Gleanings of the Week Ending September 21, 2024

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.

Congaree National Park to Remove Feral Hogs – There were feral hogs in the park when I visited in 2008!

Witness 1.8 billion years of tectonic plates dance across Earth’s surface in a new animation – I watched the video twice…the first just enjoying the overall moves. The second time I watched for how North America moved over time.

What Are the Best Policies for Reducing Carbon Emissions? - A systematic analysis of more than 1,500 climate policies from around the world found that only 63 were successful, reducing average emissions by 19 percent on average. Policies are more effective when implemented with a variety of other policies, instead of alone. In the U.K., banning coal-fired power plants worked when it was combined with tax or price incentives. The same was true for banning combustion engine cars in Norway. The study also found that successful strategies differed between countries—in developed countries, carbon pricing was effective, while regulation was successful in developing countries.

How thyroid hormone fuels the drive to explore - Research in mice sheds light on how thyroid hormone alters wiring in the brain. Findings reveal that thyroid hormone syncs up the brain and body to drive exploratory behavior. Too little thyroid hormone slows down metabolism and can result in symptoms of depression, while too much speeds up metabolism and can lead to symptoms of mania. The receptor for thyroid hormone is expressed by cells throughout the entire brain, including in areas of the cortex responsible for high-level cognition like planning and decision-making.

Cutthroats and Cottonwoods: Protecting the South Fork of the Snake - The South Fork contains the largest cottonwood gallery in the West. In the fall, the leaves on the tall-timbered giants lining the banks bounce in the breeze like gold coins exploding from the pot at rainbow’s end. Native Yellowstone cutthroat trout are in the South Fork. Most of the cutthroats spawn in tributaries contributing to the South Fork but they are found throughout and the farther you float, the bigger they get…. a river that is as it should be. Consistently wild.

Nutrition and healthy aging: The role of protein quality in combatting muscle loss - Aging may reduce our ability to digest, absorb and utilize the nutrients in food. It is important to consider increasing the amount and improving the quality of protein (probably higher than what is currently recommended for the general population) we consume. For example – research showed that consuming higher-quality (whey and pea) protein supplements at breakfast and lunch increased muscle-building in older adults by almost 10 per cent. However, collagen protein — a supplement heavily marketed towards older adults — did nothing to bolster muscle-building in older adults.

Flash Flood Roars Through Frijoles Canyon at Bandelier National Monument – One of my favorite places in New Mexico……hope I can visit again sometime when it isn’t flooded!

Cooler Communities for All - Four key design strategies to reduce urban temperatures:

• Increase tree percentage in parks and green spaces

• Provide shade

• Use plant materials and water instead of hardscape

• Switch to green ground cover, including grasses and shrubs

This Massive Egyptian Observatory Is Unlocking Celestial Secrets of an Ancient Culture - Archaeologists in Egypt have just uncovered a truly stellar find—a sixth century B.C.E. astronomical observatory in the ancient city of Kafr El-Sheikh. The observatory, made from mud bricks, is the largest and oldest of its kind in the region, spanning nearly 10,000 square feet. It was in ancient Egypt that the 365-day calendar was born, and the 24-hour day. They completely mapped the night sky, and had their own constellations and zodiac, some signs of which are still recognized today.

Looting of the Sudan National Museum – more is at stake than priceless ancient treasures - It was founded in 1959, ahead of the construction of the Aswan High Dam. A Unesco-led salvage campaign was launched in 1960 to protect and preserve the ancient monuments that would be flooded by the dam, which would alter the landscape of the Nubian region. The reported loss of parts of this collection represents a profound and multi-layered tragedy for future generations.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 10, 2024

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.

Sleep tight: A curious history of beds through the centuries – From 4,500 year old ‘beds’ at Skara Brae (Scottish island of Orkney…rectangular enclosures, around the length of a human…made from slabs of cold, hard stone…with tall headboards and raised sides) to Durrington Walls near Stonehenge (spectral outlines of long-vanished wooden bed boxes, where the builders of that monument may have once slept) to a clay figurine of a woman slumbering peacefully on her side, one hand under her head, on a simple raised platform to the gilded wooden bed in King Tut’s tomb (including a rigid, raised headrest rather than a soft pillow) to mats of dried leaves or animal skins to box beds to the ‘tick mattress’…hints of beds of the past.

Peru’s High-Altitude Hunter-Gatherers Ate Mostly Plants – Wild potatoes and the root vegetables made up 80% of their diet.

Rethinking Monarchs: Does the Beloved Butterfly Need Our Help? - The Xerces Society has published a joint statement signed by 10 top monarch biologists warning against the captive rearing and releasing of monarchs by backyard and commercial breeders. Such activities, they wrote, “promote crowding and disease spread.” The monarch is not in peril since the winter population in Mexico has shown no continued decline for the past 10 years. --- But there are some that still argue for continued ‘help.’

