Gleanings of the Week Ending September 9, 2017

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.

Reimaging Neuroscience’s Finest Works of Art – Recreating the work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s century old drawings of the nervous system

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #103 –  There is wood duck image near the end of this group….I have never managed a view from the front. This one has the reflection too.

Utilities Grapple with Rooftop Solar and the New Energy Landscape – I’m glad some utilities are adapting in a positive way to renewable energy. If they don’t – I think more people will be motivated to add battery capacity as the technology becomes available and be ‘off grid.’

New Guide: Smart, Sustainable Materials at Home – This is some I’ll take a look at more thoroughly if I am doing any renovations to an outdoor area.

Wind power costs could drop 50%. Solar PV could provide up to 50% of global power – Are solar and wind energy underestimated? They may be getting cheaper and scaling up faster than the most optimistic forecasts of a few years ago. Hurray!

The Smartphone’s Future: It’s All About the Camera – Some tech…just over the horizon but plausible based on what is available already.

Opinion: The Flood Reduction Benefits of Wetlands – There are lots of studies that will come out of the hurricanes that are impacting the US. This one was based on Hurricane Sandy and came out on August 31. It reported that insurance industry models show that during Hurricane Sandy, marshes prevented $625 million in direct flood damage in 12 states….a reduction in property damage by as much as 30% in some states.

Artificial warming trial reveals striking sea-floor changes – When researchers heated up a slice of Antarctic sea bed by 1 degree (Centigrade), changes were visually discernable: some species grew twice as fast in the heated conditions, different animal communities developed…one bryozoan became so dominate on the warmer sea floor that the diversity of species went down. The researchers already have more experiments planned.

Podcast Series Delves into History, Cultures of Mesa Verde – There are three episodes so far (available here) with a plan for additional ones in 2018.

Our Hurricane Risk Models are Dangerously Out of Date – More than half the area flooded by Harvey was ‘outside of any mapped flood zone’! It seems like insurance companies and property owners need a better understanding of risks…and the old models are no longer adequate.

Gleanings of the Week Ending September 2, 2017

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.

Yoga and meditation improve mind-body health and stress resilience – A study that went beyond anecdotal reports of positive effects. They looked at brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and activity in the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) and inflammation markers.

20+ Spectacular Photos From the…Solar Eclipse and NASA’s Best Photos of the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse – Photo series from the web of the 8/21/2017 solar eclipse.

Dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain – Dancing is more effective than endurance training! Both dancing and endurance training increase the area of the brain that declines with age but dancing improves balance too!

The big idea: 5 ways to be a more thoughtful traveler – The articles ‘5’ are: know some history, think about how you’ll document your trip, read a book set wherever you’re going, learn some of the language, and understand where you come from. Good ideas!

10 Really Weird Animals of the Anthropocene  and Tongue Orchids & Corpseflowers: 7 insanely weird plant species – There is so much to learn about plants and animals…sometimes because they are changing and sometimes because they are hard to find/rare.

Trying to Create Something Different in the Nebraska Sandhills – I couldn’t resist this one…since I just visit Nebraska for the first time recently.

Image of the Day: Flying Blood Bag – The entwined network of blood vessels in a pigeon’s CT scan.

Our brains to change from early to mid-adulthood – The changes observed were so highly correlated to age that the researchers could estimate the ages of an individual simply by looking at the brain scan. 111 scans were analyzed from volunteers 18-55 years old.

On Education in the 21st Century – A paper by Richard Watson (futurist) for the Australia’s Department of Education. It talks about Slow Education (people centric, reflective, and aim to ensure that individual appreciate where the things they consume come from…emphasizes the importance of local difference, craft and quality over standardized production and cheap ingredients).

Interactive Infographic: The Global Business of Dying – The laws governing how terminally ill patients can choose to die vary widely – around the world and in the US (link to the US map is at the bottom of the global post).

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 26, 2017

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.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #101 and #102 – 50 bird pictures this week! My favorite in the first group is the barn owl (and the other owls in this group). My favorite in the second group are the two pictures of spotted owlets! --- I am drawn to owls this week for some reason.

