Gleanings of the Week Ending January 11, 2014

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.

Iodine - A new site that formats drug information to be more easily understood by consumers. There is information about how it all got started on the TED site here.

An Animated Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States - Maps are a visual pathway to history. Thanks to the University of Richman for making these available online with a good interface.

CES 2014: Audi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-Driving Cars - Good to have a car manufacturer getting serious about self-driving cars.

Remarkable coastal change from the recent UK storms - Sometime erosion is so slow it is almost unnoticeable. These ‘before and after’ pictures show the potential of storms to cause changes very quickly.

The Bright Side of Prions - When prions are in the news, they are often associated with terrible diseases like Mad Cow Disease. This article is about recent discoveries where prions perform positive functions in cells.

10 Easy New Year’s Resolutions to Transform Your Health and Well Being - Some of these are so easy….they are good prompts to do something ‘outside the box’ to improve your 2014!

Timeline of the far future - An infographic from BBC Future. This timeline is for one hundred quintillion years!

The Future: What 32 Ed Leaders Are Excited About - And more about the near term future of education and the potential of technology to improve outcomes.

Gulf Coast Wetlands Rapidly Declining - It includes a map of the gulf coast that shows the huge wetland loss in Louisiana between 2004 and 2009. They are subsiding underwater.

Why we need to sleep in total darkness - I need to get an alarm clock with red rather than blue numbers…or do without a clock in the bedroom at all! And I have installed f.lux on my computer to change the color the screen emits at night (software available free from here).

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 4, 2014

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.

Quinoa, Apricot, and Oat Muffin Clusters - Yum! I made these yesterday. There were some substitutions since I ‘made do’ with ingredients I had around the house: spiced fruit preserve instead of apricot paste, sesame seeds for the nuts/seeds, tahini instead of almond butter. I also used muffin cups that I had had for years (found recently when I was re-arranging the cabinets!).

Heat maps reveal where you feel emotions in your body - Hmmm….so people that are happy are physically warmer!

Beyond the Core: What about Other Important Outcomes? - What topics do you think are missing from the common core for K-12 education? Use this article to jumpstart your thinking.

Stranger than Fiction (Plant Biology) - An intro to the January issue of The Scientist online magazine. Read the full articles too: Plant communication, plant DNA challenging preconceptions about the evolution of life, and gold in plants.

Attacking Fungal Infection, One of World's Major Killers - When we think of microbes that kill we generally think of bacteria or viruses, but fungal infections kill 1.3 million people per year. I remember the mycology class I took (a long time ago) in college because of the beauty visible through the microscope: it was a blue world (dye) with complex structures. Reading this story makes me wonder if there were too few people from my generation that chose to pursue medical mycology and if our medical system has tended to focus only on the non-fungal microbes. Here’s another fungi story published this past week about How Mushrooms are Changing the World’s Winds.

Meditative Moments Found Within Dramatic Landscapes - If I went for a walk, there would be some places close to my house that look like these images! I took a few pictures from my door and decided that the wind and temperature in the teens made it too cold to venture further.

Marvelous Snowflakes - A video about how they form…in keeping with the view from my window in Maryland today!

The Best Wildlife and Nature Photos from NWF Staff in 2013 - My favorite is the pitcher plants (toward the end) but the sandhill crane (the picture after the pitcher plants) just visible in tall grass is a close second. And here is a group of nature photos from National Geographic: Rainforest Bugs and Best Wishes for 2014!

Elder Pharmacology - Many clinical trials exclude patients over the age of 65 as well as patients taking multiple drugs. And one of the key findings by gerontologists is that the biology of a young body is quite different from that of a young body. Put these together…and doctors medicating patients over 65 are virtually ‘flying blind.’ The status quo is not acceptable.

The book we all wish we could have read as children - I’ve added Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison to my wish list (The NPR article that is referenced is here.)