Gleanings of the Week Ending August 4, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

How to store produce without plastic - a good reference

Museum of Food Anomalies - Some natural…some contrived

Nadya Andreeva: A healthy lifestyle you can stomach - A tummy exercise for everyone

Visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park With Insider Tips From Friends Of The Smokies -  - This is a recent post about Great Smoky Mountains but the site includes posts on all the parks. One for Theodore Roosevelt National Park has just been posted…check it out as you plan a visit to one of them

What’s the Most Important Thing We Can Do To Take Control Of Our Final Days? - A collection of recommendations from healthcare professionals….also A Discussion of How Doctors - and the rest of us - Prepare for the End

Bedtime Math - making math a fun part of kid’s everyday lives

Rym Baouendi: Learning ecodesign from ancient civilizations - TED video

The Ghostly Grandeur Of A Desert Graveyard - El Paso’s Concordia Cemetery

Making Green More Macho - Apply the lessons from the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-littering campaign more broadly

Three wonderlands of the American West: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River…in 1912 - read it - or just look at the pictures online at the Internet Archive (see last week’s gleanings for a graphic on how to use the interface to read online). To view the book in a different format, start with the main entry for the book here.

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 14, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

Way out in a barren Chilean desert, the biggest telescope ever made is taking shape - Photos from the construction of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array

High-Tech Tools Give Researchers New View Of Yellowstone Thermal Features - Thermal maps of popular areas within the park

Electricity Storage - Wow - there are a lot of new ways out there and the idea of ‘storage’ of electricity implies a more robust infrastructure for reliable power than we have now

12 stats that matter to digital publishing - the number of people reading electronically rather than from paper is growing….and what/how they read is changing too

Heron Cam 2012 Highlights - All 5 have fledged from the Sapsucker Woods nest!

Scientific History and the Lessons for Today's Emerging Ideas -  A look back at what was happening in the 1890-1910 time period…lots of theories…some are threads to current theories, others are on the trash heap

Bridges for Animals - All around the world…this is an idea being tried to reduce road kill on highways

The 10 most pristine places on earth - none are in the US

Yama no sachi - A Japanese book from 1765. Read it on the Internet Archive. Use page down (or up) to browse through the book. It has illustrations of flowers, insects, and animals. My favorites are the peony (at right) and the poppy.

Drought leads to declaration of natural disaster in 26 US states - That’s more than half the states!

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 5, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Live stream of Blue Heron nest at Cornell Ornithology Lab - There are 5 chicks…two cameras. I leave it on almost all the time. I love having bird noises in my office and they are so interesting to watch. The chicks are growing fast so don’t wait to take a look. The adult male has the extra plummage on his head (the female lost hers in a battle with an owl) and a missing toe on his right foot. They take turns on the nest.

New Saturn video created from Voyager and Cassini spacecraft images - Video and music

New Reservation System In Place For Firefly Viewing At Great Smokies June 2nd—10th - The fireflies that flash synchronously have become so popular that a ticketing system has been put in place. Good to know if you plan to see them this year.

About One Baby Born Each Hour Addicted to Opiate Drugs in U.S. - very sad

Arabic Records Allow Past Climate to Be Reconstructed - Weather in Iraq/Syria in the 816-1009 time period…a time with lots of cold waves in that area of the world

Yellowstone Super-Eruptions More Numerous Than Thought? - yes, it’s still a super volcano

The Library of Utopia - Another try to create the giant online library

10 Emerging Technologies - A list from Technology Review. It has a pull down so you can look at their list from previous years too

Is automation the handmaiden of inequality? - Productivity per hour has continued to climb while the hourly compensation flatten sometime in the 1970s. Manufacturing jobs in the US have declined precipitously since around 2000 while the manufacturing output has continued to increase (and this in spite of outsource manufacturing to other countries too!). Blog post + comments to get lots of interpretations of the data.

Breakthroughs in glass technology - and they’ll come on line in the next few years...I like the idea of having wall sized screens!