Charged 2026

Tag: spring

  • Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone

    Frazer_Park_(Portland,_Oregon)Before I moved away from Florida I never realized how much I depended on good weather to motivate me.  I’d always believed that optimism and happiness came from within, but now I know this is only half true.  Moving to an area that gets less sunshine than from where you came from is a real downer.  Atlanta gets a relatively median amount of sunshine per year (compare Atlanta GA at ~217 days; Tampa FL at ~244 days; Seattle WA at ~164 days) but the pitiful winter here harbors few sunny days.  Gray skies can last for 3 days straight, the harsh cold wind is relentless, and February seems like the longest month of the year despite having the least amount of days.

    What bugs me most is that threatening clouds hover over the city for days but never DO ANYTHING.  At least in Florida when clouds come, they produce rain, thunder and lightning for an hour, then get the hell out and the ordeal is over.  But here, when the weather wants to be gloomy, it’s taking you down too.  It doesn’t help when my family, still in Florida, tells me they’ve taken the boat out every weekend since the beginning of February.

    It’s amazing how the weather can be a source of depression.  I’m sure you’ve heard of seasonal depression, which is technically called Seasonal Affective Disorder.  If you haven’t, it is a type of depression that occurs when bright light and sunshine is limited, most often during the winter months.  Sunshine is the obvious treatment for the disorder but just how effective is sunshine?  Especially when every dermatologist and health magazine advises you to block the sun?

    Studies have shown that the brain produces more of the natural antidepressant serotonin on sunny days than on darker days.  This is regardless of the season.  Not only are serotonin levels higher on bright days than on overcast ones, but the rate of serotonin production is directly related to the duration of bright sunlight.  No other atmospheric conditions are related to serotonin levels (article from WebMD Health News).

    When sunlight interacts with our skin, Vitamin D is produced through photochemical reactions.  Of course, prolonged UV exposure can be harmful for your skin, but some exposure is extremely beneficial.  (DO: Be active in sunlight when possible, with at least 25 SPF on.  DO NOT: Lay by the beach all day without lotion).  Vitamin D works together with calcium to build strong bones and maintain bone strength.   It also has a preventative effect for some cancers including colon, breast, ovarian and prostate.  A deficiency in Vitamin D is linked to these types of cancer as well as to depression, lowered immunity, osteoporosis, and arthritis.

    You might have been aware that sunshine was positive for you, but here are some fun facts that maybe you didn’t know:

    • According to Healthkicker, people tend to buy more lottery tickets on cloudy days because weather-induced bad moods deplete self control, making us vulnerable to temptation.  (Ladies, think Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pint intakes – were those ever on bright sunny days?)
    • People use more alcohol, coffee, tobacco and chocolate when there’s less sunshine because they feel the need to compensate artificially as means to elevating their mood.
    • Getting a daily dose of sunshine increases your number of white blood cells, which in turn enhances your immune system, stated by Natural Health Restored.
    • Sunshine encourages healthy circulation by also stimulating the production of red blood cells, which increases the amount of oxygen in your blood.
    • A study performed at the University of Michigan proved that sunshine is strongly correlated with daily stock returns.  Stocks traded on sunny days yielded nearly 25% more money than those traded during cloudy periods.  Psychologists attribute this to people’s tendency to view situations more optimistically when it’s sunny, and less likely to scrutinize an investment they might cast aside when feeling grumpy.

    March is only a few weeks away, which means warmer weather is coming.  Besides the fact that spring is my favorite season, I am SO excited to shed my layers of fuzzy clothes and to enjoy Atlanta’s parks again.  When the time comes, do yourself a favor and GET OUT of the library, frolic in the daylight like a fool high on Vitamin D and always wear some sunscreen!

    In the spirit of things: [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/44617965″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

    Photo by Maria Fiala courtesy of Creative Commons.

  • The Pollinator Commeth!

