Science/Technology Archives – Page 5 of 38

March 14, 2025March 20, 2025

A Disjointed Post

Rendered by Google AI, this Frankenstein robot drawing is the only creative AI used here

Surgery is the topic of today’s post, namely because I had shoulder arthroplasty last Tuesday. The technique was reverse shoulder replacement and, as you ask, what is that? be assured that I will get there. We have to cover a little anatomy, anthropology, Popular Mechanics, history (of course), and technology along the way.

Fish Gotta Swim, Horses Gotta Run, Humans Gotta Throw Spears

Let’s talk about joints, specifically shoulders, ball-and-socket joints, and the term synovial. I had originally thought that fish had no ball-and-socket joints, and I was going to claim that it was the reptiles, crocodiles crawling out of the water, who began to develop those movable arm and leg joints rather than fins. But it turns out that, even at the beginning, fish had some types of ball-and-socket joints in their jaws, in their vertebrae, and even in their fins.

Synovial=(Greek) put together+egg=the shape of certain joints

The word synovial is important here because it means that within rigid bones, there is a hollow part and a bumpy part that fit together. Even with fish, there were hollow/bumps that fit together in fins and jaws which allowed for more flexibility and rapid movement. When reptiles developed the ability to walk on land and swim in the water, those fins turned into longer bones with multiple places for movable joints.

January 22, 2025January 24, 2025

The Dragon Hunt

Dragon from San Francisco New Year parade, 2020. Kajmeister photo.

A few weeks back, while still wrapped in the blanket of dinosaur research, I started thinking about serpent gods, flying monsters, and dragons. I wondered how scholars had addressed this question, but when a few glances at research led to papers on children’s stories and the ancestral memory of tree shrews, I gave up quickly. It was Christmas; I had presents to wrap and muffins to bake. Those few who discussed the possible origins of dragons appeared limited to art museums, mythology experts, or psychologists, rather than historians or paleontologists.

But last Thursday was of all things, Appreciate a Dragon day, according to Sandra Boynton. And we are finishing the Year of the Dragon, after all, with January 29th ending this most auspicious year and moving on to a different animal in the Chinese calendar, Year of the Snake.

Perfect timing to take another dive into the topic.

It seemed a simple question. After all, dinosaurs once covered the earth, which, at the beginning of the Triassic, was a single land called Pangaea. The continents split up after the dinosaurs proliferated, so dinosaur fossils now cover the globe, with similar species now found flung far apart in Argentina, the Rockies, and the Gobi Desert. Dragon stories also span the globe. It seems a question with a fairly obvious answer: Were human ideas and stories about dragons influenced by dinosaurs, by fossils found by ancient, primitive paleontologists?

June 10, 2024June 27, 2024

The Murky View of Cloud Brightening

Ocean ships create cloud trails, stillshot from NASA video offered by geoengineering.global.

We are in a serious pickle. We can’t even agree whether we should test equipment to run experiments to make climate change better because … well… climate change affects everybody. We don’t know what we don’t know and can’t find out because we can’t even talk about it without surfacing hysteria. This is the conundrum I surmised last week, reading about a story on environmental research. The Alameda City Council, the decision-makers for a nearby local town, voted last Wednesday against allowing the continuation of an experiment to spray sea water into the ocean air to measure its effectiveness as a strategy that might lessen the effects of climate change. It made me curious.

Why was this experiment so “controversial,” as many of the headlines said? Why did Alameda “overrule its staff,” as the New York Times described it? I dug into the weeds a little and found that there’s a lot of weeds here. I did end up a bit more optimistic about the transparency of city governments, but more pessimistic about our ability to solve climate change. It’s a mess! And it’s going to get messier before it gets better, if this is any indication.

Do You Have a Permit?

The bare bones of what happened is as follows. Scientists from the University of Washington wanted to study the usefulness of a machine that would spray seawater into the air. The goal of the spraying would be to create an effect called Marine Cloud Brightening, which I’ll explain shortly. They had arranged to put their sprayer on to the deck of an old naval carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet, which is now docked and used as a tourist museum. It’s docked in Alameda, a peninsula connected to Oakland that sits in the San Francisco Bay. Alameda used to have a naval base, hence the Hornet, hence the docking facilities.