Gleanings of the Week Ending December 31, 2016

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.

Best of Mulitmedia 2016 – From The Scientist so most from the Life Sciences perspective. There is a display of infographics then links to the full stories. After that there are some videos. Quite a lot happened in 2016!

How to draw PACH – I am so pleased with this pattern. Remember the paper chains that children enjoy making with strips of construction paper? I remember making them…my daughter made them too. This is a Zentangle® pattern to draw them! It’s a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Happy Anniversary to Photo Ark! 10 Years, 6,300 Animals Photographed – The post is about Joel Sartore’s project to photograph the animals of Earth. Take a lot at the Photo Ark site as well!

Pregnancy leads to changes in the mother’s brain – I think most women acknowledge that there is a change…initially thinking it is just the effect of sleep-deprivation….and later realizing that part of the change is still there after the baby is sleeping through the night. For me – it not only helped me into motherhood, it also enhanced my ability to empathize with others. That made me a better manager and leader at work.

10,000-Year-Old Turf War – Even hunter-gatherers fought other groups of hunter-gatherers. I’m still following up on articles the students in the Osteoarcheology course on Coursera are finding.

Treasure Trove of Newly Discovered Species Includes a Newt that Looks Like a Klingon – My favorite is the first image (the Phuket horned tree agamid). Which one is yours?

“Celldance” Selections – 3 short cell biology videos: cell division, dendritic cell motion, and microscopy of living cells (within the body)

The strange effects of thinking healthy food is costlier – Evidently the health=expensive equation has a bigger impact on our perception (and purchasing) than objective evidence!

Phenology of Bee Genera: MidAtlantic States: USA – A slide show of graphs showing weekly counts for bees (by genus) in the area where I live from Sam Droege at the USGS Bee Lab….and links to other slideshows by the same author

Buying Experiences vs Buying Things – An infographic comparing spending choices (there is a link to expand the infographic…makes it readable). There are a lot of reasons that spending on experience adds to our happiness more than spending on things.

Learning Log – May 2016

Most of the learning I logged in May was experiential or in conversations with other people. I went to a lecture on wildflowers – the closest I came to a class. The speaker included a segment on buzz pollination, reinforcing what I already knew about it from my son-in-law about the topic. He also pointed out that the jack-in-the-pulpit flowers look the same from the outside but the male and female flowers are quite different inside – but one has to cut away the outer part of the flower to see the structures. Not something I would do!

One area of experiential learning in May was picking strawberries. Years ago when I picked strawberries, I did so on my knees so I was pleasantly surprised that the mounds of my CSA’s strawberry patch made it easier to just bend over to gather the fruit. I’m still enjoying the strawberries I picked.

The other big experience of the month was using the scanner – primarily for old slides, pictures and Zentangle tiles. I learned to use a can of compressed air to clean the dust off periodically and how to scan multiple items at a time (into separate images). I also raised the scanner on a stand so that I didn’t have to bend over slightly each time I loaded it.

There were a lot of factoids I picked up in conversations with other naturalists before field trip hikes:

• Carolina wrens build multiple nests and then the female chooses one (from a birder),
• Earthworms come to the surface during rains not because they are drowning but because they are migrating (from another naturalist that had been reading about it),
• How the ‘points’ of antlers are counted (from a chaperone of a hiking group),
• Inexpensive wire mesh kitchen strainers work great to capture macro-invertebrates in rivers and streams (from a leader of a field trip to the Patapsco River).