Stories tagged Flow of Matter and Energy
Earn money, save moneyCourtesy Achim Hering
Obama's Home Depot speech
We are wasting money when heat is lost from our homes.
What would happen if economic stimulus money was used to improve the energy efficiency of our homes?
Benefits of improving energy efficiency
- Economic boost ($20 billion cash flow)
- Money saved on energy bills ($1k - $3k improvement / home X 5 million homes = $3.3 billion saved / yr on energy bills)
- Jobs creation (600,000 to 850,000 new jobs - contractors, suppliers, and inspectors)
Weatherization legislation pending
Lawmakers recently have begun pushing to offer weatherization incentives immediately as a way to create 600,000 to 850,000 new jobs.
Lane Wesley Burt, manager of building energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the program could be set up as a government rebate administered by certified contractors that would shave the money from a homeowner's bill when the work was completed. The contractor then would apply to the government for reimbursement of the incentive, similar to how auto dealers administered cash-for-clunkers rebates.
Learn more about possible weatherization incentives
Source: Los Angeles Times
Obama pushes home improvement to create jobs, save energy
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He looks happy, but it's a facade: He's very worried about phthalates, BPAs, and his manliness. (Good thing that's a glass bottle.)Courtesy sirgabeThere’s something I want to get out of the way straight off the bat: the original title for this post was “Monday Nutrition Extravaganza: Chemicals in your food, playing with your manhood!” And while that has a certain whimsical charm, a re-read revealed hidden, disturbing meaning in those words. And I didn’t want to subject you Buzzketeers to that. I just thought you should know.
So, moving on, what’s this stuff playing with our manhood, now?
Chemicalz in our foodz! And stuff.
Earlier today, I came across this study about how there seems to be a correlation between high levels of chemicals call phthalates in pregnant mothers’ urine, and a lowered incidence of “masculine play” in their male children. (“Girls’ play behavior” didn’t seem to be affected.)
Interesting, interesting.
Phthalates are a group of chemicals added to plastics to make them softer and more pliable. We all like soft plastic—no one is arguing that!—but phthalates are all over the place, and increased exposure to them (all sorts of products and packaging use phthalates) is raising concerns about how those chemicals affect us, particularly during childhood development. See, phthalates are antiandrogens, meaning that they mess with the way your body works with hormones like testosterone. Testosterone plays an important role in how we physically develop, and perhaps in how we act. The boys whose mothers had higher levels of a couple kinds of phthalates demonstrated less “male-typical” behavior. The study looked a preferred toy types (trucks versus dolls), activities (“rough-and-tumble play”), and “child characteristics.”
Now, these are slightly sticky things to go judging kids on. Some folks might argue that these characteristics aren’t linked to biology so much as social conditioning. And it feels a little weird quantifying characteristics in children (and, let’s be honest here, characteristics which may not have a solidly identified “norm,” but nonetheless have all sorts of social and sexual baggage that we are uncomfortable with and often deal with in the worst ways). However, there does seem to be some statistical association here, whatever the causal relationship is. One hypothesis is that phthalates alter fetal production of testosterone at an important period of development, affecting “brain sexual differentiation.” It’s not so hard to imagine—a year ago I did a post on how certain common chemicals in pregnant mothers seemed to be causing penis deformities in their male children. The culprit there? Phthalates. The women in that story, however, had had exceptionally high exposure to phthalates (their jobs had them in constant contact with phthalate-containing hairspray), so it’s probably not something to lose sleep over, but it’s worth knowing.
And while phthalates aren’t supposed to be in food packaging, the next article I came across (this is an extravaganza, after all) deals with another plastic additive, BPA, that is found in food packaging, and which may also cause some hormone-related havoc.
BPA has come up on Science Buzz before. It’s in all sorts of packaging and bottles (it’s the reason your over protective mother doesn’t want you to use nalgene bottles) and it may affect tissue development, potentially increasing cancer risks.
