How Sweet It Was

I love dark chocolate, but it contains sugar and sugar is getting pricey. Raw sugar futures have almost doubled in the past year. Brazil, which usually uses its sugar for ethanol, is thinking of selling it to India for food because the Indians had a crop failure and Brazil will get more for sugar used for food. Anyway, that could put pressure on gas prices because a lot of ethanol is made from sugar and we love our gasoline almost as much as we love our Twinkies so this whole sugar thing could cost us all a lot of money. Remember when sugar was sweet and gasoline came from oil and Google wasn’t a verb? Remember that? I don’t either!

Global Engineering: The Big Chill?

It’s hot, so we’re running with air conditioning and, I guess, contributing to global warming. But don’t worry. Climate engineering could be the way out of our global-warming dilemma. There’s a lot of talk about just shooting particles into the atmosphere the way volcanos do when they erupt. The particles block the sun, the temperature falls and, when their work is done, the particles fall harmlessly to earth. It could be risky though. Do the particles turn your laundry gray? Do they kill plants?  Will we breathe them in and harm ourselves? What if we send too many particles into the atmosphere and cause another ice age? Some days I feel like a dinosaur, but other days I just fear becoming one.

Universe Crashing and Crashing

There’s no point in looking up in the city with all the ambient light reducing our view of the heavens. But if you’re somewhere where you can look up, there’s lots to see. The annual Perseid meteor show reaches its peak today as Earth passes through a stream of debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle. The other stuff going on is much further away and only visible to astronomers but it’s way dramatic. A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a collision between two Mars-sized planets circling a young star. Astronomers say this is quite recent, within the last few thousand years. Four billion years ago, there was a smashup between two planets that created Earth and our moon. There was a recent strike on Jupiter and some astronomers say the object that hit Jupiter was the size of Earth. Another ominous sign of things that could come is that there was a collision of the Big Dipper, a wooden roller coaster in Britain that was built in 1923. Twelve people were hurt. Okay, the Big Dipper thing is stretching this blog quite thin but there are billions of stars, billions of planets, space junk we can’t imagine and here we are floating around like a single cell in a massive whirlpool. I guess that means if they pull the plug we’ll just float through, possibly inside one of those space tunnels. When we come out the other side, we could be in clover again or in something better than clover . . . barley!