Bully or Bullied?

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Bully or Bullied?

Pit bulls are so common around here that some call them the “Labradors of New Mexico,” so it’s worth taking a closer look at the nature of this infamous pet. But who holds the answers? Depending who you ask, pit bulls are a dangerously vicious type of dog, they’re perfect darlings—or they don’t even exist.

That is to say, they don’t exist as a distinct breed. “Pit bull” is a term without an official definition, more slang than scientific identifier. Almost any mutt with “bully” qualities can be considered a pit bull, including the offspring of Staffordshire terriers mixed with a wide range of other breeds, lumping together a pretty diverse pool of puppies. Many mutts of unknown origins are misidentified as pit bulls based on their appearance despite lacking even a drop of terrier blood.

But does it matter which blood flows through a dog’s veins? Are certain breeds really more violent than others?

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How Do You Hoodoo?

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How Do You Hoodoo?

New Mexico is called the Land of Enchantment for a reason: its landscape takes stunning new forms at every turn, from rocky mountain peaks to deep-cut gorges, flat-topped mesas to rolling sand dunes. Then there are the hoodoos, geological features so seemingly magical that elsewhere they’re known as goblins or fairy chimneys.

Hoodoos are naturally-occurring stone spires that dot dry basins like enormous mushrooms. Unlike fruiting fungi, though, they didn’t sprout upward from the ground—rather, they held their own while the rock around them was weathered away by millennia of water and wind. Worn-down expanses of rock are one things, but how were these free-standing hoodoos left behind? 

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Doped Silicon & Hopping Electrons

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Doped Silicon & Hopping Electrons

Ready to soak up some more solar energy? Last week we looked at Sandia Labs’ 8-acre heliostat field, in which hundreds of huge mirrors bounce the desert light onto a single tower. Their cumulative reflected light adds up to 400 suns’ worth of radiation, enough to produce 1 megawatt of electricity via an industrial thermal generator. Whew!

Today we’re shifting scales from the massive to the subatomic: instead of measuring energy in suns, we’ll measure it in photons. This is the level on which photovoltaic cells operate, one photon at a time energizing one electron at a time. How do solar panels convert rays of sunlight into a usable electrical current?

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Here Comes the Sun

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Here Comes the Sun

As a transplant from gray-skied Seattle, I might never get over how sun-drenched things are here in Albuquerque. With over 320 days of clear sunshine every year, New Mexico is officially one of the sunniest states in the union, a distinction it owes both to its southerly latitude and its dry desert atmosphere.

That’s pure gold streaming in from above, not just for our moods but for the state’s energy sector. While I’m slipping on sunglasses to block out the glare, many New Mexicans are installing solar panels to soak in all the rays they can get. How are they capturing all that sunlight and harnessing its powers for good?

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