Deceptively Beautiful Invasive Plants – Avoid Lessor Celadine, Mimosa Tree, English Ivy…..Today, we have the opportunity to make gardening choices that benefit both the aesthetics of our gardens and local wildlife by removing invasive species and replacing them with beautiful and wildlife-friendly native alternatives. 

See the World Through the Eyes of Animals with These Stunning New Videos - To “see through” animal eyes, the team uses two cameras—one sensitive to ultraviolet light and one sensitive to visible light. Together, they capture light in four distinct wavelengths: blue, green, red and ultraviolet.

New genetic variants found in large Chinese mother–baby study - Mothers with higher blood pressure give birth to lighter and shorter babies than do mothers with lower blood pressure. This was just one of a multitude of links between maternal health and fetal development observed in a large genetic analysis of Chinese parents and their babies, which included some unexpected results. The researchers sequenced genetic data from blood samples taken from the parents and umbilical-cord blood of the infants and collected physical information about the mothers and their babies, including height and weight. The researchers identified discrepancies in the effect of some genetic variants on the same trait between mothers and their babies. For example, some variants were associated with altered cholesterol levels in infants but not in their mothers, and vice versa.

Preserving History at Bandelier National Monument – Two videos that show recreations of what the structures looked like in use based on archeological findings.

The 4-Second Nap: Unusual Sleep Habits of Animals - The killer whale, which can go a month or more without sleeping. Or the chinstrap penguin, which researchers recently discovered sleeps in four-second microbursts. Compare that to the koala, which conks out for most of the day.  When dolphins are sleeping with one hemisphere, one eye closes and one remains open. They sometimes rest motionless near the surface of the water or swim slowly, still able to breathe when needed. African elephants sleep for the least amount of time recorded of any land mammal.  The domestic horse sleeps just under three hours on average each day, and the domestic pony sleeps about three hours and 20 minutes. 

How a walk in nature restores attention - The study, conducted in 2022 between April and October, analyzed EEG data recorded on each of 92 participants immediately before and after they undertook a 40-minute walk. Half walked through Red Butte, the arboretum in the foothills just east of the University of Utah, and half through the nearby asphalt-laden medical campus. The participants that had walked in nature showed an improvement in their executive attention, whereas the urban walkers did not.

Climate change is causing a pothole plague. Are robots and self-healing pavement the solution? - In the United States, about 44 million drivers reported damage to their vehicles from potholes in 2022, which was a massive 57% increase over 2021, according to AAA. New developments offer hope for addressing potholes more effectively amid climate change, and are attracting investors….but innovations take time to be implemented.

Art and Archaeology – An Illustrated Magazine

There are 11 volumes of the Art and Archaeology magazine from 1914-1923 available on Internet Archive; it was published in Baltimore. Most of the illustrations are black and white photographs but there are occasional color ones. I enjoyed finding pictures that looked familiar…and realizing how long some of the places and artifacts have been featured in magazines: the Aztec and Maya from Central America; buildings in Greece and Italy and Spain and France from Europe; Egypt, Babylon, and Petra from the Middle East; the desert Southwest and Lincoln of the US….and these are just what is represented in the 2 sample images I picked from each volume. Some of the places are probably a bit more worn from tourists and damaged by air pollution 100 years later…some have been restored. Maybe I will do a side by side look at some historical pictures of a place I visit (when I start doing that kind of traveling again).

I hope that more of volumes of this magazine become available as the copyright expires; it was published into the 1930s. For now – enjoy the sample images below by clicking through the 22 images…or go to the volumes directly by following the 11 links.

V1 (1914-1915), V2 (1915), V3 (1916-1), V4 (1916-2), V5 (1917), V7 (1918), V9-10 (1920), V11-12 (1921), V13-14 (1922), V15 (1923 - 1), V16 (1923 -2)

American Museum of Natural History in 1953

The 1953 volume of the Magazine of the American Museum of Natural History is available from Internet Archive (here is the link for whole collection list). I am featuring the volume of magazines published the year I was born this week. There were two items that resonated…that reminded me of other years in my life.

The first was an article about Bandelier National Monument.

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I’ve been to the place at least 4 times: Spring 1971, August 1980, September 1981, and March 2005. The first time was for a picnic during a high school trip. In 1980 and 1981 my husband and I camped there. We hiked to the lower falls in 1981….and took our best pictures of the place.

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The sideshow below is a mix of pictures from the 1980 and 1981 trips. Based on the pictures, we took longer hikes in 1981. My husband did all the photography. I scanned the slides years later.

In 2005, it was a wet day. It was a bit larger group with my parents, husband and daughter. We only walked around near the visitor center. It is a place to visualize how people lived long ago….and the juxtaposition of more modern history of the world in nearby Los Alamos, the lab at the forefront of creating the first atomic bombs.

