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.

Master Naturalist Training - Week 6

Last Wednesday was the 6th of eight days of training to become a Master Naturalist in Maryland. We managed to go out for a short history walk at Belmont before the rain started. I noticed a lower branch of the English Elm on the slope in front of the house and got this close up of the buds.

Back inside we talked about native and invasive species in Maryland. I’m motivated to think about planting some ‘natives’ at the edge of the forest behind our house. The area has a lot of deer traffic so I may have to protect whatever I plant.  We have big trees but not many samplings because of the heavy browsing. I am starting with two items in a two small areas: ferns in the dampest area of the yard and a spicebush or service berry or winterberry to provide a shrub or understory level plant in the area where it has gotten too shady for grass to grow well. I still love the crocus, snowdrops and daffodils in the spring - even though they are non-native. Our neighbor has an expanding clump of daffodils at the edge of the woods and I enjoy them every spring. Maybe I’ll plant some bulbs next fall around my young understory tree.

In the afternoon the topic was fish. After a short lecture we did several classification exercises with various fishes on newspaper. I appreciate that gloves were provided…and that my pen worked just find to spread the fins and open the mouth! We headed out to the pond; it was cold and we did not get a single fish in the net although we did recognize scat (from our week 3 lecture on mammals). This one had a lot of hair - so a predator - and too big for fox - so probably a coyote. They seemed to frequent the area around the pond.

I also got some images of the bald cypress from the other side of the pond. See the people to the right of the tree…for scale.

Also near the pond are some trees that were planted in protective tubes that seem to be thriving. One had a delicate birds nest from last summer. The ornithology segment of the course is part of the last class.

I did some follow-up work at home from the week 4 lecture on microbes. I made a spore print with a baby bella mushroom I had from the grocery store. It is an easy process: 1) remove any remaining veil covering the gills on the underside of the mushroom and the stem 2) turn it gills down on a piece of paper 3) cover it with an upside down bowl to keep it from disturbed 4) come back in 12+ hours, carefully remove the bowl and mushroom…the spore print will be on the paper. I was surprised at how much moisture the mushroom leaked onto the paper…next time I’ll not used paper that has printing on the other side!

Another follow-up was from week 5. When we went to the stream - we scraped the rocks with a toothbrush and kept the sample of watery debris in the refrigerator for a week. There was no compound microscope in the building for week 6 as originally planned so I took the sample home to look at with my microscope. And there were living diatoms in the sample! I same two different kinds right away….and will look again sometime this weekend.