Voyager: Inside the world’s greatest space mission – The two Voyager space craft were launched in 1977…and are both sending back messages to earth.

Trees with ‘crown shyness’ mysteriously avoid touching each other – I haven’t observed this phenomenon in our Maryland forests…but now when I am in a forest, I’ll always look for it!

Time Spent – Who Americans spend their time with (from Richard Watson’s blog). It changes with age. The last chart shows that as we get older we spend more and more time alone.

Air pollutions ranking in 32 cities –  LA ranks 24; Washington DC, San Francisco and New York are 26-28; Boston is 31. Delhi, Beijing, and Cairo are the top three.

Trees and shrubs offer new food crops to diversity the farm – Ongoing research from the University of Illinois trying to mimic the habitat features, carbon storage, and nutrient-holding capacities of a natural system with a farming method that incorporates berry and nut bearing shrubs/trees with alley cropping (hay or row crops)….to be economically and environmentally sound.

AWEA releases map of every wind farm and factory in America – There is a link to the interactive map. The red diamonds are manufactures and the blue dots are the wind farms themselves. It’s easy to see that manufactures happens a lot in areas other than where the wind farms are located….that the center of the country has a lot of installed wind turbines! We saw some of them in Iowa on our way to and from the solar eclipse last Monday.

Diversity Lacking in US Academia: Study – Under-representation of African Americans, Hispanics, and women in STEM faculties at public universities. There is a similar lack of diversity in PhD programs. On a positive note: the assistant professor is more diverse (more Asians, Hispanics and women) that the associate or full professor rank.  Unfortunately, this positive finding is not true for African Americans. Overall – still a challenge….and it impacts the broader labor market as well.

More than 300,000 Atlantic Salmon Spill into Pacific – Oh no! Hopefully this is not catastrophic in the long run. But – Why are they growing Atlantic salmon in pens in Puget Sound anyway?

Thanks to Co-op, Small Iowa Town Goes Big on Solar – Kalona, Iowa – not far from our route to the eclipse! It comes down to local self-reliance and economic development that made sense for this small town. Somehow a pointer to this article (from last February) was in a blog post I looked at when I returned home and I noticed where the town was…small world.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 19, 2017

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.

Three things to know about the Louvre’s history – A fort…royal residence…and then a museum!

Americans are using less electricity today than a decade ago – Annual residential electricity sales have declined by 3% and residential electricity sales per capita is down by 7% since 2010. Advances in efficiency and shifts to smaller devices are making a difference. Some argue that electric cars will cause an increase in demand for electricity….but the same people that drive electric cars are likely to have solar panels!

Aspirin’s Four-Thousand-Year History – Willow bark was used for 1000s of years for ‘curing’ fevers. In 1897, Felix Hoffman at Bayer created chemically pure salicylic acid and then created acetylsalicylic acid which did not irritate digestion the way salicylic acid does….and Aspirin came to the marketplace.

The Quest to Restore American Elms: Nearing the Finish Line – My grandparents had elm trees around their house in Oklahoma when I was growing up in the ‘60s. My grandfather built a picnic table around one of them and we had our evening meals there during our summer visits. In my late teens, the tree began to die and eventually had to be cut down. The place lost a key element when that happened. I’m sure that was true around many homes. I hope the elms can be restored….and maybe the chestnuts too.

Climate change is disrupting the birds and the bees and Europe to experience vast and rapid ‘invasion’ by infectious diseases as climate warming continues – The effects of climate change are not just rising temperatures or changing weather patterns. Everything on earth is interrelated. Sometimes that building in resiliency to change and sometimes it enables small changes to have a domino effect that is catastrophic.

In the Earth’s hottest place, life has been found in pure acid – Microbes that survive in extreme acid, hot temperatures, and high salinity. The pH in one pool was 0…and life was found there.

Here’s a crazy idea: let’s agree on the facts – Finding common ground through data? That is what Steve Ballmer is working on. The USAFacts site is the result and it is very easy to spend time looking at the summary reports….and the linkage to raw data sources.

