Closed Canyon

Closed Canyon is a short trail that lies right off the main road. There is a parking lot from which you can quickly hike down to the stream bed and walk to the canyon’s entrance. The canyon cuts through the mesa to the Rio Grande, but you can’t hike all the way down to the river because it gets steep and involves rock climbing. Below is a crop from a satellite view showing the canyon between the highway and the river.

Once you get in the canyon, you are mostly in the shade and it is very pleasant. The first part of it is a very easy hike, but as you progress farther into the canyon you begin to have obstacles to climb. I hiked along until it looked like more trouble that it was worth and then headed back. The sun shines high up on the walls…

Hello Science Fans!

We are experiencing a massive change in our lifestyles because of a virus.

Here in the Philippines, Metro Manila and its neighboring provinces are once again in “Extreme Community Quarantine”, the most stringent form of lockdown in the country. This was caused by another spike of cases that exceeded the number of newly infected cases per day from the initial wave last July to August 2020.

As we contemplate life from within the four walls of our homes, have you ever wondered why viruses exist?

In this episode of the SHE-ensya Why Series, we discuss some of the basic principles needed to understand viruses.

We discuss the basic structure of a virus – how it’s made up of mostly two types of biomolecules (protein + nucleic acid). And yet despite this simplicity, it can take over the complex machinery of our cells once it gains entry.

NOT-SO-FUN…

Misty

In former times, when people lived in a mystic world, where elves, dwarfs, leprechauns and talking wolves did their dreadful state of affairs in the midst of dark and impenetrable huge forests, people thought that even the old trees in the woods had their own thoughts.

Uncontrollable, sounds, the snorting of the deer, a mysterious hidden, permanently changing shades in a cold and misty twilight.

Biology

A forest is only then a forest, when a high concentration of trees is given. Woods bear a great number of species, produce a majority of oxygen in our world; they are huge reservoirs of water and stabilize the ground with their tangles of roots.

Snow

Snow consists of ice crystals. Their formation within clouds depends on the presence of ice nucleating particles and temperatures lower – 12°C.

Crystals possess a hexagonal symmetry, being prism-shaped at lower temperatures and…

Morning mist

Forest in the morning, tree stems covered by a foggy most, borderless steam wraps slowly rising in the air and disappearing there tracelessly.

Forests as moisture reservoir, being released in the morning due to the awakening warmth. Morning mist is nothing else than a fog, only some meters over the ground. Consisting like each fog of numerous water bodies in gas conditions, which condensate due to the cold night and seem to have springled all plants and even insects and other sleeping animals with tiny water drops.

Especially in arid environments, that morning mist watering is most wanted and essential for surviving.

With the rising sun, warmth moves the misty clouds up, where they cover the forests in a mysterious light, before the fog disappears.

Sunlight

Consisting of all rainbow colors, each color of the spectrum being defined by a specific wave length. But sunlight also consists of…