We don’t care about that, though, right? Sure, cancer is out there, but in the future, not right now, you know? I know. But BPA’s latest appearance in the news may bring some immediacy to the concern over its use. Concern for some people. For men, I mean.
Chemical BPA in workers related to sex problems, says the Washington Post. “Sex problems”? We don’t want those! Chinese men working in a factory that uses BPA were found to have high rates of sexual problems. (I won’t be defining what “sexual problems” are because whatever you just imagined was probably correct.) Now, these guys have BPA levels about 50 times higher than the average American. But, still, something like 90% of Americans have detectable levels of BPA in their urine. Again, probably nothing to lose a lot of sleep over, but something worth knowing about. This professor is of the opinion that BPAs should be banned, even though most of us will probably never be exposed to dangerous levels of it, because a) it’s not a natural part of our diet; b) it’s not actually necessary in plastics processing; c) it accumulates in the body, and we still don’t know what level at which it begins to become harmful (ask those Chinese guys); and d) it’d be relatively easy to get it out of the food and water supply, unlike some other potentially harmful chemicals.
Accepting that scientific studies are necessarily very focused to eliminate variables, both of these stories still left me wondering what affect phthalates and BPAs have on women and girls. On one hand, one tries to avoid the mindset that average human physiology=male physiology, but on the other hand it’s usually just males that have penises, making their medical problems a little more hilarious.
There are so many… things out there, and they’re all doing… stuff! Interesting to know.
An electromagnetic gun: What's it for shooting? Disks, mostly.Courtesy ScienceApeOh, you thought I forgot about the Geoengineering Extravaganza I promised, after just one entry? Did JGordon forget? Or is he just demonstrating a tremendous lack of respect for the Science Buzz audience?
Neither, respected friends, neither. First of all, I’ve never forgotten anything in my life. (This is in case anything I do eventually relates to someone else owing me money.) And I think I’ve demonstrated my respect for y’all over the years.
No, what happened was this: on Tuesday evening, my sock caught on a nail sticking out of my kitchen floor, and I went down like a redwood. Dried or decomposing pieces of food cushioned the fall for most of my body, but I’m afraid my face landed squarely in the mousetrap, which I had just baited with fresh poison. Luckily the trap pinned my lips shut before I ate too much of the poison, but I mix some potent poisons, and it only took a little to put me out.
My poisons are designed to remove a mouse from consciousness for anywhere from a week to several months, long enough for me to shave them, and ensure that they wake up somewhere frighteningly unfamiliar, like Thailand, or inside of someone recovering from major surgery.
At any rate, I was out for almost all of yesterday. It’s good that I woke up when I did, because I was covered with mice, but I’m afraid I just never found the opportunity to do another geoengineering post.
Until now.
So, let us continue with the “forget about the greenhouse gases, and just cool this place off, now!” theories. That is, those theories that could reduce the amount of absorbed heat (from the sun) rather than reduce what’s storing the heat (greenhouse gases). It’s called solar radiation management, and it includes a wide range of potential projects. And I shall now introduce you to several, starting with the most weaksauce of them, and moving on to something with giant space guns.
When I call something “weaksauce,” I don’t mean to imply that it’s a bad idea, only that it doesn’t involve huge guns, or giant sulfur-spewing zepellins. Sort of like how cool roofs are weaksauce. Cool roofs have come up on the Buzz before. The idea is that by simply having lighter-colored roofs, more sunlight and heat is reflected back away from the Earth. And, aside from the planet heating up a little less, your house heats up a little less too, so you don’t have to use as much energy on air conditioning, and the power companies don’t have to burn as much coal, etc. Pretty neat, huh?
Unfortunately, it’d be pretty tricky to get enough people to have reflective roofs for it to make much of a difference to global temperatures—otherwise the cooling would just be local, and who cares about that, right? Plus… no giant guns, or anything.
Not like the plans to build a sunshade in space. They have guns.