    It’s pollen season, and where I live in Atlanta Mother Nature has given everything with the misfortune to be outside a healthy dusting. Now that my car has the same greeny-yellow slime color of an abandoned pool I am resolved to do some digging into the phenomenon. However, I feel pollen is fairly well known natural event. It’s part of plants making baby plants and bees are involved. What else is there to know right? Well for starters, how are pollen levels measured? Pollen levels being the standard metric by which news organizations inform drugstores to stock up on tissues and anti-histamine. This concept has gotten my engineer-sense tingling…unless that’s just… Oh geez…

    ::Achoo!::

    Just kidding. My immune system is like an impregnable fortress made of Dwarven forged mithril (the good stuff), but if you are one of the many people who suffer from pollen allergies (known collectively as allergic rhinitis AKA hay fever) you should take solace in the fact that science is on your side. Right now, on a rooftop somewhere in your area is a greased up rod spinning around in a tube that is sucking in air and pollen. This doohickey has the understandable but perhaps uninspired name of a “rotorod”. Air is sampled for a fixed interval, usually for one minute out of every ten minutes for a twenty-four hour period, and any pollen grains in the sampled air are stuck to a layer of silicone grease on the rotorod as they pass over its surface. After the sampling period a special staining solution that contains a dye designed to adhere preferentially to the surface of the pollen grains (and not for example on mold or dust also in the air) is put onto the rotorod localized pollen, and then a fixed area of the rotorod surface is observed under an optical microscope. By utilizing the fact that the sampling rate, volume of air sampled and observation area are all fixed the number of pollen grains on the observed area of the rotorod can be used to calculate the average concentration of pollen grains floating around in the air.

    If your response to that last paragraph was, “Wait, somebody has to physically count every single pollen grain collected during the test AND because they are a good scientist and want to minimize the scatter in their data took multiple tests? I thought you said science was on MY side!” then I am right there with you friend o’ mine. Sounds like a lot of work, especially when automated particle counters exist to constantly measure the concentration and size of particulates in the air. These particle counters use either the blocking of light (for particles larger than about 1000 nanometers) or scattering of light (for particles around 50-500 nanometers) and with similar methodology to the rotorod and microscope method (known volume of sampled air at fixed sampling intervals) these devices can determine total particle concentrations and size distributions for a given volume of air. This type of sampling technique is commonly used to monitor the “cleanliness” of clean rooms used for semiconductor and satellite fabrication where even minor levels of contaminants can cause device failure. The best clean rooms have as few as one or less particle with a diameter of 500 nanometers in every cubic foot of air. As someone who has spent some time as a famous clean room technician (that’s me in the background!), and considering the fact that normal “dirty” room air has over a million particulates of the same size for every cubic foot, I can tell you these are some pretty clean rooms.

    Images of pollen grains in SEM with false color added

    One very important reason for not using this technique is the fact that pollens of different varieties imply different allergic responses for different people. Thus reporting a total pollen count or grain size distribution might not be an effective method to inform the public about the likelihood of a runny nose in their future which is the whole point of monitoring pollen levels in the first place. As a consequence, a trained specialist must identify both the species and concentration of pollen grains with the method described above which results in the reported “pollen count”. The myriad of sizes and shapes among different pollen grains, which macroscopically have very similar appearances, is shown in this false color image taken in a scanning electron microscope shown to the left. The original grey scale image (all SEM images are taken in grey scale) can be found here with call-outs to identify the pollen grains.

    All of this finally brings us to the featured topic: the pollen count. From some sources only a value of high or low, moderate or severe or something of this nature is given, but this belies what we should now understand is a much more detailed piece of data from a very sensitive measurement system: a trained scientist. One source reported that the pollen count in Atlanta hit a record at over 9000 grains per cubic meter which seems like quite a lot, but not so bad when you consider the recent panic in Moscow when clouds of pollen from trees were so thick people thought they were toxic chemical fumes. Bonus points if you can spot the trained scientist in the video from Russia. With that knowledge, I’m feeling a little better about my car.