I don’t normally double-post, but there are issues involved in this that are of relevance here as well as at the Journal. Reporters depend on smart people to explain things to them. That generally means people who are intimately involved in the subject at hand. When the subject matter is an issue of controversy, that …
From Plastic Manzikert: Nuclear Power is not the only option, but it is a valid option. There are flaws, of course – it’s more expensive than carbon dioxide emitting power generators. That’s an economic problem, and as the world moves away from fossil fuels, that disadvantage will go down.
Using the bike racks on Albuquerque’s buses
More drought: Farmers have threatened to protest unless they receive more government help in coping with a prolonged drought that has destroyed millions of hectares (acres) of crops. The drought has cost Romania €1.5 billion (US$2 billion) in damages and has affected more than a third of the country’s arable land, an agriculture official said …
From my colleague Sean Olson, on the discovery of brackish water 3,770 feet (1,150 meters) beneath the New Mexico desert: The county started drilling an exploratory well in the Rio Puerco about a month ago on the educated hunch there was a large supply of brackish salt water deep within the surface. It was a …
On dinosaurs and power politics metaphors: Some scientists have argued that dinosaurs came on with a bang during the period of Earth history called the Triassic, sweeping into power in what amounted to a geologic instant. But the new fossils, found at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, upend that story. As dinosaurs were beginning their rise …
Many years ago, some friends of mine did one of the all-time great April Fool’s jokes. (Note to readers. It was a joke. A hoax.) They buried a cast of a fossil dinosaur and a fossil human, and staged and documented an elaborate excavation. (Note to readers: the fossils were fake.) The “scientists” doing the …
A NASA group has come up with a new model that incorporates both remote sensing data and food prices to try to help anticipate food shortages: Brown, the lead author of a study to be published early next year in the journal Land Economics, said that until now officials have primarily studied the after effects …
Cool paper out today in GRL by Edmund Chang and Yanjuan Guo about the hurricane record. To try to estimate the number we might have missed when we had to depend on ship-board observations rather than satellites, Chang and Guo fed storm tracks from the satellite era into a simulation that included old-timey ship tracks …
It’s not exactly Albuquerque’s most scenic bike trail, but I’d have to say this is really my favorite.