When I was four years old, my pregnant mother drove my sister and me out to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah to visit my father, who worked on the original Fly’s Eye detector for the University of Utah...…
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jamie zvirzdin
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.…
Our motto here at “The Freeman’s Journal” and “Hometown Oneonta” is “putting the community back into the newspaper.” Whether you read our hard-copy newspapers or subscribe to our website, AllOtsego.com, we believe it is important to not only cover the news of Otsego County, but also to provide a forum by which its residents can contribute their own views and expertise.…
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.…
Mere days before the winter solstice this year, on December 17th, I had the opportunity to visit Stonehenge with my son and husband. Driving clockwise in roundabouts and on the left-hand side of narrow roads gave my brain a workout, but I could still spare a moment of shock as I crested the top of a hill and saw the lone group of large stones surrounded by fields and sheep.…
Here is the core question I want us to ask other risk-averse people like myself: Given the current climate change trajectory (which really does not look good when we look at it honestly), can we afford to let fear and a terrible track record prevent us from further developing nuclear energy as a consistently reliable, carbon-free energy source?…
Consider a thunderstorm, nature’s best display of electric energy. Through complicated collisions and Sisyphean updrafts within the storm, particles with negative charges are driven toward the cloud base, with positive charges accumulating near the top. This separation creates a large electric potential difference (voltage) between the cloud base and the ground below, because the ground often becomes positively charged in response.…
