by Laura Fitzgibbons

Chicanery!

Some companies monopolized on the exciting moment and sold eclipse glasses that were not properly rated for safety. If you want to make sure your equipment will actually keep your eyes safe, try holding it up to a neutral light and making sure that the light appears dim or close to dark through the lenses. According to the Amerian Astronomical Society, the glasses should also have a ISO-12312-2 label on the arm. You can view some recommended providers of solar eclipse glasses here.  

Illustration by Laura Fitzgibbons

Sharper Shadows

Because of the way the diffused and covered light changed during the height of the solar eclipse, your shadow actually got crisper around the edges and richer. If you stayed in one place throughout the movement of the moon past the sun, you may have even noticed your shadow deepening and changing in real time. 

Illustration by Laura Fitzgibbons

Wildlife behaving strangely

In the past, eclipses have coincided with all kinds of unusual behavior from forest critters. They may behave anxiously, or they may start activities that are more closely associated with nighttime ranging from how they eat and sleep, to how they explore or interact with other species. 

Squirrel, photo credit istock

Fireflies could come out!

If you live in an area where fireflies normally come out at night, you may see them start to wake up and move around during an eclipse. This is because they are programmed to seek the darkness to know when to kick into their nighttime routine, and if you are within the darkest path of the solar ecplipse they could be confused into thinking it's nighttime. 

Fireflies during an eclipse illustration by Laura Fitzgibbons

Syzygy!

Syzygy is the fun astronomical term for when three celestial objects line up in a row. Because the solar eclipse is effectively a straight line where the earth, moon, then sun are temporarily all in a row, the moment of total ecplise is a type of syzygy.

Pasta

Well, not really pasta. But you can use any household items that are full of small holes to hold under the eclipse and create a multiply-projecting pinhole camera. Some things that work just fine are a slotted spoon, cheese grater, or a colander. 

Colander pinhole camera during an eclipse illustration by Laura Fitzgibbons

Chilly air

As the moon blocks larger and larger sections of the sun's rays, the air temperature can drop considerably. The closer you are to the geographic areas that see the fullest ecplise, the more quickly noticeable the temperature drop becomes.

Bailey's beads

The bailey's beads effect happens when the moon covers most of the sun during a total solar eclipse and the edges of the sun's rays appear to pool together in the shape of beads. 

Leaves of sun

The tiny spaces between leaves or the holes in a tree's leaves can act as pinhole cameras and create an amazing pattern on surfaces that show the current shape of the eclipse. 

Congruence

It's easy to take for granted the cool and unlikely chances that play a part in making our sun and moon appear equal in size where they sit in the sky. This coincidence is not repeated on any other planet in our solar system. It just happens to be the case that first, the sun is 400 times farther away from us than our moon, and second, the sun is also 400 times bigger than our moon. 

The Sun and the Moon appear to have the same radius in our sky illustration by Laura Fitzgibbons

by Laura Fitzgibbons

How many poems and stories are about how looking someone you love in the eyes can feel like falling into their soul, like knowing them without knowing them, like you are forming a bond deeper than any other? The connection between meaningful eye contact and chemical happiness is intrinsically linked.

When two people who generally find each other agreeable hold their eye contact for at least three seconds, their brains produce two powerful love chemicals: phenylathylamine and oxytocin.

Phenylethylamine stimulates your central nervous system in a profound way. Aside from occurring when you look into a partner’s eyes, it may also be produced when you eat chocolate. Yes, staring into your date's eyes may feel as good or better than chocolate. 

Gazing without a care at another human can also release oxytocin, dotingly referred to as “the love chemical”. This chemical is strongly associated with commitment and long-term bonding. 

High levels of both of these chemicals can even make you healthier, and increase your body’s chances of fighting pathogens, microbes, and disease. 

So if you want to catch someone’s interest this Valentine’s Day, start by simply trying to catch their eye.

by Brian Koberlein

This story first appeared at www.briankoberlein.com on January 5, 2024. 

The surface gravity of a neutron star is so incredibly intense that it can cause atoms to collapse into a dense cluster of neutrons. The interiors of neutron stars may be dense enough to allow quarks to escape the bounds of nuclei. So it’s hard to imagine neutron stars as active bodies, with tectonic crusts and perhaps even mountains. But we have evidence to support this idea, and we could learn even more through gravitational waves. 

