Gleanings of the Week Ending May 23, 2015

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.

New Battery Technology Will Fundamentally Change the Way the Grid Operates - Cost effective storage of energy seems to be on the near horizon. It could overcome the complaint about the intermittent nature of solar and wind power generation.

The Chemistry of Permanent Hair Dyes - There are probably still a lot of people covering grey hair with permanent hair dyes…not me. I’d rather enjoy my natural salt and pepper!

A Gorgeously Detailed View of Antarctica's Churning Ocean Currents  and Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf Will Likely Disintegrate by Decade's End - Two recent articles about Antarctica. The first one is a visualization of simulations done at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  The second article is bad news since it means global sea level rise will be increasing as glacial ice enters the ocean faster.

From Snapshot to Science: Photos of Biodiversity as Useful Records - Learn about National Geographic’s Great Nature Project. The Belmont BioBlitz observations have become part of the project!

The Birth of a Bee - A short video…well worth watching.

Recommended levels of activity rarely achieved in busy workplace environment - Many workplaces are quite sedentary. This study looked at 83 employees in a hospital. Only 6% of the participants reached the 10,000 steps per day goal even though the jobs of 53% of the participants were assumed to require ‘high’ levels of activity! I know when I started wearing a Fitbit I had to focus on getting steps in after my workday. Now that I am retired, it is easier to get the steps in throughout the day rather than focused at the end of the day.

China Coal Use Continues To Fall “Precipitously” - Now if this trend will continue….

First fully warm-blooded fish: The opah or moonfish - And now we discover that there is an exception to something we all learned in school….fishes are not all cold-blooded.

A Map Showing the "Most Distinctive" Causes of Death by State - It is a very colorful map…but does it mean very much. The most distinctive form of death in Maryland seemed strange to me…and ‘tuberculosis’ was listed for Texas.

How Machines Destroy (And Create!) Jobs, In 4 Graphs - I was somewhat surprised that the ‘services’ sector is not even larger. Looking at the graph historically - white collar jobs became the highest percentage and number of jobs in the 1950s and the trend continues.

Dragonfly Wings

There was a dragonfly in a petri dish to be looked at under the microscope at one of the demonstration tables of the Belmont BioBlitz. I took a picture with my camera in ‘close up’ mode - without the microscope; the magnification is enough to make it interesting but I need to have better control of the light source to avoid reflections.

Even though butterflies are more generally colorful - I find the dragonflies more interesting. It is just getting warm enough to see them this season and observe their behavior: diving through the meadow and sitting on the tip of meadow grasses. Later we’ll see them near water on lotuses or water lilies and stroking over the water to lay their eggs. May camera speed is not fast enough to catch the two wings on each side moving independently.

The wing structure seen in the photograph could be a Zentangle. Are the lines veins or just structural elements?

Next time I go to Arizona, I’ll photograph my son-in-laws mounted collection of spiders and insects!

Belmont BioBlitz

This is the last day of the Belmont BioBlitz! About 400 middle school students have participated over the 4 days. The first day was very hot…the second day was humid…the fourth was breezy but near perfect otherwise. The forecast for today has a higher probability for rain (hopefully it will hold off until the Bioblitz is over and the students have boarded their buses after a picnic lunch).

A red-tailed hawk was in the area on the first day - on the roof of the building housing the ‘tech’ for the Bioblitz and then on a high branch of a sycamore that was well within the range of the spotting scope.

A mockingbird that has a nest in a nearby river birch used the same roofline more frequently and griped at the ‘too many people’ in the area.

I was responsible for helping student identify what they found. The reference books were spread out on outdoor tables near enough of wi-fi reception where they could sync their iNaturalist observations while working on identification and then go into the tech room to make sure all the data was recorded.

Several insects visited my tables - and student made some last minute observations!

Some of the animals from the nature center were popular. Katrina - the diamond back terrapin usually in a large tank of water in the nature center - was out and about in the grass.

Maize the corn snake was also a new experience for many of the students.

And at the very end of yesterday - a plant that we haven’t identified yet. I need to quiet time with the books!

In the end - success is more about the new perspectives many of the students have demonstrated than the details of one particular observation.