10 Years Ago – In November 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the November 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.  

1. Earthquakes and volcanic activity over the past few days in Indonesia, Ecuador, Pakistan, the United States and Japan are totally unrelated to each other or to the seismic events surrounding Italy's Mount Etna, experts said: the earth is not going to crack.
2. Elderly adults who perform as well as younger adults on certain cognitive tests appear to enlist the otherwise underused left half of the prefrontal cortex of their brain in order to maintain performance. In contrast, elderly people who are not "high performers" on the tests resemble younger adults in showing a preferred usage of the right side of the prefrontal cortex.
3. A severe shortage of people in the United States who know languages used by terrorists and who can decipher intelligence
4. A team of astronomers, routinely monitoring Jupiter's moon Io, have witnessed the largest documented volcanic eruption in history.
5. Last year's Nisqually earthquake caused damage to nearly 300,000 residences or almost one out of every four households in the Puget Sound area
6. About 10,000 years ago, glaciers pushed the range of North American earthworms southward and today the only earthworms found in most of Minnesota are non-native species introduced from Europe. New research suggests that non-native earthworms are radically changing the forest floor in the northern U.S., threatening the goblin fern and other rare plants in the process.
7. Enormous Irish Temple Discovered Underground once surrounded by 300 towering oak posts…each tree was approximately 2.2 yards wide.…dates from 2500 to 2300 B.C.
8. In the 1930s, wild turkeys were near extinct and numbering only about 30,000… the wild turkey population now stands at around 6 million.
9. Nepal - A security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu has been shot dead by unidentified assailants in what police said appears to be a deliberate escalation of violence by Maoist rebels.
10. Open-heart surgery was performed without opening the chest

10 Years Ago – In July 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the July 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.   

1. "Power Nap" Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects A Skill
2. AIDS will claim 70 million by 2022
3. U.S. millionaire Steve Fossett became the first solo balloonist to circle the globe nonstop
4. The monuments of ancient Egypt may have stood for thousands of years in the desert sands, but now they face a new threat -- from rising groundwater.
5. There are approximately 100,000 more wild flowering plants in the world than previously thought
6. Sesame Street to introduce HIV positive muppet
7. Weeks into the state's effort to kill every deer in part of southwest Wisconsin to halt an outbreak of chronic wasting disease, wildlife officials still don't know how they're going to dispose of the tens of thousands of carcasses.
8. Glowing lava set trees afire and oozed into the ocean before dawn Saturday as thousands of spectators braved Kilauea Volcano's scalding spray to witness the spectacle.
9. Sea temperatures around Australia's Great Barrier Reef reached record highs this year, doing major damage to the world's largest living entity
10. During excavations last week at a Roman era palace in Butrint, Albania, researchers working in an upper level reception hall found a tiny ivory object dating to 465 AD. They believe it is Europe's oldest known chess piece.

As usual - the list is heavily skewed toward science and technology although the two about HIV/AIDS reflect how prominent that topic was in the news 10 years ago this month.

10 Years Ago – In June 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the June 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.     

1. Centuries-old oak toppled in Maryland storm
2. A wildfire raging in the Pike National Forest
3. Archeologists doing maintenance at the famous Inca citadel of Machu Picchu have found new stone terraces, water channels, a rubbish dump and a wall dividing the site's urban sector from its temples
4. A moderate earthquake shook a wide area around southern Indiana
5. A 4,600 year-old Egyptian tomb, glued shut and with its original owner still inside, has been discovered by archaeologists working near the Giza Pyramids.
6. Ann Landers, the columnist whose snappy, plainspoken and timely advice helped millions of readers deal with everything from birth to death, died Saturday. She was 83.
7. Hundreds of people were killed or injured as an earthquake and a series of aftershocks rocked northern Iran
8. FBI searches apartment in anthrax probe
9. An Argentine icebreaker prepared to leave on a mission to rescue 107 people aboard a ship stranded off Antarctica.
10. The consumption of forests, energy and land by humans is exceeding the rate at which Earth can replenish itself 

My interest in science is reflected in 7 of the 10 (archeology in 3, 4; botany in 1; climate/ecology in 2, 10; geology in 4 and 7).  The others fit into a people/places/politics category.

