Photo: Don Clark/Portsmouth Herald.

Santa came a bit early to a lucky bunch of school kids in Portsmouth, Maine. It seems teacher Molly Green wished for a high-tech weather station for her fifth-graders, and lo and behold, a brand new Vantage Pro2 arrived from an unknown, but very generous and wise, donor. Ho ho ho, we just love people like that! See the story on the Seacoast Online website.

TECH TIPS :

Ewwww, Continued

Jeffrey Foltz sent us this yukky image. Those are ants…in his weather station ….on his roof! “My home is being re-roofed tomorrow so I moved the system today and while doing so I discovered it was full of ants. On my roof! Go figure! They were even coming out of the anemometer itself, as well as the tube on which it mounts. I'd been wondering why, when the leaves were moving, flags were flapping and even my ‘turbovents’ were spinning, my anemometer cups were not.”

(Sorry, can’t type right now. Shivering with creepiness.)

Weather Check Quiz Question 3: Ants. We, like most residents of the Bay Area, live in near-constant battle with the Argentine ant, a whole bevy of whom were found roaming around our shower this morning. We’ve tried spraying them with Windex, dusting them with cleanser, shooting Raid at them, chanting and sending white light to their higher selves, keeping the house immaculate (now THAT was a challenge), and decorating the bathroom and kitchen with ant bait traps. According to a new study by Stanford University, which of these techniques is most likely to work? (Click here for answers.)


Jason Answers Meteorological Questions from Mt. Washington

Jason Karvelot, our in-house meteorologist, got the chance to visit the Mt. Washington Observatory in New Hampshire as part of a celebration of their 75th anniversary. For those who don’t know, Mt. Washington is the highest point in the Northeast U.S. and they have a 24/7, 365-days a year, voluntary weather observatory there. They have the dual honors of the highest recorded wind speed and the “world’s worst weather.” Usually when you see a photo of this spot, the primary color is white, and any humans are being blown sideways – but even Mt. Washington has some balmy weather in the summer!

While we’ve got Jason hunkered down and standing still, we passed on a question from Jason Hicok:

“Every time I talk to someone at NOAA, they talk about wind gusts as ‘three-second’ wind gusts. Every time I report a wind gust of xx mph, it always seems like they question the accuracy due to this three-second rule and that my gust is higher than their gust. I believe they are comparing it to local official NOAA stations located regionally. What's up with that? Is this true?”

Jason K. says the NOAA is right. Our anemometer’s period measures gusts over 2 ¼ seconds, so our gust speed just might be a little high.

WEATHER 101:

How to Freeze to Death Like a Wood Frog

Recently the temperature in the Bay Area got into the frigid 50ºs F (low teens C). Just yesterday we heard a holiday shopper whine, “I’m FREEZING!” as she peeled off rain coat, hood, and gloves. It got us thinking about what it means to actually freeze, and why we can’t at this time thaw out an ice age man or Walt Disney, cure whatever killed them, and have them good as new.

The first thing we learned is that the shopper would be long dead before she actually freezes solid. Freezing, called hypothermia in the medical world, would begin when her body’s temperature drops just 1-2°C (1.8-3.6°F). She’d start shivering, then her breathing would become more shallow. As her body temperature drops a few more degrees, she might start to feel a bit warmer and then notice that her muscles don’t seem to be working. She’d become pale, even bluish. If she doesn’t get help soon, and her temperature goes below 32ºC (89.6ºF), her metabolic processes will slow, she’ll be very sluggish and confused, and at somewhere around 30ºC (86ºF), she’ll be pretty much a goner. But even as her blue and puffy body shuts down, her brain might continue to function – making her clinical death precede her brain death. (This is why medics almost always attempt to revive a hypothermia victim who is clinically dead and is the source of an EMT maxim: “you’re not dead by freezing until you are dead and warm.”)

(For a really descriptive story about what it feels like to freeze to death, read Peter Stark’s amazing “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow--First Chill--Then Stupor--Then the Letting Go” in the January 1997 issue of Outside Magazine.)

The cells of most animals cannot function at freeezing temperature. This is because, according to cryobiologist Kenneth Storey (in NewScientist) of Carleton University in Ottawa, "between two and five per cent ice in any mammal kills it dead as a doornail." Ice crystals and animal cell activity simply do not go together. When water in the body freezes, ice forms between the cells, and those large, sharp crystal do great damage to the cells. When cryogenics technicians freeze those already dearly departed, hoping for a future thaw date, they replace the water with cryoprotectant solutions in an effort to limit this damage.

But there are some creatures who have learned to freeze, but not quite to death. Among them is the North American wood frog, who just snuggles down into the freezing soil, tells its tiny heart to stop beating and its little lungs to stop breathing. As much as 65% of the water in its body freezes and he gets rock solid and very dead-looking. There he sits for weeks or even months, with his body temperature below 0ºC (32ºF), until spring arrives. Then he starts breathing again, pumps his blood a bit, and is up and no worse for the experience.

