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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Making Good v. Breaking Bad

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Making Good v. Breaking Bad

What’s addictive, rots your teeth, and plays a starring role in AMC’s hit New Mexico-based drama Breaking Bad?

Sugar, obviously. Why, what were you thinking?

Well, if you’ve seen the series you undoubtedly thought of methamphetamine, the illicit drug that launches an ordinary man down the dark path from cook to dealer to head of a deadly empire. But just as the ruthless Walter White was played by a light-hearted, child-like Bryan Cranston, his ruinous crystal meth was played by sweet, child-friendly rock candy. Does something as lovely as sugar really bear a chemical resemblance to something as destructive as meth?

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