Gleanings of the Week Ending October 26, 2013

The items below are ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Genome Digest - A summary from The Scientist of recent research findings. I like these summaries both for their specific content and the ‘overview’ comparison they sometimes stimulate. Did you know that chimpanzees/bonobos have 2.9 billion base pairs; a cyanobacteria has 4.7 million base pairs; cucumber has 245 million base pairs?

Did You Forget to Have Fun? - How long has it been since you actually did whatever your answer is to “If you had all the time in the world, and weren’t always working, what would you do for fun?”

Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think - Read the comments as well as the story. Time will tell as always. This is a technology that I am really looking forward to so I hope this naysayer is wrong.

The Gorgeous Fjordlands of West Norway - Beautiful wild places

How Are Open Access Publishing and Massive Open Online Courses Disrupting the Academic Community? - So far - is appears that MOOCs have been more disruptive than OA.

Mountain Lion Facts - Did you know that baby mountain lions have spots and blue eyes?

Ancient tattoos may have been used as medicine - Tattoos on Otzi the Iceman

Winners of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2013 - More feasts for the eyes…UK landscapes.

Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics - A map that showed the density of slavery was well used by Lincoln (it ‘bore the marks of much service’). This article also highlights William Playfair’s role in the development of data visualization; he was the inventor of pie charts and bar graphs in his “Commercial and Political Atlas which he published in 1786.

Improving Weather Forecasts - Forecast accuracy…and how the forecast is presented and interpreted. There’s always room for improvement.

Gleanings of the Week Ending September 21, 2013

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.

19th Century London Street Photography by John Thomson - Photographs of people in the streets of London during the later 1800s. I noticed the children in particular. John Thomson published his pictures in books and one of them is available on the Internet Archive: Street Life in London published in 1877.

The Geography of American Agriculture - Follow the link to the county-by-county crop maps from USDA to find out about where different food grows in the US.

Detailed Digital Flowers Radiate with a Magical Glow - I like flowers….event digital ones!

Obese Stomachs tell us diets are doomed to fail - Research has revealed that the mechanism that tells our brains how full we are is damaged in obese people…and it does not return to normal when they lose weight. Aargh! I’m not sure that means that diets are doomed to fail but it does mean that a person that has been obese may have to consciously limit the amount they eat for the rest of their lives rather than relying on their stomach-brain mechanism to tell them when they are full.

Mt. Zion dig reveals possible second temple period priestly mansion - Layers of structures and sorting out what it might mean - from a bathroom to a large number of murex shells to a cistern with pots and a stove in the bottom under rubbish.

Once-Majestic Cities That Sank Beneath the Ocean - There are quite a few - and some great pictures of the underwater remains: Alexandria, Egypt; Heracleion (or Thonis), Egypt; Canopus, Egypt; Yonaguni Jima Island, Japan; Saeftinghe, Netherlands; Port Royal, Jamaica; Baiae (Campania), Italy; Pavlopetri, Greece; Atlit, Israel; Lion City (Shi Cheng), China; Samabaj, Guetamala;

U.S. Drops in Share of Publications - Another indicator of globalization of science. The US is still producing 28% of the world’s share of manuscripts…but the percentage has been sliding in recent years (the absolute number of papers is holding steady).

They’re Taking Over! - The ‘they’ in this case are jellyfish. The New York Review of Books reviews Lisa-ann Gershwin’s book Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean.

Giant Prehistoric Elephant Slaughtered by Early Humans - From 1000s of years before Neanderthals…from layers 420,000 years old…found along the route of a rail link from the Channel Tunnel to London and excavated in 2004.

Beautiful Glowing Portraits of a Bobtail Squid - Photograph by Todd Bretl.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 10, 2013

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.

Giant Maya Carvings Found in Guatemala - There are traces of red, blue, green and yellow paint; at some point they should be able to create an image of what it looked like before it became part of the buried foundations of a rectangular pyramid.

Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts - Historical perspective. The first was way back in 1963….and from the Soviet Union.

Length of Human Pregnancies Can Vary Naturally by as Much as Five Weeks - Previously everyone assumed the variability was from not knowing exactly when ovulation and then implantation of the fertilized embryo occurred …. But this study revealed that even using technology to determine precisely when these events occur, there is still significant variability.

Hot Lava Hits Seawater and Forms Black Sand Beach - Images from Hawaii

Healthy Cooking Oils: 8 New Picks To Try - I’m going to try avocado oil at some point….once I come to terms with how much it costs!

Top 10 College Towns 2013 - These places have appeal to more than just students! Also take a look at the Cost of Living calculator provided by nerdwallet.

Cactus-inspired material cleans oily water - Deep understanding of how nature works can be quite useful - in this case, a potentially new type of filter. It turns out that it may work for aerosolized oil as well.

Baby Owls Sleep like Baby Humans: Owlets Spend More Time in REM Sleep Than Adult Owls - This study confirmed that the generally held notion that birds, like mammal, spend a lot of their sleep time in REM sleep when they are first born and that it declines over time. The correlation of sleep pattern with other aspects of the owls ‘growing up’ was also studied. I particularly liked that the observations in this study were made with sensors on wild owlets that were not harmed at all by the study and the potential the findings have for understanding the impact of sleep patterns in our own species.

Top US States For Solar Energy - The top 5 are: California, Hawaii, Arizona, Maryland, and Delaware. The article provides the criteria used to assess the states.

The Science of Mummies - Technologies applied to studying mummies….many of them non-invasive and non-destructive.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 2, 2013

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.

Masterful Textured Oil Paintings of Ships at Sea - from Polish Artist Justyna Kopania

Health and Environment: A Closer Look at Plastics - trying to balance risks and rewards

The Whirlpool Galaxy

Morning Glory Muffins - nutrition rich - to start the day

Population Density in the US from 1790-2000 - from Stanford University’s Spatial History Project.

Simon Beck Snow Art - this post is almost a year old…but I only found it recently

Test for Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals Gets Global Seal of Approval - both the international Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and the US Government ….good that they are agreed on how to test for the chemicals

Silhouettes and Moonrise in Real Time - video of a moon rise from a New Zealand mountain top

Archaic Native Americans Built Massive Louisiana Mound in Less Than 90 Days - At Poverty Point…the largest mound was built between rains; the hunter gatherers must have been a lot more organized - and in larger numbers - that previously thought

Romantic Textured Paintings of Couples Walking Together - just in time for Valentine’s Day