Remember that season finale episode of The Simpsons, where Mr. Burns built a giant metal shade to block the Sun from Springfield? I hope you do, because some scientists are actually proposing something like that, but on a larger scale, and in space. Like, massive mirrored satellites. Or there’s the plan mentioned in this Atlantic article (which I’ve linked to before)—A professor at the University of Arizona proposes building 20 giant electromagnetic guns (rail guns?), each more than a mile long, with the purpose of firing Frisbee-sized ceramic disks into space. Each gun would fire 180,000 disks a minute, 24 hours a day, for 10 years. At that point, there should be enough disks suspended “at the gravitational midpoint between the Earth and the Sun,” that sunlight headed toward Earth would be significantly scattered… lowering the planet’s temperature. Unfortunately, the technology for these guns doesn’t exist, it would be really expensive, and it would kind of last forever. Also, one gets the feeling that this professor is just trying to make a point. On the other hand… giant disk guns.
And then there are the middle ground plans, like cloud enhancement. The idea there is to make the clouds puffier and whiter by blasting seawater up into the air with special ships. These nice, white clouds would, again, reflect more sunlight away from the Earth, cooling things down. It shouldn’t last forever, and who doesn’t like puffy white clouds? Unfortunately, it ain’t cheap, and as with all most of the other solar radiation management plans, we don’t know exactly what all the repercussions would be. Clouds are just clouds, right? Yes, but clouds affect how much rain we get, and who gets it, and how much plants photosynthesize, and so forth and so forth. And the plan is slightly less gunny than the space-sunshade thing.
Next time we’ll move on to “carbon-removal projects.” But right now I have to get the taste of mouse blood out of my mouth. (It’s an ingredient in the poison.)
A nice refreshing belch from Pinatubo: Repeat?Courtesy D. HarlowEver want to change the world?
No, I’m not talking about the awesome drums and bass album you’re working on. And I’m not talking about your new theory of about time and mountains and stuff. And I’m not talking about your award winning bowel movements.
I’m talking about shaking the heavenly spheres until they throw up a little. I’m talking about jamming your boot into the nearest orifice until the planet cries uncle. I’m talking about pinning its arms and slapping its belly until it forgets its own name in frustration. I’m talking about changing the world.
Sure, it’s sort of supervillain territory. And it used to be that you’d need a bad childhood and some sort of superpower, or maybe a giant laser for this sort of thing. But these days… these days you don’t even need to be super-mega-rich to tear the planet a new one; you only need to be super rich. And it could be that the planet needs a new one torn.
We haven’t really talked much about geoengineering here on Buzz, which is weird, because it falls under both “quick fixes” and “things that might look awesome,” categories I very much appreciate. This is why I prefer to deal with hangnails by shooting them off, and why my dog has painted-on zebra stripes. (The “quick fix” there was spray paint being used to make him look less stupid.)
Geoengineering is engineering on the global scale; it’s changing the planet to solve some problem. What if we could, for instance, stop global warming without changing our energy-hungry lifestyles? What if it was as quick and cheap as spray-painting the dog?
The thing is, many geoengineering projects would be quick and easy (relative to, say, transitioning the planet to renewable energy). But, like spray-painting the dog, geoengineering comes with the potential for serious problems. If we’re spray-painting the dog instead of washing him, we have to keep spray-painting him forever, or else one day we’ll have an obviously incredibly unwashed dog on our hands. And what sort of health problems might a spray-painted dog unexpectedly develop? And can we get used to living with a dog that is spray-painted?
(Bryan Kennedy posted a link to an article about these issues this summer. Check it out.)
Consider these problems with me as we turn away from painted dogs, toward the wide world of geoengineering. In the coming days, if I remember to, and if I’m not feeling too lazy, we will meet some possible geoengineering scenarios. And, remember, these aren’t totally sci-fi—they’re very possible (for the most part). The question is, do we really want to do them?
And so, geoengineering day 1: A fart like you wouldn’t believe.