How can he do this? Two clever tricks: one, he makes his own “antifreeze:” glucose. And, two, fake ice crystals.

The frog only looks frozen solid – but really the water inside his cells does not totally freeze because glucose, pumped put in earnest by the liver as the temperature drops, inside the cells lowers the freezing temperature and keeps the water inside the cells a syrupy liquid. The other 65% of water, which remains outside the cells freezes, but in small, regulated lattices because the froggie’s blood contains “ice nucleating proteins” which encourages ice to form by mimicking its crystal lattice, but not allowing any of the crystals to get big enough to damage the tissue.

As EMTs who have treated hypothermia victims know, thawing can be as dangerous as freezing. They know not to warm a hypothermia victim too fast, something the wood frog also understands. As he comes back to life, the organs that were the last to freeze and are the most syrupy thaw first, so that the heart begins pumping blood before the extremities thaw. That way no thawed part of the frog is deprived of oxygen. "They're clever," says Storey, "they thaw from the inside out."

You can see a very cool video of a frog going from frozen to hoppin’ on UTube.

So far, Walt Disney and his cryogenically preserved peers are going to have stay frozen, as science has not yet figured out how to revive them, much less how to cure the diseases that did them in. But they are certainly getting closer. Relatively simple living structures, like stem cells, sperm, and embryos are routinely and safely frozen. And scientists have even reanimated dogs several hours after clinical death.

For more on wood frogs, check out the Exploratorium and All About Frogs. For more on cryogenics, including how they do what they do, check out Stranger Than Fiction.

(If you want to play evil mad scientist, MakeZine tells you how to freeze and restore a garden snail. We won’t tell you where the PDF is unless you promise to deliver any poor snail you reanimate to a snail palace of luxury after his “procedure.” Promise? Okay, here it is.)

Weather Check Quiz Question 4: True or False: Sometimes freezing people actually rip their clothes off. EMTs have even incorrectly assumed the person was not a victim of hypothermia but of sexual assault. (Click here for answers.)

MAILBAG:

Great Balls of Fire on Aircraft

Dave Bastacky’s thinking gears were sparked when he read the story about ball lightning in our last issue. We reported that the Brazilian scientists’ theory was that lightning interacts with silica in the earth’soil to create the ball of electricity.

“I wonder,” mused Dave, “how they would explain those cases of ball lightning that have been observed in commercial aircraft after a lightning strike?”

Since we don’t have a direct line to the scientists in question and thought Dave’s was a good question, we thought we let you all weigh in. To start the “ball” rolling, we’d guess that it is not so much the silica, but the surface that matters. We might also hazard a guess that there is silica present on the surface of airplanes, as well as other elements that might have the same effect. What do you think?

By the way, in our research we found plenty of references to ball lightning in or around aircraft, our favorite being a story about a ball of lightning that danced down the aisle of an aircraft, from cockpit to tail. Headed for the restroom, perhaps?

Devilish Winds Whip Up Name Controversy

Gary L. Burk, of Olympia, WA, was interested in our story about the Santa Ana winds, especially their name.

“I went through all the linked pages in your wildfires/wind articles. But nowhere did I see the ‘obvious’ (to me) thought for the name given to the wind.

“Early in the Spanish settlement of California, that canyon was named Santana for the ‘devil’ winds that blew there. (Maybe some early Spanish chamber of commerce members didn’t think that was appropriate and changed it.) Most likely it was a local priest that split the name so his church would not be in a place named for the devil.

“The name could easily come from a ship’s log since the early European exploration of California, by Spanish, English, and Russian explorers, was by sea. I’ve had sailboat experience with the Squamish winds of British Columbia. I can easily imagine calling a canyon that issued forth smoke and heat like that shown in the NASA photos, ‘The Devil’s Canyon.’”

Well, Gary, this is one of those subjects that seems to crop up every time we mention those evil winds. Back in March of ‘06 we discussed the “Santa Ana” vs “Santana” issue. But we had to come to the conclusion that the right term is Santa Ana, based first, on the fact that that’s what is mostly commonly used today, and second, on a pretty interesting and definitive story on the Journal of San Diego History webpage.

We guess we’ll never really know whether the “right” name is Santa Ana or Santana. We bet that if yours was one of the many homes lost or evacuated, it would be easy to come with a few even more descriptive names.

Weather Check Quiz Question 5: Our friends Zephuros and Boreas are expecting twins. Which names would NOT fit their family?
A. Ashley & Cade
B. Yukiko & Nevada
C. Kari & Rabi
D. Makani & Samiel
(Click here for answers.)

YOU'RE BRILLIANT!:

Question 1: Despite the fact that everyone besides Vixen has a pretty masculine name, an expert on Sami culture (the indigenous people of Lapland, Sweden and the original reindeer herders) told us that most male reindeer loose their antlers in the winter, but the females keep theirs. (Back to stories.)