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 26, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Lyrids meteor shower and Earth - as seen from the International Space Station

Unique Gold Earring Found in Intriguing Collection of Ancient Jewelry in Israel - jewelry from 1100 BC found in jug

Toxic Mercury, Accumulating in the Arctic, Springs from a Hidden Source - the rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean (the Lena, Ob, and Yenisei are the main ones) turn out to be more significant than the atmosphere

Equifax Eyes Are Watching You--Big Data Means Big Brother - They know more than your credit score.

European Physicists Smash Chinese Teleportation Record - This is all about the next generation global communications network. The race is between Europe and China. Yikes! No player from the US.

'Personality Genes' May Help Account for Longevity - Positive attitude toward life is a trait shared by most centenarians

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #14 - Always a great selection…and you can look back to previous weeks as well

First Ladies: Grace Under Fire - Marlo Thomas provides a slide show featuring 12 first ladies

Avoiding bees, wasps, mosquitoes and ticks - tips for avoiding bites from the National Wildlife Federation as you are out and about this summer

Cost of Lighting - infographic comparing incandescent light bulbs, compact-fluorescent bulbs and light emitting diodes

10 Years Ago – In April 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the April 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.   

1. Wildfire scorches parts of New Mexico
2. A new census in the solar system doubles the number of large asteroids thought to lurk between Mars and Jupiter.
3. Despite decades of legal protection, the billion or so monarch butterflies that overwinter in Mexico are losing the cloudbelt forests they depend on
4. China tops list of world executioners
5. Thousands of mummies, most of them from the Inca culture five centuries ago, have been unearthed from an ancient cemetery under a shantytown near Lima in Peru,
6. Huge colonies of Earth microbes are living off of hydrogen gas released by common rocks, raising the possibility of similar life forms on Mars
7. Adventurer Thor Heyerdahl dead at 87
8. Cooking tomatoes -- such as in spaghetti sauce -- makes the fruit heart-healthier and boosts its cancer-fighting ability
9. Four whooping cranes taught to migrate by human trainers have completed the return trip to Wisconsin from Florida on their own
10. Being the firstborn child in a family may make a person more likely to develop coronary disease

As usual, my interests are reflected in these top 10: space exploration (2 and 6), earth systems and exploration (1, 3, 5, 7 and 9), food/health (8 and 10).

10 Years Ago – In February 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the February 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.

1. Intellectual Resources May Help Soldiers Stave Off Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
2. Second space tourist to take stem cells, HIV experiment
3. The recent discovery of two giant Roman water-lifting machines near St. Paul's Cathedral in London
4. Study shows the average sleep for Americans of seven hours per night is safest
5. Texas A&M Clones First Cat
6. Enormous Iceberg May Be In Its Death Throes; Collisions With Another Large Berg
7. Plague fears spark panic in India
8. A cold front that killed about 250 million Monarch butterflies in central Mexico last month may reduce next year's migrations.
9. Glacier melting could contribute 0.65 feet or more to sea level this century
10. One of the odd possibilities that could emerge from global warming is that much of Europe, robbed of the ocean current patterns that help keep it warm, could rather abruptly enter a deep freeze and have a climate that more closely resembles Alaska than the modest temperatures it now enjoys.

Notice that weather and climate figure prominently in this list (6, 8, 9, 10) since it must have been and area of interest to me in 2002. The last blurb must have been from a story about global weather models; I wonder if the low temperatures in Eastern Europe this year are going to happen with increasing frequency.

Item 8 about Monarch butterflies was a turning point in our summer activities. For several years before 2002 we had collected Monarch eggs and caterpillars from the milkweed behind our house, feed them well while they were caterpillars, and released them when they hatched from their chrysalis. There were not enough Monarchs in our area of Maryland from 2002 onward.