my first earthquake

This morning, at 4:42 am (PT), the U.S. Geological Survey reported that a 4.2-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco area. (read article) The quake originated about two miles east-northeast of Oakland, at a depth of 3.6 miles. Oakland is just east of San Francisco, across San Francisco Bay. I remember feeling my bed shake, waking up, and wondering if it was an earthquake. However, when I saw the clock said 4:44 am, I decided leave the investigating until the morning.

According to the USGS, "Each year the southern California area has about 10,000 earthquakes. Most of them are so small that they are not felt. Only several hundred are greater than magnitude 3.0, and only about 15-20 are greater than magnitude 4.0. " Although San Francisco is not exactly southern California, the general idea is the same. There are many microquakes each day, but this morning's quake was an unusual one. (In fact, according to the USGS site right now, in the 12.5 hours since this morning's quake, there already have been 11 more earthquakes in California today!)

Earthquakes, as most of you know, are a consequence of moving tectonic plates and are measured using the Richter scale.

The Richter scale is a standard scale used to compare earthquakes. It is a logarithmic scale, meaning that the numbers on the scale measure factors of 10. So, for example, an earthquake that measures 4.0 on the Richter scale is 10 times larger than one that measures 3.0. On the Richter scale, anything below 2.0 is undetectable to a normal person and is called a microquake. Microquakes occur constantly. Moderate earthquakes measure less than 6.0 or so on the Richter scale. Earthquakes measuring more than 6.0 can cause significant damage. The maximum quake rating ever measured is about 8.9. - HowStuffWorks

(image borrowed from some guy's blog)

science across the usa

I haven't travelled much in my life, so it was a great "hands-on" opportunity to drive across the country this summer and experience earth science! I learned so much, and I would like to share one thing I learned from each of the amazing science sites I visited on my drive from Chicago to California. (All images are my own photos - feel free to click on any of them for a larger version.)

The Badlands (South Dakota) - This national park consists of nearly 244,000 acres of some of the most bizarre landforms I have ever seen. Here, rivers and rainstorms have been eroding away the soft sediments and volcanic ash, revealing colorful bands that correspond with specific time periods in the history of the rock formation.

Wind Cave (South Dakota) - First explored by a 16 year old boy with a candle and a string, Wind Cave now has over 100 miles of known passageways, although studies indicate only about 5% of the cave has been discovered.

The most fascinating part of the cave is its entrance. The Lakota Indians have been long aware of this opening, and regard it as a sacred place. In the picture to the left, you can see a guy attempting to enter the natural entrance of the cave. (I guess he didn't care about the gate park rangers have installed to stop people from doing just that....) It is this opening (and not the cave's interior) that gives Wind Cave its name.

The wind moves depending on atmospheric pressure on the surface and inside the cave. When the pressure is higher outside than inside the cave, wind rushes into the entrances; when pressure is higher inside the cave, the wind blows out of the entrances.

The wind is driven by changes in barometric pressure. The air pressure within the cave and outside attempt to reach equilibrium. The wind blows into the cave when the barometer rises, and out when the barometer falls. This airflow may forecast how the weather is going to change. - nps.gov

This was confirmed on our visit by the presence of ominous clouds in the distance (storm approaching) and the strong winds blowing out of the natural entrance.

Mammoth Site (South Dakota) - More than 26,000 years ago, many large Colombian and woolly mammoths spent their time tediously scraping away the snow with their tusks to find food. However, scientists believe some mammoths were "lazy" and were instead lured by the more easily-accessible vegetation at the sinkhole's edge. Once these mammoths risked coming near the sinkhole's edge, it is believed they fell in, became trapped and died.

Scientists have found remains of 52 mammoths in the pit (which was discovered by chance in 1974 when they bulldozed to make a housing development). Of those 52 animals, ALL of them are male. And all, except one, are young ADOLESCENT males. Raleigh Philip, author of an educational neuroscience text, says, "It's interesting to speculate how the young Colombian Mammoths' adolescent brain may have led to their demise in the same way that teenagers take risks today."

Devil's Tower (Wyoming) - Geologists agree that Devils Tower is the core of a volcano exposed after millions of years of erosion. However, there is still debate about the exact details of its formation. This bizarre land form has been somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps that is why Stephen Spielberg used Devil's Tower as an alien communication point in his movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Also known as Bears Lodge, it is a sacred site for many American Indians. I personally like their legend the best.