Y’all know what killed the last dinosaurs, right? Yes: loneliness. But how did they get so lonely? It was that, ah, meteorite thing, right? A big space rock smashed into the Earth, boom, no more dinosaurs. But it’s not like all the dinosaurs got smashed by that falling rock. Most of the trouble came after the impact. Vast quantities of dust were thrown way up into the atmosphere when the space rock hit the planet… and it stayed up there for a while. The affect all that dust had on climate is pretty complicated, but, if we boil it way down, it basically blocked sunlight, and made the world a shadier, colder place for a while. Lots of plants couldn’t live in colder, darker conditions, so they died. And the dinosaurs couldn’t live without those plants, and so they died. (Again, it’s more complicated than that, but…)
And now… now we have a situation where, in the coming decades, the world may be getting much hotter than a lot of organisms can survive for very long. We aren’t hoping for an asteroid or meteorite to smash into us, of course, but is there another way to fill the sky with sun-blocking particles?
Yes. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded, blasting millions of tons of sulfur into the sky. All that sulfur, and other tiny particles from the eruption (called aerosols), reflected lots of energy from the Sun back into space. Because it’s solar energy that provides the heat for global warming (greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide just trap the heat here), the Pinatubo eruption is thought to be responsible for temporarily lowering global temperatures by about 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit). That might seem like only a small drop, but a few fractions of a degree change in temperature worldwide can have a big affect on climate, and when we think about how it was caused by just one eruption… We could do it too! We could change the world!
One of the major ideas in geoengineering is to essentially recreate the Pinatubo eruption. Over and over again. Factories on the ground could pump tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would bond with water vapor and condense around floating dust, blocking solar radiation from heating the planet. (This article envisions zeppelins hovering 12 miles up, tethered to factories by SO2-carrying hoses.)
The project might cost only tens of billion dollars (small potatoes when talking about changing global climate), and it might actually work… but then what? What happens once the dog has been spray-painted?
Some scientists are concerned that all that SO2 in the atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, which protects us from UV radiation from the Sun. (After Pinatubo erupted, the ozone layer suffered temporary but significant depletion.) Others point out that the project would do nothing to remove greenhouse gases, so that once the sulfur settled back down to Earth, we’d face very sudden temperature rises again; we’d have to continue to block out the Sun until we could decrease our production of greenhouse gases. The main thing that could happen is, well, we don’t totally know what would happen. It’s unlikely that a solution like this would only lower global temperatures, but exactly how it would affect other aspects of the climate and life on the planet is unclear…
Is it worth it? Should we pump the skies full of sulfur gas, even if we don’t understand everything that could happen because of it? What if it was the only way to hold off a “tipping point”? (Many climate scientists are concerned that gradual global warming will lead to a “tipping point,” after which warming accelerates rapidly. Thawing frozen tundra, for instance, might release vast amounts of trapped methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.) Or do you think geoengineering would distract us from addressing the basic causes of climate change?
Any thooouuughts?
Typical T. rex?: Image modified slightly by JGordon.Courtesy ArthurWeasleyOh, paleontologists… with your grabby little claws… always grabbing for the juiciest headlines… late to the table of the hard sciences, where your neighbors long ago grew fat and respected.
JK, of course. You’re a spunky young science, paleontology, and I love you for it. And who doesn’t want headlines? Why do you think I keep lighting fireworks off on my roof? If you’ve got something as loved, feared, and debated as the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex as your specialty, why not be a little provocative?
And so it went with a couple of paleontologists based out of Beijing and Munich. They’re all, “Ahem. Ahem. Is this thing on? Hello? We think, ah, that the Tyrannosaurus rex probably ate a lot of baby dinosaurs, and not so many fearsome adult dinosaurs. And, um, we…”
And then the press is all, “Say what?! Are you trying to say that the T. rex was just a big, dumb baby-eater? You are?”
Scientists: “Sort of, but not exactly.”
Press: “Print it!”
And so we have a new contender in the “Fearsome Hunter vs. Giant Scavenger” ring: Fearsome Baby-Hunter!
The idea, say the scientists, is that it’d be a lot easier to go around eating weak little babies than to go around fighting big triceratops and stuff, so that’s probably what T. rex did. (T. rex and other large, two-legged meat eaters.)
