I applaud you all at Iron String Press for continuing your column series “Citizen Science.” I have greatly appreciated the insights of Jamie Zvirzdin these last three years, and now look forward to more from Roberta McLain...…
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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.…
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...…
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.…