In one story, two girls playing in the woods are chased by an enormous bear. The girls jump on top of a rock, but it is too small to give them safety. The Great Spirit sees the girls' predicament and causes the rock to grown to an immense size. The giant bear jumps at the girls, but cannot reach the top. His claws leave the gouges in the side of the rock that can still be seen today. - the Unmuseum

Beehive Geyser (Yellowstone Nat'l Park, Wyoming) - While Old Faithful is certainly the most famous geyser at Yellowstone, it is just one of the 10,000 geothermal features found in the park. The geyser in the picture is Beehive Geyser, an unpredictable cone geyser with water reaching 93 °C (199 °F) and eruptions up to 200 feet! A cool thing about this geyser is that there is a small vent located a few feet east of Beehive, called Beehive's Indicator, which erupts about 6 feet, 10-20 minutes before an eruption. When we walked by the sputtering indicator, we decided to stick around for the show!

Yellowstone Nat'l Park, (Wyoming) - Thermophiles, or microbes that live in extremely hot conditions, make up these colorful bacterial mats. Pigments (like chlorophyll and carotenoids) within the microbes are responsible for their colors. The run-off channel from a hot spring, for example, is white or clear near its source. This water is heated by the magma just under the earth's crust! Only a few single-cell bacteria live in this boiling water, which is 93 °C (199°F). (Pure water boils at 212°F at sea level.) As the water slightly cools to 167°F farther downstream, the first colorful forms of bacteria show up. Shades of green to pink to orange to yellow-brown to gray indicate bacteria growing in slightly different temperature regions on the mat.

(Yellowstone Nat'l Park, Wyoming) - At the Mammoth Hot Springs, I learned that these white tiered formations were travertine. This mineral is formed when hot water dissolves the limestone beneath Mammoth and brings it to the surface where it cools, and and forms this delicate mineral. These terraces (in the picture) are like "living sculptures," since they can change with changes in temperature, water flow, and bacterial concentrations. (Notice the colorful thermophile bacteria mat in the background.)

Mud Pots! (Yellowstone Nat'l Park, Wyoming) - I was somewhat familiar with hot springs before my Yellowstone trip, but I was was never introduced to their close cousins, the fumarole and the mudpot. The mudpots quickly became my favorite geothermal feature, mostly due to their "bloop bloop" sounds. A mudpot or paint pot is a sort of hot spring or fumarole consisting of a pool of usually bubbling mud. Watch my Quicktime video to see a mudpot hurling mud into the air.

Craters of the Moon (Idaho) - I saw fields of lava, both áa ("ay-ay") and pahoehoe ("pa-hoy-hoy") lava. (I liked the sound of those names!) The highlight of this visit had to be exploring the caves formed by the collapse of giant lava tubes. The tubes were originally formed as hot lava melted and rock in its path, while the surface of the lava in contact with the air hardened (forming the "roof" of the cave). When these tubes collapsed, they made great caves to explore!

Finally, I couldn't resist... this picture is one of my favorites from the trip. You don't see this in Chicago!

what the world eats

Speaking of food, there is an amazing photo gallery from Time Magazine. (It is based of a book called Hungry Planet.) Each of the 15 photos show family members standing around the food that would make up a series of typical meals for the week, plus the weekly cost and a list of their favorite foods.

Not surprisingly, the most processed food surrounds... you guessed it. The American families. This is even more intriguing to me as I am currently reading An Omnivore's Dilemma. This book discusses the food processing that I (and many Americans) seldom consider. (For instance, did you know there are 38 ingredients required to make a Chicken McNugget?!) If you are not so interested in reading the entire book, you could check out the article author Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times. Some of his advice includes:

Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

food hacking

What happens when the world's leading hacker chefs skill up on organic chemistry and buy centrifuges for their kitchens? Is your palate ready for "meat glue", "cooking" with liquid nitrogen, and "liquid noodles"? ... [this] looks at the growing role of science in fine dining kitchens with examples from the restaurants that are inventing the exciting field of molecular gastronomy. (Dorkbot)

I am a terrible cook, and usually consume food I can carry in one hand (apple, bagel, rice cake). However, my interest in food preparation was piqued when I read about food hacking! This trend, popularized by scientifically-minded chefs, is based on the principle of "creat[ing] dishes based on the molecular compatibilities of foods." For example, a food hacker might combine chocolate and oysters (!) due to the similarities in their molecular make-up.

Marc Powell, a San Francisco-based hacker chef, is well known in the field of "molecular gastronomy." His website (foodhacking.com) established a food hacking wiki in June of 2006, where fellow food hackers can go to share ideas and "Experiments/recipes." Many of the recipes require unusual tools such as a nitrous oxide siphon or a centrifuge. Other recipes require exotic chemicals, like "meat-glue" which can combine chicken and beef into a single slab of meat referred to as "chick-a-beef."

Martin Lersch, from Oslo, Norway, holds a PhD within the field of organometallic chemistry and maintains a blog about molecular gastronomy and the connections between science and cooking.

Here in Chicago, interested parties can experience molecular gastronomy bliss at Moto (google map).