That part makes sense. Even if you’re as big and strong as the T. rex certainly was, eating something that can’t hurt you or run away from you pays off a lot more than eating something that can hurt seriously damage you, and takes a lot of energy to get. If you were a dinosaur, babies would probably be your favorite food. They’d be like the equivalent of individual serving yogurts. (Fun, delicious, and easy to eat.) That doesn’t mean that there were no epic dino-battles… they would have just been rare, I guess.
The paleontologists go on to say that T. rex-like dinosaurs specialized in baby eating so much, that it could explain the lack of immature dinosaurs in the fossil record. Juveniles would have been eaten whole, or at least in large chunks, their predators digesting the bones and everything. This would also explain, the claim, the low occurrence of bite marks on fossilized adult dinosaur bones—they just weren’t getting bitten much, if they made it to adulthood.
That’s where some of the theory falls apart for me. Why would an organism expend so much energy growing and maintaining a body the size of T. rex’s if its main prey was small and weak? Also, did dinosaurs just leave their young lying around for any old predator to eat? Unless a predator were small and sneaky (and whatever else T. rex was, it wasn’t small and sneaky), and could grab baby dinos on the sly, one would think that it would run into some protective parent dinosaurs pretty often. And then they’d have to fight, which defeats the purpose of going after little dinosaurs in the first place.
The lack of scarred adult bones seems to be incidental too. If a dinosaur died from whatever scarred its bones, I’d assume that it would be totally eaten (either by its killer, or later, by scavengers) before it fossilized. And maybe the type of wound that would leave scars on a bone would likely kill the attacked animal. And if the creature didn’t die, if it healed totally, it still might get eaten later on. And most animals don’t fossilize anyway.
And do we need a reason why there aren’t more baby dinosaur skeletons? They survive to adulthood, no baby skeletons. They get eaten, no skeleton. (Babies were bound to have been eaten, even without large dinosaurs specializing in eating them.) Even if they died of other causes, I wonder if their parents would eat the body themselves, or at least push it out of a nest, or leave it behind (where it would get eaten).
I wonder, too, if the ratio of baby dinosaurs to adults is similar in periods and areas without large theropods. (Theropods are the group of two-legged meat eaters T. rex belonged to.) If it’s the same, then the reason for so few specimens would have to be low fossilization rates, or a sampling problem, or just that everything was eating baby dinosaurs, not just theropods (which is a much less interesting claim to make).
Anyone care enough to offer an opinion?
Proposed power grid for wind and solarCourtesy U. S. Dept. of Energy
A national energy grid - good or bad
About a year ago I wrote about our need for a national energy grid. Many politicians are moving to block the lines because they hurt their local economies or because of environmental local impacts. Others claim more local improvements would be better and less costly. Read more in Technology Review's, "A Costly and Unnecessary New Electricity Grid".
A new national grid, which has been likened to the Interstate Highway System constructed in the 1950s, has been proposed by groups such as the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, and AEP, a large utility; elements of the plans have been included in recent federal legislation.
Last week, investor T. Boone Pickens said that he's halting his planned four-gigawatt wind farm in Texas in part because of a lack of transmission lines to carry the power from the farm to urban centers.
Learn more about the national energy "smart grid"
If you have 20 minutes or so, Center for American Progress has several complete primers on the issue:
Smart appliances save electricity and money
Last Tuesday, General Electric showed utility industry executives how their new appliances could reduce electric demand and save everyone money. Read about it in Are consumers ready for the smart grid?
It's only a squirt gun: Wait—what am I saying, "only"?Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsGone are the heady days of the devil-may-care Raindrop Kid, and the infamous Morning Dew Gang. (Not to be confused with the morning dugong, which I believe is just an early-rising manitee-like creature.)
Yessir, the iron fisted rule of the rain barons is over, and the good people of Colorado can now legally gather rainwater.
Colorado is thirsty country, and they’ve got some serious laws regarding water rights. The folks who own flowing and standing water have wanted to make sure that no one tapped into their supply—precipitation in this case—and so it has been illegal to, say, put a bucket under your gutters and water your garden with it.
