurance athletes start young. Many fall by the wayside in middle age, but there are also those who keep going, completing marathons and similar events well into retirement age. What happens to the heart muscles of such titans of lifelong exercise? A recent British study set out to address that question. It...