One of the ways we know neutron stars are active is through pulsars. Pulsars are neutron stars that emit powerful beams of radio light from their magnetic poles. When those poles are aligned toward Earth, we see a regular series of pulses. The pulses are so regular that we can use them as a kind of cosmic clock, measuring everything from the orbital decay of binary systems due to gravitational radiation to the rippling of spacetime caused by the first moments of the Big Bang. 

Because neutron stars radiate energy, their rate of rotation gradually slows down over time. It’s a small effect, but we can observe this slowdown in pulsar data. Sometimes, however, a pulsar will glitch, meaning that its rotation rate jumps up slightly. This can only happen if the shape of the neutron star has suddenly changed. Just as earthquakes can trigger a measurable change in the rotation of the Earth, starquakes change the rotation of neutron stars. So we know there is some kind of tectonic activity on neutron stars, but we aren’t entirely clear what that is. 

One idea is that neutron stars have a rather thin but rigid crust, similar to that of a rocky planet. As a neutron star cools over time, this crust fractures and folds, which leads to quakes, fissures, and perhaps even mountains. While this seems to be a reasonable model, it’s difficult to prove because we can only detect a glitch when something dramatic happens. Imagine trying to study the mountains of Earth when you can only capture earthquake data. But as Fabiarn Gittins shows in his paper, “Gravitational waves from neutron-star mountains,” there could be another way to study the mountains of neutron stars: gravitational waves. 

Gravitational wave astronomy is still a young field, but it has already captured data from neutron stars. When neutron stars merge, they create an energetic burst of gravitational waves, similar to the way merging black holes emit a gravitational chirp. Astronomers have been able to combine gravitational wave observations of merging neutron stars with optical data to study the interiors of neutron stars. This new paper takes the idea one step further. 

If a neutron star has a mountain or surface rise, it is asymmetrical. This means as it rotates the neutron star will emit a continuous stream of gravitational waves. These waves aren’t very intense, but they would hold lots of information about the overall shape of the neutron star. If we can observe these waves over time we could even study how a neutron star precesses due to the dynamic motion of its surface. For neutron stars with intense magnetic fields, known as magnetars, we could even study how the magnetic fields can distort the shape of a neutron star, which is something that may play a role in fast radio bursts. 

Of course, to do all this, we need to be able to detect these faint gravitational waves, and here astronomers are a bit more sanguine. At the moment, the most precise gravitational wave data we have can only place an upper bound on the scale of neutron star mountains. Even then, all we can really say is that they aren’t huge, which we already knew based on glitch data. But as the next generation of gravitational observatories comes online, it could put us in the range of observation. There are still lots of challenges, but they don’t look insurmountable. So in the coming data, gravitational waves could revolutionize our understanding of neutron stars in much the same way as they are revolutionizing our understanding of black holes today. 

What Is Going On With the Sweetie Cranberry?

by Laura Fitzgibbons

My favorite fall holiday recipe to make is a big batch of slow-simmered and chilled blueberry-cranberry sauce. The fresh blueberries lend a beautiful, natural sweetness to the otherwise tart cranberries. Sweetening the sauce this way tastes better than adding piles of sugar, and the fruits perfectly complement each other.

But what if there was a cranberry that is already a naturally much sweeter berry? The researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered exactly that, a new variety of cranberry that is genetically altered to be sweeter than its acrid ancestor plants. 

How do experimental cultivars work?

Experimental cultivars are part of a process in plant biology that involves experimenting with plant varieties and optimizing for different traits. 

The first step in the process is to collect something called the germplasm, which is essentially the cells of the plant that carry its hereditary traits.

Next, growers or biologists place the various germplasm in pots in a plant nursery and watch for different traits as they grow.

In the case of cranberries, which are self-pollinating, the grower will help the pollen get to the right part of the plant. For cross-pollinating varieties, they perform the same process but transfer the pollen across different plants. 

Creating a Whole New Plant

Sometimes biologists use a process called mass selection, where they look for the most resilient and happy variety of the plant and collect as many seeds from that variety as possible. 

Over many generations of growth those traits may get even stronger. This is called recurrent selection.

