Gleanings of the Week Ending June 29, 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.

The Electric Revolution of Gardening Tools is Here – Hurray! We’ve been completely transitioned to battery powered yard tools for a few years now. I wouldn’t be mowing my own yard without our electric mower. Our old gas-powered one was noisy and my throat got scratchy from the fumes. Now I think of mowing the yard as a challenging exercise rather than a negative impact on my hearing and lungs!

US Cities Ranked by Vehicle Miles Traveled – As I read the article, I wondered where Dallas/Fort Worth fit since they were not on the top 10 list. I went to the source cited in the article and found that Dallas/Fort Worth was 19th.  Other Texas cities are high too – San Antonio at 14, Houston at 18 and Austin at 22.

See Frida Kahlo in Her Element in a New York Show of Rare Photographs – There is a picture of her (and Diego) viewing a solar eclipse in 1932 (Detroit)!

The apple detectives hunting for lost varieties - Apple fanatics across the UK are now taking samples from very old apple trees in hopes of learning more about antique varieties, and perhaps making some surprising discoveries. That's because there are apples, documented in 19th-Century books like Robert Hogg and Robert Bull Graves' The Herefordshire Pomona, that have slipped through people's fingers.

In North Macedonia, an Ancient Lake Faces Modern Threats – Lake Ohrid - 19 miles long, nine miles wide and 945 feet deep, teeming with fish, snails, leeches, flatworms, phytoplankton, crustaceans, and more. Of the lake’s roughly 1,200 known native species, 212 of them are endemic, occurring nowhere else. It faces growing threats, including from overfishing, nutrient pollution, invasive species, booming tourism, unregulated building, official neglect, and perhaps the most inexorable challenge of all, global warming.

Rare White Bison Calf Born at Yellowstone National Park - Photographed on June 4, as a group of bison crossed a road with traffic stopped.

A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels - This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. They haven’t come to the Walmart near me yet…I’ll be looking for them every time I shop there.

A new way to measure aging and disease risk with the protein aggregation clock - Although there are other "clocks" to measure ageing and health, most of them are based on nucleic acids like DNA. A biological clock based on proteins could be a useful complement to these existing clocks, as proteins are among the most abundant molecules in cells and are crucial for all cellular functions. With the help of such a protein aggregation clock, scientists and doctors might move one step closer towards helping people age healthily and preventing age-related diseases.

Tiny beauty: how I make scientific art from behind the microscope – Great illustrations…worth scrolling through.

New metric for blood circulation in brain to better understand dementia - By accurately measuring how pulsatility is transmitted in the brain, researchers can better understand the underlying mechanism of brain conditions (including Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia) and potentially guide development of new treatments.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 6, 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.

How Britain's taste for tea may have been a life saver - The explosion of tea as an everyman's drink in late 1700s England saved many lives - the simple practice of boiling water for tea, in an era before people understood that illness could be caused by water-borne pathogens, may have been enough to keep many from an early grave. Sometimes people's existing behaviors can make more of a difference to their health than an explicit intervention might.

Carbon-Based Paleolithic Paintings Found in France - The carbon-based drawings were detected with visible light and infrared photography, X-ray fluorescence, and spectroscopy underneath previously known images. The discovery could allow for precise radiocarbon dating of the artwork. Most of the Paleolithic paintings in the more than 200 caves in the region were made with iron and manganese oxides, which cannot be directly dated with radiocarbon dating technologies.

Winners of the 2023 International Landscape Photographer of the Year Contest – Wonderful views. I wish more of them were annotated (where they were taken…comments from the photographer, etc.). One of my favorites was the Winner for Snow and Ice by Thomas Vijayan of Canada.

Which zoo animals are most active in winter and what times are best to see them? – Author commenting about zoos in the UK…but most of the comments are relevant to zoos in the US too. I particularly enjoyed the last recommendation – going to the Reptile House to warm up! My daughter gave us a membership to the local zoo for Christmas…and we’ll probably bundle up and go soon (but not while the weather is in the 20s)!

Photos of the Week – December 24, 2023 from the Prairie Ecologist – Great reminders that there are interesting subjects for nature photography in winter.

103-Year-Old Artificial Christmas Tree Sells for Over $4,000 – A sliver of history: The tree originally belonged to Dorothy Grant, whose family purchased it for their Leicestershire, England, home in 1920. When she first saw it, the 8-year-old girl was “wildly excited.” She decorated its branches with cotton wool that resembled snow, as baubles were an “extravagance” at the time. Grant cherished the tree for the rest of her life. When she died at the age of 101 in 2014, her 84-year-old daughter, Shirley Hall, inherited it. She decided to part with it to honor her mother’s memory and to ensure it survives as a humble reminder of 1920s life—a boom-to-bust decade.

Photography In the National Parks: 2023 In Review – Rebecca Lawson’s favorite shots from 2023 from Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainer, Lake Chelan, Yosemite, Death Valley, and Banff National Parks.

Honeycrisp, Cosmic Crisp usher in banner year for U.S. apples - Growers report that apple production in the United States hit levels in 2023 that had not been seen since the 2014-15 season. Washington State was the largest grower, producing some 90% of the nation's crop. Of all the varieties, Honeycrisp, Gala, Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Fuji make up 76% of the total apple holdings. The big winner this year was the Cosmic Crisp apple, which experienced a 41% year-over-year growth, with 9.5 million bushels harvested.

Millions of mysterious pits in the ocean decoded - Most of the depressions in the seafloor in the German Bight are created by porpoises and other animals in search of food, and then scoured out by bottom currents. The researchers showed that the marine mammals leave pits in the seafloor when they hunt for buried sand eels.

2023 was a year of big anniversaries – 20 years ago the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas…the Concorde made its final flight, 30 years ago the World Wide Web launched into the public domain, 50 years ago hip-hop began, 60 years ago March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (“I have a dream” speech)…JFK assassinated, 75 years ago Israel declared independence, 80 years ago Casablanca opened, 150 years ago blue jeans patented.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 15, 2022

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.

Previously deployed military personnel show retained dust in lungs – The lingering impact of deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Rio Grande shrinks, El Paso plans for uncertain water future – Preparing for a year when there is no river water. Elephant Butte Reservoir that stores water for Las Cruces NM and El Paso TX, where I went on a birding field trip in November 2016, is currently at 5.6% of its capacity. So far – nothing has resolved the water insecurity of the region into the future.

Watercolor seas in the wake of Hurricane Ian – The impact of water surging and running off…natural-color imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite. There is also an image from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite detailing the coastline near Fort Myers.

Solar Community Slammed by Hurricane Ian: “Our Lights Stayed On” – And another Hurricane story…this one from the ground – Babcock Ranch, about 2 miles from Fort Myers.

Pre-Hispanic images revealed on early convent walls in Mexico – Hmmm….the building was not always a Christian convent?

Has the pandemic changed your personality? – Declines in extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness among adults were measured…particularly in young adults (ages 18-25). I found myself wondering whether the political upheaval that was happening at the same time contributed to the finding; the collective stress levels were probably heightened by more than the pandemic.

A field guide to Jackrabbits – An animal to look for in the west….next time I travel there.

Multiple health benefits of b-type procyanidin-rich foods like chocolate and apples consumed in right amounts – The study showed that peak benefits are achieved at mid-range doses rather than high or low doses. But it is not clear how to get the mid-range dose through diet…which made this article interesting but not actionable.

How did Vikings make glass beads? – Evidently by salvaging Roman and Byzantine mosaics as their raw material!

Scientists are finding fungi in cancerous tumors – A surprise…and lots of research still to be done to understand if the fungi are a correlation or contributor to the tumor.