Gleanings of the Week Ending August 24, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Restricting Food and Fluids during Labor Is Unwarranted, Study Suggests - I can remember being very thirsty with only rationed ice chips when I had my daughter years ago. And I was ravenous by the time she was born (and only offered a rather stale boxed lunch since it was out of the normal food service hours in the hospital). Hopefully this study will be a starting point to change the food and liquid restriction rules.

These alien-looking ice sculptures formed all on their own - A collection of images from some very cold places. What a cooling post for August!

Astronomers Take Sharpest Photos Ever of the Night Sky - Using adaptive optics that have been developed over the past 20 years at University of Arizona.

Creative Fashion Illustrations Made with Leaves - Sparse lines - and then leaves. They work together to create appealing images. My favorite is the first one.

Fascinating Friday: 80 Maps That Explain Everything - Pointers to collections of maps from Buzzfeed and The Washington Post. It turns out that maps are good ways to display lots of data in an intuitive way.

State of Flux Images of Change - Pictures of the changes in the earth over day, months or years from NASA.

Iron Is at Core of Alzheimer's Disease, Study Suggests - Yet another reason why we shouldn’t get higher doses of iron. The foods I normally consume easily get me to 100% of the iron requirements - so fortified cereals and iron-contain multi-vitamins are of my grocery list completely.

Fall in the National Parks: Some Great Activities to Put On Your Calendar - Includes the following national parks: Voyagers, San Francisco Maritime, Acadia, Capitol Reef and Grant-Kohrs Ranch.

Amaranth: Another Ancient Wonder Food, But Who Will Eat It? - Chia - quinoa - amaranth - nutritious options abound.

The Common Cook's How-Many Guide to Kitchen Conversions - Very handy for the kitchen!

by ShannonLattin.
Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 10, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Giant Maya Carvings Found in Guatemala - There are traces of red, blue, green and yellow paint; at some point they should be able to create an image of what it looked like before it became part of the buried foundations of a rectangular pyramid.

Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts - Historical perspective. The first was way back in 1963….and from the Soviet Union.

Length of Human Pregnancies Can Vary Naturally by as Much as Five Weeks - Previously everyone assumed the variability was from not knowing exactly when ovulation and then implantation of the fertilized embryo occurred …. But this study revealed that even using technology to determine precisely when these events occur, there is still significant variability.

Hot Lava Hits Seawater and Forms Black Sand Beach - Images from Hawaii

Healthy Cooking Oils: 8 New Picks To Try - I’m going to try avocado oil at some point….once I come to terms with how much it costs!

Top 10 College Towns 2013 - These places have appeal to more than just students! Also take a look at the Cost of Living calculator provided by nerdwallet.

Cactus-inspired material cleans oily water - Deep understanding of how nature works can be quite useful - in this case, a potentially new type of filter. It turns out that it may work for aerosolized oil as well.

Baby Owls Sleep like Baby Humans: Owlets Spend More Time in REM Sleep Than Adult Owls - This study confirmed that the generally held notion that birds, like mammal, spend a lot of their sleep time in REM sleep when they are first born and that it declines over time. The correlation of sleep pattern with other aspects of the owls ‘growing up’ was also studied. I particularly liked that the observations in this study were made with sensors on wild owlets that were not harmed at all by the study and the potential the findings have for understanding the impact of sleep patterns in our own species.

Top US States For Solar Energy - The top 5 are: California, Hawaii, Arizona, Maryland, and Delaware. The article provides the criteria used to assess the states.

The Science of Mummies - Technologies applied to studying mummies….many of them non-invasive and non-destructive.