But sometimes the specific strengths of two plants may be combined in a process called the top cross method.

In one of the most intense processes, called synthetic variety development, an enormous number of plants are grown in rows then carefully observed. In experimental fashion, various pairs are combined and their new plants observed looking for specific strengths. 

Not Sweet Like a Blueberry...Yet

While the "sweetie" variety of cranberry is milder than other cranberries, it's still not quite the table snack berry that growers are hoping to find. The closest growers have come to a snackable cranberry is  a version that actually combines cranberry and blueberry plants together.

Still a Tasty Cranberry, Though!

The sweetie cranberry is plump, white in the middle, with a deep red shell. It's flavor is not as delightful as a grape or cherry, but it can be considered comparable to a crisp granny smith apple. 

This is achieved partly by raising the sugar content, and partly by lowering the acidity. 

Head to the Produce Aisle to Try a Sweetie Cranberry

Just, not yet. While fun new experimental varieties of cranberries might be available some day in the near future, the farmers and biologists have not yet perfected their plant variety enough to mass produce them for standard grocery stores. Someday very soon, though, you might be able to add HyRed, Sundance, or Sweetie cranberry recipes to your fall table.

Are Green, Yellow, and Red Stoplight Peppers the Same Pepper at Three Different Levels of Ripeness?

The Answer is Somewhere in the Middle!

by Laura Fitzgibbons

Bioactive Phytochemicals Create Your Vegetable Rainbow

Peppers absolutely do change color as they ripen. The concept that a pack of red, yellow, and green peppers are the same red pepper at three different stages of ripeness is a fun idea, but it's not actually the case. The real story behind your pack of stoplight peppers is a little more complicated than that. 

When you buy a pack of three different colored peppers at the grocery store, a stoplight pack, they are three different kinds of peppers. So how does coloration and variety work in vegetables? It all boils down to chemicals.

The reddest pepper is sweetest

Something further complicating the question is that the red pepper is generally the sweetest color. This adds to the plausibility that the pepper pack could contain slightly ripening (and sweetening) versions of the same pepper.  An unripe green pepper is the closest taste to bitter. And a super red pepper, with tons of carotenoids, is the sweetest. 

It’s all in the phytochemicals

A plant’s phytochemicals determine how it will taste, smell, look, and even impact your health. The same way that they play a big role in protecting plants from danger, they effectively synthesize into your immune system to support it in fighting off illness. 

The most cartenoids there are in a vegetable, the closer it will be to red. And the more sun available, the higher the concentration of cartenoids. This is also true about temperature: the warmer the temperature, the higher the concentration of carotenoids. 

Carotenoids like lycopene give vegetables their red color

Beta-carotene gives vegetables their orange color

Lutein gives vegetables their yellow color. 

Anthocyanins give vegetables blue and purple color

Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light

Most bell peppers change color as they ripen with one exception: certain varieties of green bell pepper may stay green throughout their lifecycle. 

Generally the other colors: brown, white, red, orange, yellow, green, and purple, may all start out as green. It may take between two weeks and three months for a full-sized pepper to go from its unripe color to its ripest color. 

Over time the chemicals that make a pepper a certain color increase in concentration, changing the hue and saturation. 

So at the heart of this question, your pack of three red, yellow, and green peppers are not three peppers at varying degrees of ripeness. But they are not DEFINITELY three different kinds either. 

You can virtually guarantee that the yellow pepper is a fully ripe red pepper. And the red pepper is for sure a fully ripe red pepper. However, the green pepper may be any one of the following: an evergreen fully ripe green pepper, an unripe green future-yellow pepper, and unripe green future-red pepper, or an unripe green future less-common-colored pepper (brown, white, orange, or purple). So instead of calling it a stoplight pack, consider calling it two peppers and a mystery!

We Need to Preserve Our Dark Skies
Now More Than Ever

by Laura Fitzgibbons

Across the globe there are more than 200 designated parks and areas of land that are preserved as dark sky locations. These parks and spaces limit artificial light as much as possible in order to provide amazing stargazing. They are go-to destinations for the public and scientists alike. 

Darkness is in trouble

It may seem like the enjoyment of the stars overhead is as reliable as the night sky itself, but every year more and more light pollution enters the sky making it harder for people to observe the constellations and stars. The more light pollution and resultant skyglow in your area, the less you will be able to see independent astronomical objects.