You don't just eat chef Homaro Cantu's food. You gape in disbelief as you are instructed in how to handle his offbeat creations with even more peculiar utensils: The whole thinking is like a three-star science lab. (from one of many reviews of the restaurant)

I experienced the 10 course meal there recently. The meal began with an tasty edible menu nestled on top of a micro-salad. I don't want to give away all the good parts, but let's just say the meal included lasers, liquid nitrogen, and dehydrated macaroni. It was an (albeit pricey) experience I would enthusiastic recommend.

moving giant marine animals

When I read that two new whale sharks arrived at the Georgia Aquarium on Friday, June 1st, while the recently-born beluga whale is making plans to leave the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago some time this summer, I couldn't help but wonder - how do you transport these giant animals?

Well, the two whale sharks were flown 8,000 miles from Taipei, Taiwan on a specially-designed cargo plane with 20-foot-long fiberglass tanks with oxygen machines and other equipment to keep them healthy on their trip. When they arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, their tanks were transferred to two flatbed trucks and driven to the aquarium surrounded by an escort of Atlanta police cars with their blue lights flashing. (video) They will join three other whale sharks in their new home in a 6 million gallon tank.

Qannik, the male Beluga whale born back in August, 2000, is leaving Chicago and heading for Tacoma, Washington's Point Defiance Zoo. Qannik's mother, Mauyak, is pregnant again and expecting the new calf this fall. The mother/son bond between Qannik and Mauyak has all but disappeared as he grows into a sexual mature adult, and he must leave the facility to avoid interbreeding between him and his mother. Qannik is now 11 feet long and weighs about 1,000 pounds. In his new home, he will live in a whale pool with Beethoven, a 14-year-old 1,600-pound male beluga.

Qannik will travel in a specially-designed freight plane, riding in a "custom-made, fleece-lined sling suspended in a shallow tank of ice water." Trainers at the Shedd have been putting Qannik in and out of the sling repeatedly this year, using it for check-ups and exams, which will help Qannik be more comfortable with the device during his trip.

UPDATE (6.11.07) Qannik has arrived at the Tacoma zoo!

The aquarium kept the timing of Qannik's move under wraps to stave off protests, officials told The News Tribune of Tacoma for a story posted on the paper's Web site Sunday.

The whale traveled inside an "enormous, foam-padded plastic tank in the DC-8 plane for a flight that cost $84,000." The zoo website has posted photos of Qannik's adventures!

so many deformed cicadas

A student asked me why there are so many deformed cicadas. You know, the ones with the shriveled wings, or even the ones who harden halfway out of their old exoskeletons. I read more in the Chicago Gardener blog. (You might want to check out the rest of the cicada posts too!)

John Cooley, a biologist at the University of Connecticut says it is not the lawn chemicals doing the damage, although humans are the ultimate culprit.

When cicada nymphs emerge, they must find something vertical to climb and stake out perching places to molt. At its perch, each cicada slips out of its nymph shell and then must hang undisturbed on that perch until its new exoskeleton unfolds and begins to harden properly. If it is disturbed during that time, its exoskeleton will be deformed ("faulty ecdysis," to the scientists).

In regular woody settings, there are plenty of trees, shrubs and tall grasses to support the cicada population. But here in the suburbs, yards are carefully landscaped, with neatly trimmed lawns and a few strategically placed trees and bushes, which limits the number of perches for the nymphs to hang on.

Since many cicadas must crawl onto the same places, they often bump into or climb over each other. This is a problem for those light-colored, recently molted cicadas who are waiting for their exoskeletons to harden. At the delicate stage when they must hang undisturbed, they are finding themselves trampled by other cicadas. This causes the many deformed cicadas.

The University of Connecticut Dept. of Ecology agrees, "Cicadas sometimes fail to properly inflate their wings after molting; such individuals can be found in low vegetation in any emergence.... The cicadas in the picture below came from a 1990 emergence in a suburban front yard near Chicago. Many of the cicadas in this area had deformed wings. Possible explanations include crowding (during molting) and use of lawn chemicals."


A University of Illinois entomologist believes it is normal to have so many deformed cicadas, although normally predators would eat them before we would see them. However, with these cicadas, there are so many insects, the predators can't keep up! (Chicago Cicada Central)

our ginkgo tree

The Ginkgo tree is one of the oldest trees on earth. Fossils of Ginkgo relatives have been found in rocks dating back 270 million years. For centuries, people thought the Ginkgo was extinct, until is was found growing in remote parts of China in the mid-1700s.

The word Ginkgo comes from a misspelling of the Japanese word "ginkyo" or "silver apricot." Other people attribute the word to the older Chinese word meaning "silver fruit."