It’s not your imagination. Summers are getting hotter. – A graphic of the changing bell curve of the temperatures with the base period being 1950-1980…crawling toward the hot and hotter direction for the time periods since them.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #100 – There is an indigo bunting in this set. I always celebrate when I see one in the field!

The greatest threats to humanity as we know it – Infographic from BBC Future.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 12, 2017

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.

Map of Play – A non-profit that not only builds playgrounds all over the US but also maps the ones they build and others (here). What a great way for families with children to explore the parks where they live….and when they travel!

Could a Bus with Sleep Pods Replace Airplanes? – Right now it only operates between LA and San Francisco…but it has the potential to be a less stressful way to travel than through an airport. What would it be like to take buses overnight and touring cities during the day…gradually moving cross country?

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #99 – Two pictures of peafowl! A male sitting with the tail feathers bunched behind and the head of a peahen!

The Chemistry of Giant Hogweed and how it causes skin burns – Awful plant! We were warned about this plant in Master Naturalist training since there have been some found in Maryland.

5 health benefits of beets – I’ve been enjoying beets from the CSA this year. Instead of always making fruit beety with them, I’ve be using them one at a time: raw in salads, in soups with potatoes (adds color!), and slivered for stir frying with other veggies. I like them well enough, I’ll buy them at the grocery store after the season for them via the CSA is over!

Illustrated timeline presents women’s fashion every year from 1784-1970 – A little history. I remember from the late 50s onwards and was making many of my own clothes from the mid-60s…so the styles for those years look familiar. I made a dress for myself that looked very similar to the 1966 dress about 1967!

The animals thriving in the Anthropocene – A study done by a team based near where I live in Maryland! Mosquitos, cockroaches, rats, deer, house sparrows…a few of the organisms are thriving while others are declining…or even becoming extinct.

Medieval Manuscripts are a DNA Smorgasbord – Much can be learned from the debris scraped away during cleaning of old manuscripts: DNA from bookworms and humans plus the animals that became parchment. So – we learn history from the physical aspects of manuscripts as much as well as from the words on the pages!

Magnificent Photos of Canyons Carved over Millions of Years –  Antelope Canyon and Canyon X…in Arizona. My husband already wants to plan a vacation to the place.

Ancient DNA used to track Mesa Verde exodus in 13^th century – Another item in the gleanings for this week about a place near Antelope Canyon…Mesa Verde. When I visited years ago, the mystery of where the people went was unresolved although many assumed they came part of the Pueblo peoples in New Mexico. This study used DNA of turkeys! Evidently the Mesa Verde people raised turkeys for feathers and food…and they took the turkeys with them when they migrated to the Northern Rio Grande area north of Santa Fe, NM.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 5, 2017

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.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #98 – This set includes a kestrel!

View and Print in 3D more than 200 Objects from the British Museum – If you can’t go to the museum itself, these 3D renderings are the next best thing. And you can look at them whenever you want!

Here are UNESCO’s Newest World Heritage Sites – There are so many unique places to explore.

How a guy from a Montana trailer park overturned 150 years of biology – The researcher that overcame challenges of early life….and figured out that lichen was made of more than a fungus and an alga.

The dizzy history of carousels begins with knights – A little history. I was surprised that it starts with a training game for Arabian and Turkish warriors in the 12 century!

16 best train trips in the world – I’ve never taken an extended train trip…only short ones for fall foliage in Maryland and Pennsylvania – or scenic areas in Arizona. Maybe a train trips will be my substitute for long road trips.

Paul Hawken on One Hundred Solutions to the Climate Crises – Focusing on solutions rather than the problem…of course.

Look Ma, No Break! You’ll Drive Electric Cars with One Pedal – My Prius Prime still has 2 pedals but long term EVs will be changing to 1 pedal to maximize regen breaking…barely using brake pads

These nature photos inspire serious wanderlust – From National Geographic.

Archaeologists discover a ‘Little Pompeii’ in Eastern France -  From the 1^st Century AD…abandoned after catastrophic fires….but the excavation will only last until the end of the year before the construction of a housing complex begins.