A 2007 study, however, showed that something like 97 percent of falling water in the Denver area never made it anywhere near a stream (it all either evaporated, or was quickly absorbed my plants), and so whoever owned water rights to a stream didn’t have much to complain about.
Taking this into consideration alongside the growing population of the region, and shrinking water supplies, state government decided to allow people to gather and use the water falling on their homes—so long as they have a permit. So if you’re dead set on maintaining that outlaw freedom, I suppose you could always just use a rain barrel without a permit. Yee-haw.
Have you ever seen anything more dull?: Even the toilet seems to be yawning.Courtesy luis echanoveIt’s called growing up, Peter, and everyone does it. Even you. But, on the plus side, you can legally buy cigarettes now.
Or am I just tired of life?
Well, whatever. Poop is in the news. Yawn. Again. And again.
Where others might see a barrel, and be all, “Hey, I’m not scraping the bottom of that barrel,” the cleverest capitalists and the sharpest scientists look at the situation and say, “Are you done with that barrel? And does anyone want to buy what I can scrape out of here? Even if it’s poop?” And of course it’s poop. And of course someone wants it.
Awesome I guess.
I should be more excited, shouldn’t I? I mean, someone out there is taking human waste and turning it into an environmentally-conscious coal substitute. It probably looks hilarious. But there’s only so much human waste a person can take. It’s just not exciting anymore.
So some company is squeezing the water from the brown gold of southern California, and turning it into coal-y stuff. Cement factories buy it, they burn it, they mix the ashes with their cement. At full capacity they’ll produce enough crapcoal to equal the energy out put of a 7-megawatt power station.
Great.
The fecal sciences just seem to have lost their flavor.
Rains of cats, dogs and pitchforks, however: Are so rare that we choose not to mention them.Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsOriginally I was going to write a post today called, “Hey, kids, you’ve been lied to!” The first story was going to be this science news item. Remember how people always tell you that your fingerprints are there (on your fingers) to help you hold on to all of the slippery smooth items we humans have adapted to use? Even if you don’t remember, someone for sure told you this. Something like, “Good thing you have fingerprints, child, because you need them to hold on to that pencil of yours!” Presumably, without fingerprints we’d be walking around dropping water glasses, remote controls, fancy pens, and greased pets, until all of these things were stuck, permanently, on the ground.
It turns out that this isn’t true! You’ve been lied to, kids! It seems that some clever scientists were surprised to find lots of time on their hands. As we all well know, time is our smoothest dimension, and, if you think about it, it’s sort of amazing that we’re able to hold onto it at all. So, think these scientists, is it the itty bitty ridges on our slender fingers that have allowed us to keep so much time on our hands? And experimentation commenced.
These cleverboots devised a scientific finger grip contraption that could measure the resistance of a finger being rubbed across a smooth, glassy surface. Short story shorter, the scientists found that the area of fingerprint in contact with the glassy stuff didn’t increase grip as much as it should have. Instead, the fingertips behaved more or less like rubber, with resistance increasing proportionately with the area of flesh touching the smooth material. This means that, if anything, instead of acting as grip-enhancers, fingerprints reduce your ability to grip smooth objects, because all of those tiny ridges actually decrease the amount of finger surface area in contact with an object by as much as a third. Maybe fingerprints evolved to help us grip rough surfaces, like tree bark, or to help our skin stretch without damaging, or to allow moisture to drain more effectively from out fingertips. But they don’t help us grip all these smooth little things we like to grip so much. Lies!
And that was my first thought. Then, I came across this article on a rain of tadpoles in Japan. This is the sort of thing we don’t think much about, because it doesn’t ever really rain tadpoles, fish, or frogs, does it? Wrong! It does! If someone in your life has ever told you that it doesn’t rain animals, or implied this simply by not talking about it, you have been lied to! It rains animals all the time!
