And as we talked through a few basic criteria, more people wanted to know: What’s the difference between an asteroid and a comet? A galaxy and a nebula?…
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A colleague recently suggested—after a bit of a brouhaha about opinion pieces versus reporting—that we might consider penning an editorial explaining where our content comes from and how it is positioned in “The Freeman’s Journal,” “Hometown Oneonta” and on our website AllOtsego.com.…
Most of us think of our bodies as a single organism—just us. But the story is more complicated. Trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes live on our skin, in our mouths, and in our gut. Together, they form what scientists call the human microbiome.…
The best part about chaos is that studying chaos in nature quiets our inner chaos. That is, our nervous systems appear wired to positively respond to certain forms of natural complexity.…
On Sunday, January 4, Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society wrapped up our 57th consecutive year of participation in the National Audubon Annual Christmas Bird Count. This marks the nation’s oldest and longest-running citizen science effort dedicated to bird conservation.…
One Saturday morning in the early 1990s, when I was around 8 years old, my father and I kept to our tradition: he, a runner, would jog next to my bike as we wandered through the suburban streets of Murray, Utah. As I became stronger and older, we started exploring farther and farther from home.…
Sprites, TROLLs, ELVES—these are not fairytale beings but real and eerie atmospheric light events tied to thunderstorms, each with names as otherworldly as their appearances. Like the mysterious light-tinged footprints Nancy Drew finds in a moonlit garden, these atmospheric phenomena whisper of hidden processes and rare clues in the otherwise well-lit mystery of lightning.…
First discovered in 2015 by the Kepler Space Telescope, K2-18b quickly drew attention. It is roughly 2.6 times Earth’s diameter, making it unlike anything in our solar system—a so-called “hycean” world. Imagine a planet with a deep, global ocean beneath a huge, puffy atmosphere dominated by hydrogen and helium. It’s not unlike Lewis’ fictional world Perelandra: vast, watery, mysterious.…
What is causing so many American citizens to turn their backs on the scientific method? Why are they dismissing and deriding the hard-won, life-saving, Earth-protecting, universe-expanding knowledge we have already earned—knowledge that has cost us dearly?…
In 2023, this “Citizen Science” column focused on distinguishing science from pseudoscience; in 2024, we sought to demystify energy by studying the various flavors of real energy. This year, we’ll further develop our critical thinking skills and sleuthing abilities by looking at outstanding mysteries in physics—what the problem is, why the solution continues to elude us, and what’s been done so far to solve it.…
