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Science

A collection of 10 posts

Kimchi Jjigae

Here's another food post. It's a natural follow-up from my kimchi post. This was perhaps my most successful ever first attempt at making a food that I'd enjoyed when eating out. This is the Korean dish kimchi jjigae. Once again, I tackled this dish

Kimchi

As I've said before, I generally don't follow recipes. It's more accurate to call this a template. Every iteration of my kimchi is based on this template, with some variation depending on the ingredients that I have on hand at the time. Kimchi is

Science: DIY Butter (and more!)

Cooking is science. It's actually a subset of materials science! Integral to cooking are the concepts of kinetics, phase transformations, and organic chemistry. Cooking is the perfect way to learn these intuitively. Today, I'll explain a simple experiment I did in the kitchen. The impetus was

Bees

I have a new friend. He is a valley carpenter bee Xylocopa varipuncta. Xylocopa means carpenter, and varipuncta means very punctual. He visits every day before dusk, hovering around the tulsi trying to steal some pollen. He is a big bee, about as big as my thumb. One of the

Bumbling Beetles

For many in the world, early August is a time for heat waves, monsoons, and torrid humidity. In my neighborhood, late summer is a time for wildfires and the big bumbling beetles Cotinis mutabilis, the figeater beetle. Two days prior, I set out some old oranges to help hydrate thirsty

Heat Islands - An Impromptu Autobio

Global warming is seriously going on right now. We have been talking about climate change for decades. I was in 5th grade, reading TIME magazine, trying (in vain) to rally the other children into planting trees, anything we could do to suck up the C-O-2. I was convinced by the

Convergence of Flight

Within the animal kingdom, only a handful of lineages evolved flight. Birds are the undisputed masters of flight. This is because, in this day and age, birds pose the largest and most powerful flying creatures. Consider the golden eagle and 400 PSI of grip pressure between its large talons. To

Conflicts

I'm going to throw this stream of consciousness in before my post on animal flight. Actually, I have been watching the PBS Eons series of short videos on Youtube. They are very well produced with soft background music from APM, beautiful illustrations of prehistoric biology, and charismatic hosts

Vultures

Today I want to discuss vultures. There are two main varieties and both belong to the large order of fearsome birds, the Accipitriformes. The four families within this order are Sagitariidae, Pandionidae, Cathartidae, and Accipitridae. Let's quickly break them down. Sagitarridae contains the Sagittarius serpentarius, the secretarybird. This