Well, maybe not all the time, because I’m pretty sure I’ve been out in the rain a few times this year, and I haven’t yet been hit in the head by an animal. (From above, anyway. I’ve been hit in the side of the head by animals several times already.) But, as weird as it sounds, lots of animals do fall from the sky from time to time. And one of those times was just now, in Nanao, Japan. Tadpoles. Everywhere. From the sky!
What if one fell in your open mouth?
Wikipedia has a list, of course, of rains of animals. Fish, frogs and toads feature prominently in the bizarre precipitation, although the occasional rain of blood (or something bloodlike), flesh, or turtles pops up now and again. And check it out: there was a rain of frogs and toads in the summer of 1901 in our own back yard, Minneapolis! Here’s a quote from the relevant news item:
“When the storm was at its highest... there appeared as if descending directly from the sky a huge green mass. Then followed a peculiar patter, unlike that of rain or hail. When the storm abated the people found, three inches deep and covering an area of more than four blocks, a collection of a most striking variety of frogs... so thick in some places [that] travel was impossible.”
Sweet, huh? Also, apparently s rain of fresh fish occurs so regularly each summer near the city of Yoro, Honduras, that they hold a festival for it every year.
What gives? Why is there an extravaganza of falling (sometimes living) meat every year, all over the place, which people lie about by not mentioning everyday because it’s awesome?
Here’s the satisfying answer: Wizards do it. Wizards and demons. Wizards, demons, wizard demons, and demon wizards gift us with rains of animals, for our amusement and theirs.
Here’s the less-satisfying answer: Because scientists don’t believe in wizards, demons, etc, the explanation here has to be related to an observed weather phenomena. The favorite is waterspouts. Waterspouts are caused by tornadoes over water, or by tornado-junior things over water. Either way, what’s happening during a waterspout is that a big thunderstorm has a rotating column of air with a strong updraft that moves over a body of water. Water gets sucked up into the air, and it’s awesome to see. What happens when a waterspout goes over a school of fish or a frog pond, scientists ask? You might get a bunch of damp and surprised animals up in the air, ready to rain down wherever the storm takes them. That the animals occasionally arrive frozen makes sense too—it can be cold up there. Rains of blood and chunks can probably be explained away by a little too much ice and action up in the clouds, or by flocks of birds caught in a violent storm. Clouds of bats have even been seen (on weather radar) being consumed by storm systems and disappearing. The hundreds or thousands of bats involved would presumably return to the earth at some point. In some form or other. Probably all guts and little pieces of bat wings, I mean.
But who would have thought, you know? I’ve never had guts or animals rain on me, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. I’ve never had red hot pyroclastic rock rain down on me either, but it happens to some people. And my parents never once sat me down and told me about the rains of fish and frogs. No doubt you have likewise missed the experience. We have been lied to, Buzzketeers!
UPDATE 6/18:
Apparently there have been multiple rains of animals in this area recently. Two small towns got tadpoles, and a third got tiny fish. There are photographs on this site. Japanese coverage of the bizarre weather mentions the waterspout theory, but meteorologists in the area point out that no waterspouts have been observed, and local weather has not been favorable to their formation anyhow. They're mystified. Witness reports of the "rain" say that, during at least one of the events, there was a strange sound outside, but no rain or wind. Neat-o.
Wardenclyffe tower and building c. 1903Courtesy Public domainIn 1901, inventor and electrical visionary Nikola Tesla began building a laboratory near New York’s Long Island Sound complete with a gigantic 18-story radio tower that he hoped would not only broadcast wireless communications to the world but also supply free electricity for everyone. His grand schemes, however, never really got off the ground. Before the year was out Guglielmo Marconi (using seventeen of Tesla’s patents) would claim to send the first radio signal across the Atlantic, and soon after, Tesla’s investors - including steel magnate J. P. Morgan - began to lose faith in the project and withheld further funding. Eventually mounting debts, lawsuits and loss of patent income began to take their toll on Tesla and his visionary plans.