Not that you'd want to hang around the fruit of the female ginkgo tree. While most plants are hermaphrodites, ginkgos have separate male and female trees. The female trees produce fruit that become a mushy, foul-smelling mess on city sidewalks in the fall. The fruit contains butanoic acid, which makes it smell like rancid butter. For this reason, landscape suppliers will only sell male cultivars, or trees that are male clones of existing trees, to ensure maleness. Don't know if your Ginkgo is male or female? Don't let a few years of non-smelliness convince you - female trees will not fruit for 20 years more. (Ours is a male cultivar.)

Ginkgos are very successful in urban settings and are well-known for being disease and pest-free. (Although, I am not sure they are immune to the ovipositors of the female cicadas. That's why we decided to cover our new Ginkgo for the duration of the 2007 periodical cicada emergence!)

Ginkgos are deciduous dioecious gymnosperms (deciduous = they lose leaves yearly, dioecious = male and female are separate, gymnosperm = "naked seed," meaning their seeds are not encased in ripened fruit, although the females do not produce actual cones.)

Kingdom Plantae -- Plants
Subkingdom Tracheobionta -- Vascular plants
Superdivision Spermatophyta -- Seed plants
Division/phylum Ginkgophyta -- Ginkgo
Class Ginkgoopsida
Order Ginkgoales
Family Ginkgoaceae -- Ginkgo family
Genus Ginkgo L.

The only living member of the Order Ginkgoales is the Ginkgo biloba! The word biloba means "two-lobed" and refers to its distinctive leaf shape.

Many people take Ginkgo biloba extracts (widely available at drugstores) for a variety of health issues, however, most often as a memory enhancer (to improve memory). "Some smaller studies for memory enhancement have had promising results, but a trial sponsored by the National Institute on Aging of more than 200 healthy adults over age 60 found that ginkgo taken for 6 weeks did not improve memory," as reported in a 2002 JAMA article.

SOURCES: Ohio State Horticulture Page, National Institute of Heath (NIH) Ginkgo Fact Sheet, The Ginkgo Pages.

bad day at the fish farm

If I ever think I'm having a bad day at work, I will think of this story. Four workers in Turners Falls, Massachusetts fell into a 18-foot filtration tank filled with a mixture of sandy fish feces. The workers were standing on a pad, attached to the tank by a bracket, when the bracket broke, plunging them into the vat of fish waste. The men were rescued, treated and expected to be fine.

Turners Falls Fire Capt. David Dion comments, "It was very slimy and it was heavy," he said. "Never seen anything like it in my life."

The Australis Aquaculture fish farm in Turners Falls farms barramundi, a replacement for grouper. While we're on the topic, did you ever think of where your fish comes from? There are two types, wild and farm-raised. While fishing fish in the wild can quickly destroy ecosystems (think Happy Feet), farm-raised fish can cause similar havoc.

According to a 2002 article in Time Magazine, aquaculture (as opposed to agriculture) is already the world's fastest-growing food industry, with production increasing more than 10% a year. This is good because "about half the world's wild fisheries have been exhausted by overfishing. In the North Atlantic, one of the most depleted oceans, populations of popular fish are just one-sixth of what they were a century ago." Theoretically, when you eat farm-raised fish, you are saving a wild fish from being removed from the wild.

In fact, ecologists and economists warn that, at the current rate without any changes, the world will run out of seafood by 2048. According to the Washington Post, "the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution and other environmental factors are wiping out important species around the globe, hampering the ocean's ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease."

However, there are many critics of fish farming. According to that same Time article, Otto Langer, a biologist who worked 30 years for Canada's Department of Fisheries, says "a large salmon farm may pour as much liquid waste into the sea as a small city." Not only can fish farms contribute to polluting the waters, but they deplete the supply of wild fish in order to feed their farm-raised counterparts. This leads to some pretty unnatural stuff.

Because salmon are voracious eaters of smaller species, it takes several pounds of wild fish, ground up into meal, to yield 1 lb. of farmed salmon — an exchange that depletes the world supply of protein. The diet of farmed salmon lacks the small, pink-colored krill that their wild cousins eat, so the flesh of farmed fish is gray; a synthetic version of astaxanthin, a naturally occurring pigment, is added to the feed.

Also consider the effects of disease, parasites, severe overcrowding of fish, and the antibiotics (farmers give to protect their fish) leaking into the waters.. Also there are potential problems when farm-raised fish escape into the wild, interfering with the natural ecological balance of the area.

Shrimp are particularly damaging to the environment. Shrimp farms can actually raise the salinity of surrounding waters, and the waste run off can kill trees in area. Interestingly enough, Time has some praise for particular invertebrate farms.

On an eco-friendly scale, bivalves generally rate highest among the more than 220 species of fish and shellfish that are cultivated commercially. Mussels and oysters are filter-feeders that make the surrounding water cleaner, so small-scale farming of them is not usually harmful to the ecosystem.