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Oakland used to brag about the quality of its streets, which were made of Oakland rock. Two things, an accident of geology and technological happenstance, meant our first roads were built starting around 1860 with macadam paving, the pre-asphalt method of constructing roadways with layers of clean, sterile crushed rock, each layer wetted down and compacted under heavy rollers.

The origins of Memorial Day lie in the U.S. Civil War, a conflict that led to the deaths of nearly 700,000 Americans. By the waning days of the war, makeshift military cemeteries had sprung up throughout the country, but especially in the South and Mid-Atlantic, where much of the fighting occurred.

Policymakers, politicians and the media have been talking about the need for better water policy in the desert southwest of the United States for decades. As the Colorado River, a major source of water for much of that area, continu...

Speeding up, slowing down, capturing amazing views, making discoveries -- all thanks to planets....

As NASA advances technology for long-term exploration of the Moon and missions to Mars, one of the most challenging obstacles is propulsion, specifically, how to launch astronauts off the Martian surface for their journey home. Traditional rocket engines require massive amounts of fuel or propellant. Propellant is heavy and takes up a lot of room, which makes it challenging and expensive to desig…

Accelerate progress in our three core enterprises — Explore Worlds, Find Life, and Defend Earth. You can support the entire fund, or designate a core enterprise of your choice.

Federal water managers yesterday (May 18, 2026) began pushing a pulse of water through New Mexico's rapidly drying Middle Rio Grande to try to encourage the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow to spawn.

One reason I was so happy to be invited to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs is because the museum has two of the coolest ones on display: Aquilops, the smallest and earliest ceratopsian in North America...

The outermost layers of Earth's atmosphere, the thermosphere and exosphere, are relatively busy places. In these layers, tens of thousands of trackable objects, including satellites and various types of debris, orbit the planet. They are also where dozens of tons of meteoric material enter daily, occasionally producing bright fireballs as the pieces burn up.

It's now fairly well established that the remains of the Krayt Dragon that C-3PO and R2-D2 walk past in an early Tatooine scene of Star Wars (1977) were re-used from the knockabout Disney film One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975).

The loss of fertilizer shipments coming from the Persian Gulf as a result of the Iran war got me thinking about the chemist Justus von Liebig, a prominent 19th century proponent of the mineral theory of plant nutrition. Li...

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Last Friday night I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs, for the launch of the "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit. But last Saturday I was there for "Curiousiday", to talk about Sauroposeidon. I wa...

Accelerate progress in our three core enterprises — Explore Worlds, Find Life, and Defend Earth. You can support the entire fund, or designate a core enterprise of your choice.

The IXPE GO Program solicits proposals for investigations in any area of astrophysics (not constrained to IXPE's prime science areas). IXPE Cycle 4 observations will commence on or about February 1, 2027, and continue for a nominal period of 12 months. Individuals may submit proposals for observations that will advance the IXPE mission science return. Observing proposals may be for "standard," "T…

As threatened, I was in Oklahoma at the tail end of last week and over the weekend, mostly to give talks. My Friday evening public lecture was on horned dinosaurs, and it was tied in with the launch of a temporary exhibit called "Bizarre Headgear: Ceratopsians and the Evolution of Extraordinary Skulls". I'll cover the talks in another post; this one is about that exhibit.

The bill keeps NASA funding flat with the currently enacted budget, but reprioritizes funding levels across the agency, including a 17% cut to Science to offset increases elsewhere....

My next post about the Geology of the National Parks Through Pictures is from our move across the country from Utah to New York. Along the way we visited 13 National Parks as well as some other sites. This was the 12th National Park along the way.

One of my earliest blog posts (in 2008) was a list of my favorite depictions of geologists in movies. I've revisited it once or twice. It came to mind as we prepare to offer a showing of "Tremors" as a geology field studies fundraiser at the State Th...

I've been riding the last few weeks down around the Rio Grande and Central Avenue in Albuquerque. I'm trying to make sense of Albuquerque's relationship with a drying Rio Grande.