Posts tagged as:

Science

An Out-of-This-World Moonsuit

Odds and Ends

The year was 1960 when NASA development engineer Allyn B. “Hap” Hazard donned his stellar design creation to take a runway strut around Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
According to the Kevitivity blog, where I stumbled across this vintage photo, the goofy suit was the inspiration for Mattel’s Major Matt Mason, the action figure for Space [...]

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Toxic Flora: Dayhiking Amid the Poison Oak

Life in Angel City

The upside to the February and March rains we get here in the Southland is that our dry chaparral suddenly springs to life, making hillside hikes all the more enjoyable once the sun comes out. The downside is that same breathtaking chaparral along the trail includes lots of poison oak.
Western poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) [...]

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Megastorm Watch 2011 and Beyond!

Reading Room

Local television news anchors and their producers must be salivating. Scientists are warning that the Mother of All Storm Seasons may soon be headed our way.
No, it’s not due to global cooling, global warming or climate change (whichever term is in vogue nowadays). Rather, like our region’s major earthquakes, such megastorms are natural phenomena that [...]

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Moon to Glow Yuletide Red This Monday Night

Odds and Ends

While it won’t compare much with the Star of Bethlehem some 2000 years ago, the heavens are nonetheless aligning to deliver us Left Coasters our own special astronomical phenomenon just in time for Christmas.
According to a NASA alert, a holiday lunar eclipse will begin Monday, Dec. 20 at 10:33 p.m. PST, taking a “dark-red bite” [...]

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Corpse Flower Creates Big Stink at Huntington

Cryptic L.A.

This past weekend, crowds lined up at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, wanting to catch a glimpse of a flower known both for its humongous size (6 to 10 feet tall!) and its stench. The plant producing this startling, malodorous bloom is known by botanists as Amorphophallus titanum and by laypeople as the [...]

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Where Were You When the Eagle Landed?

Odds and Ends

I count myself fortunate to have been a young witness to one of humankind’s proudest achievements. Forty years ago I, like millions the world over, gazed in awe as the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle touched down at Tranquility Base.
A boy of seven, I was gathered with my brothers in our family living room along [...]

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Altadena’s Weirdly Mysterious “Gravity Hill”

Cryptic L.A.

Recently your humble blogger picked up a copy of the wondrously offbeat Weird California (left), a “travel guide to California’s local legends and best kept secrets.” Written by folklorist triumvirate Greg Bishop, Joe Oesterle and Mike Marinacci, the 2006 book devotes several pages to so-called “Gravity Hills” throughout the Golden State, including one in [...]

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