Archive | March, 2013

Patrick Daniel, of Squids4Kids, dissects a Humboldt squid at the 2012 Bay Area Science Festival. Photo by Ken Baltz

Squid: Science ambassadors

Marine biologist Bill Gilly wasn’t prepared for the greeting he received from St. Andrew’s Episcopal school in 2008. He’d come to the Saratoga, Calif. school to teach a special lesson on the Humboldt squid, complete with a dissection. Gilly approached the school and saw a line of ten-year-olds stretching out the door of his classroom….

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But is it Eco Art?

Environmental art pioneers Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison have an exhibit at UC Santa Cruz’s Sesnon Gallery this quarter. It’s part of a larger focus on environmental art, including a series of lectures on Wednesday nights. I’m in Mountain View on Wednesdays and couldn’t attend the lectures, but the guests are an intriguing mix of…

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Crumb stars suggest Milky Way was cannibalistic

Billions of years after going on a cannibalistic binge, our own Milky Way galaxy has been implicated by the stale crumbs it left behind. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used Hubble Space Telescope data to spot the crumbs – ancient stars thought to be remnants of a dwarf galaxy engulfed by our…

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Broken Hearts

I started writing this post when I discovered one of my fittest friends, Rick*, a 50-year-old Ironman triathlete and veteran marathoner, has a surprisingly unfit heart. So unfit, that he didn’t show up for the Sunday morning run, a ritual rarely missed in our running community unless there’s a race to attend or a death…

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