Known as Wardenclyffe, the site was designed by noted architect Stanford White. It operated for a few years in the early 1900s, even serving as the inventor’s main laboratory for a time. But by mid-decade Tesla himself abandoned the site, and for years it sat unoccupied falling to ruin. Inner machinery and equipment were salvaged and sold to satisfy monetary obligations, and the massive tower was dismantled for scrap during World War I leaving only its foundation. But the main building still stands today and, despite its dilapidated state, has the distinction of being the only remaining worksite of the brilliant Gilded Age inventor.
Now a group of Tesla devotees are pushing for the site to be preserved and designated as a historical site and memorial to a man they say is worthy of a monument.
Nikola TeslaCourtesy WikipediaTesla contributions were certainly monumental. The Serbian-born inventor held over 700 patents and introduced to the world such things as fluorescent lighting, the first remote controlled robot, x-ray photographs, and wireless communications. One invention, the Tesla coil, is still used in today’s radios and television sets and other electrical devices. One of his greatest contributions, the development of alternating electrical current (AC) technology, went against his former employer Thomas Edison's big push for direct current (DC). The threatened Edison went so far as to hire a man to electrocute dogs, old horses, and even a rogue elephant(!) to show the public the dangers of AC current. But AC’s superior technology proved more efficient and cheaper, and near the end of his life, Edison admitted Tesla had been right.
Tesla in his element: Typical promotional photo of the inventorCourtesy Public domainTesla was a bit of a showman when it came to promoting his inventions and theories, often portraying himself in composite photographs sitting peacefully in a display of electric current. During the height of his career he was a wealthy and dapper household name who hobnobbed with the scientific, artistic, and political elite of his day, and had several laboratories in the New York area. In the late 1890s he set up a lab in Colorado Springs to supposedly “transmit a radio signal from Pikes Peak to Paris”. With funding from Colonel John Jacob Astor (who later went down with the Titanic), Tesla built an 80-foot tower on the prairie for that very purpose. Whether or not he achieved his objective remains a mystery, but he and his assistant did manage to put on quite a lightshow for Colorado Springs residents. Reportedly, the tower discharged a high-voltage flurry of 145-foot sparks in every direction that subsequently blew out the power for the entire town. After nine months of experiments, he abandoned the lab and returned to New York to continue his experiments at Wardenclyffe. The Colorado Springs facility was eventually torn down and sold for scrap and no sign of it remains today,
A consortium of science enthusiasts, preservationists, and plain old fans of Tesla’s genius want the Wardenclyffe facilities preserved as a national monument and museum. The group includes Tesla biographer Marc Siefer who helped pen a letter to President Obama asking for the necessary funds to purchase the 10,000-square foot brownstone structure and surrounding acres from the Belgium-based Agfa Corp, which is eager to sell the property to soften the effects of the present economy.
But Siefer and his colleagues think Tesla’s many accomplishments warrant its preservations. For one thing the group contends it was Tesla - not Marconi - who was the true inventor of wireless radio. The issue of who owned the patents for radio broadcast has gone back and forth since the early 20th Century. In 1904 the US Patent Office ruled in favor of Marconi for the patents even though it had ruled in Tesla’s favor in the prior year. Marconi’s many powerful investors may have been the reason for this. After Marconi won the Nobel Prize in 1909 the furious Tesla sued him for infringement and lost again. But in 1943, the US Supreme court proclaimed Tesla was the inventor (probably because the Marconi Company was suing the US government for infringement of the same patents). Unfortunately, for Tesla, this final designation came two months after his death.
Even today, Tesla still seems to elude proper recognition, but Marc Seifer and his colleagues hope to change that by acquiring and preserving Wardenclyffe, a site they say has great historic significance as the last remaining trace of the eccentric inventor’s once grand vision.
“It’s hugely important to protect this site,” Seifer said. “He’s an icon. He stands for what humans are supposed to do — honor nature while using high technology to harness its powers.”
Watch a YouTube video detailing Tesla's life and accomplishments.
LINKS
Tesla Memorial Society of New York website
NY Times Wardenclyffe story
PBS Tesla site
War of the Currents
1899 Tesla interview
Belgrade Tesla museum