Light pollution causes ecological harm

Too much light pollution confuses plant and animals species that depend on the onset of darkness to set their body's natural timing. This impacts everything including knowing when to hunt, when the rest, when to create life, and when to seek shelter from predators. Birds, plants, insects, amphibians, mammals, and any living creatures in a confused light and darkness pattern are in immediate threat. The harm is lasting through generations and can even be deadly.  

You can implement responsible lighting practices now

Reducing light pollution is a mindset, and you can start right away with simple habit changes. The easiest way to do this is by simply turning lights off when you're not using them. If you spend time outside, try to use low lights or less light whenever possible. When you are enjoying your space at night and need bright lights, try to remember to close your curtains. When you choose small lamps make sure they have a cover. Flashlights outside should point down. If you want to make a big impact, get involved in your community and encourage them to choose street lights that aim light down without also shining light directly up into the night sky.

How to find the darkest skies near you

One simple trick if you're deciding on a great stargazing location is to check if you can see the Milky Way. It is one of the most beautiful astronomical objects, but a whopping one third of all people in the globe cannot see it. A great resource to find a designated dark sky preserve is Dark Sky International's Dark Sky Place (DSP) finder. If there is not already a great stargazing location anywhere near you, your community will benefit immensely from you creating one yourself. 

You're Not Killing Your Orchids: They Have a Natural Season of Looking Super Dead

by Laura Fitzgibbons

Don't feel bad! This is something that happens to so many people. You find a beautiful, blooming orchid at the store, bring it home, and meticulously follow the care instructions. Mist it gently, sprinkle it with the allotted amount of orchid food, maybe lower a single ice cube in each week while singing a soft melody.

And then, inevitably, the beautiful flowers wilt. Soon the sturdy green stems start to look stiff and brown. Next, the tiny leaves and petals fall and you're staring at what looks like a petrified spider of twisting dead branches. 

The plant stays like this for what seems like forever. You try giving it extra water, and that just makes things worse somehow. You move it closer to the sun, into a different window, and nothing. Not a single hint of life. 

What is happening to the orchid is actually a very healthy and important part of the process. You haven't killed it. In fact, as long as you keep up with the same basic care you started with, your orchid will be blooming again in no time, with even bigger, more beautiful flowers.

Why do orchids experience long stages of dormancy?

Orchids lose their flowers as a regular part of their growth cycle. The plants are simply resting, taking a break. Dormancy in orchids takes a long time, but the wait is all worth it. The long periods of rest that the plants go through are part of what make them able to have gorgeous blooms when they start to bounce back. A regular dormancy period for indoor orchids could last 6 months or even close to a year. This long period of dormancy is why you so often hear people say “I can’t take care of orchids–I always end up killing them!” They are Romeo and Juliet plants, sweetly snoozing and feigning death with dangerous plausibility.

How can you prepare your sleeping orchid for its next flowering season?

Believe it or not, the new flowers will not grow from the stems where they grew before. See those spongy, squishy, spiderlike green stems poking out from the bottom of your pot? Those are future flower-wielding branches. 

Most store-bought orchids come with tiny clips. When you see the spongy green stems poking out, simply lift them up onto the plastic stick and clip them into place. By training the new stems to grow upward, they will transform into the woody spikes that flowers grow on. 

Your despair about orchids reminded me of science!

When it looks like not much is happening, way down within the dormant, sleeping brown stick you are able to see, a tiny green meristem is preparing for its greenest season. 

Next come the long branches that will later hold clusters of flowers--these are known as inflorescence branches. Soon the tiny, rubbery flower-serving-trays that hold each flower will pop free, and finally, after exactly the right amount of time has passed, the flowers will unfurl in glorious color.

Go ahead! Grow those beauties and love them whether they are asleep or in flower

Like everything amazing in life, the wait is worth it. When your orchid has returned to its blooming stage, it will be even healthier and happier than before. 

Orchids don’t need extra care compared to other household plants–they actually thrive in colder environments with slightly diffused light. They require very little water. 

They don’t need much–all they really need is for someone to believe in them, to know that even when they look stiff to the touch and dead, all their magic is still forming way down below the surface, and their time to bloom will surely come around again. 

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