The second item was a picture of horsetails.

I remember reading about the plant in a textbook when I was in college in the mid70s…and then being thrilled to see and recognize a stand growing in Platt National Park when we visited a few months later. I had probably seen them before but overlooked them…didn’t realize that these are remnants of primitive plants that used to be the understory of the giant forests that eventually formed coal deposits. The genus (Equisetaceae) was eaten by dinosaurs!

I like finding publications from meaningful times in my life ….it’s a tangible connection to history. It’s also fun to see places I have seen more recently and to think about how they’ve changed … how they’ve remained the same.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 17, 2020

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 birds of the week: October 2020 – Starting out the weekly gleanings with birds.

Linking calorie restriction, body temperature and healthspan -- ScienceDaily – Interesting research. I went off on a tangent thinking about “up to half of what we eat every day is turned into energy simply to maintain our core body temperature.” Many people in the developed world spend the majority of time in temperature-controlled buildings or homes…and that means we probably expend a lot less calories warming or cooling ourselves than we did prior to efficient heating and cooling systems. Just one more way we are changing our environment in a way that will tweak our future evolution.

The super-adaptable chimps that can withstand climate change - BBC Future – I didn’t realize how many different habitats chimpanzees are found in…and that the ones that live in environments with greater seasonal change have more varied behaviors to respond to those changes than chimps that live in an environment that doesn’t change much.

Environmental Education Goes Virtual: Creating Meaningful Learning Opportunities at Home: The National Wildlife Federation Blog – So many good online resources…they’ve been developed over years but are probably getting a lot more use during this pandemic year.

It's Tarantula Season At Bandelier National Monument – I’ve not been to Bandelier during tarantula season! The last time I was there was in March 2005 and that was before I started taking a lot of pictures….this article reminded me that I want to go again. Maybe we’ll plan to go in the fall and be on the look out for the male tarantulas trying to find a mate. Here are a couple of pictures my husband took when we visited in 1980!

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Are we living at the 'hinge of history'? - BBC Future – It’s difficult not to look at current trends and think the future will be a dystopian one with or without seeing this as a ‘hinge.’ The last paragraph was the best of the article: “So, while we do not know if our time will be the most influential or not, we can say with more certainty that we have increasing power to shape the lives and well-being of billions of people living tomorrow – for better and for worse. It will be for future historians to judge how wisely we used that influence.”

Why is America Running out of water? – Shortages are not everywhere…but there are places in the US that are already problematic…and there are a lot of people living in those areas.

Raptor Rescue: When Bird Injuries Warrant Rehab – This article was a good summary of things I’ve heard about before re injured birds.

Unusual climate conditions influenced WWI mortality and subsequent influenza pandemic -- ScienceDaily – Something new about the 1918 flu…torrential rains and unusually cold temperatures kept Mallard ducks from their normal migration…and thus spread the virus more broadly in the battlefields of the Western Front.

What 'net-zero carbon' really means for cities - BBC Future – Using London as an example: no/fewer cars and all transport EV, less concrete…more timber, buildings reused/retrofit, green roofs and walls, renewable energy, reduced waste through recycling and energy production, urban farms. It’s technology that exists now…and already is being applied…ramped up, of course.

New Mexico Earrings

There are still more Festival of the Cranes posts to come, but I am taking a break for a few days to do post on other topics….and to do a little history of our travels to New Mexico via my earring collection.

I have some New Mexico earrings from as far back as the 1970s but I’m going to focus this post on the ones I’ve collected this century.

I bought the pair of black and silver M design (like a pottery shard) at Bandelier National Monument in 2005. My husband, daughter, and I had met my parents in Albuquerque and used that as a base to see north central New Mexico: Santa Fe, Bandelier, Petroglyphs, and Chaco Canyon.

On a road trip between Dallas and Tucson, we stopped at White Sands National Monument in 2013. I posted about the barn swallows and yuccas!

During our first experience with Festival of the Cranes back in 2016, I bought some radio telescope earrings at the Very Large Array Radio Telescope,

Two pairs of earrings including some stylized cranes at Vertu, the local artist store in Socorro,

And three more pair in the Albuquerque airport.

I bought four pair of earrings this year during our second experience at Festival of the Cranes. Starting at 12 o’clock position: there are the polished stones purchased at Vertu (they are thin enough to not be heavy), the dragonfly in cattails at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge gift shop , the bird flying over water and mountains from a shop on Socorro’s square, and the mosaic type earrings at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge made by an artist from the Santo Domingo Pueblo.

Overall – I don’t remember the years all that well (I must look back at notes), but I easily remember where I bought them. Earrings are still the best keepsake for me to buy, pack, and enjoy – savoring the memory from the time I bought them every time I see them.