ocean — 2015 — The 21st Century Matriarch

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.

Pollinator Partnership Planting Guides - Planning a garden? How about giving the pollinators in your area a boost too? This site has a planting guide for ‘ecoregions’ in the US - accessed by entering your zipcode!

A Wet and Wild look Inside the 'Mushroom Houses' Of a Fungi Farm - Ever wonder how mushrooms you buy in the grocery store are grown? This post includes a short video. If we had household gardener robots - would you grow mushrooms as well as vegetables?

The Surprising, Depressing Reason Why City-Dwelling Robins Sing at Night - When I saw the picture at the front of this post, my first thought was “that’s not a robin.” But it is - a European robin. I was thinking of the North American variety. It is disturbing that our lights are messing up circadian rhythms - our own and other organisms.

What is the oldest city in the world? - It is surprisingly controversial. How many of the possibilities in the article have your heard about before?

Deconstructing mental illness through ultradian rhythms - A study that suggests that regular meals and early bedtimes may lead to a better life and prevent the onset of mental illness. The study discovered a new dopamine-based rhythm generator. The full paper is available here.

Retracing the roots of fungal symbioses - Mycorrhizal fungi live on the roots of host plants where they exchange sugars that plants produce for mineral nutrients that fungi absorb from the soil. It is hard to visualize - and often not well understood. Now genomics is being applied. Climate change will put whole new stresses on symbiotic relationships. I hope the knowledge gained from this type of research will help us maintain or increase food production as the environment changes.

Liquid Biopsy - Fast DNA-sequencing machines are leading to simple blood tests for cancer - There are some technologies that are so appealing…that you wish they were already available. But it is not easy. So far - the work is for specific types of cancers. The ability to do faster DNA sequencing is improving the prospects.

Ocean circulation change: Sea level spiked for two years along Northeastern North America - Climate change and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)…most of the models predict a weakening of the AMOC over the 21st century and it appears that there was changed in the 2009-2010 time frame.

Computational Anthropology Reveals How the Most Important People in History Vary by Culture - This study looked at articles about significant people in the English, German, Chinese and Japanese language versions of Wikipedia as a data source.

These Brilliantly Colored Bolivian Buildings Look Like Alien Spaceships - Wow! Almost too much color…but certainly different than the majority of buidlings.

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.

Add nature, art and religion to life's best anti-inflammatories - Yet another reason to savor the awe of nature, art and spiritually - if you need one. Including these in day-to-day living should not be a hard sell but many times they fall by the wayside if our lives get too full of other things. They don’t go on a ‘bucket list’ for some other time; they need to be included every day!

In a crisis, the bigger your social network, the better - This research indicates that more extensive social networks are a backup strategy for crises - or at least it was in the pre-Hispanic Southwest. Is it always the case? Sometimes it seems that all the increased communication going on in the modern world has increased the divides rather than built positive networks.

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job - The history of Google and Internet Archive as ‘library.’

High Stakes in Declining Monarch Butterfly Populations and Six Ways to Save Monarchs - The rapid decline of Monarch butterflies is very sad….but there are things to do. I am going make the dominant plant in my chaos garden beginning this year!

How the Eastern tiger swallowtail got 'scary' - Another butterfly story. I bought some tiger swallowtail earrings (one is the caterpillar and the other is the butterfly) so this article captured my attention.

The Chemical Compounds behind the Smell of Flowers - The smell of roses, carnations, violets, lilies, hyacinth, chrysanthemums, and lilacs. The only flower whose smell is not produced with compounds containing ring structures is the lily.

Increasing individualism in US linked with rise of white-collar jobs - A lot has happened in the last 150 years…including a higher percentage of the population working in white-collar jobs. This study showed that the trend in type of job was more correlated with the trend toward individualism that some other changes such as urbanization or frequency of disease or disasters.

How Tourist Garbage Causes Yellowstone's Morning Glory to Change Color - The color of the Morning Glory pool is no longer the blue color of its namesake. Too many people have thrown coins, rocks, and trash into it. This article reports on why the trash caused the change.

Larger area analysis needed to understand patterns in ancient prehistory - In the past, the main tools used to study prehistory only addressed very small areas. Now there is an acknowledgement that some conclusions cannot be drawn with only those small samples and technologies that can look at larger areas are being applied more frequently to understand how cultures responded to population pressure and climate change in particular.

An ocean of plastic: Magnitude of plastic waste going into the ocean calculated - More than 4.8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the oceans from land each year; it could be as high as 12.7 metric tons. That’s a lot of plastic. The ocean seems so vast…but we are pushing it in ways that it may not be able to absorb without huge impact to itself and the planet.

Electrochromic polymers create broad color palette for sunglasses, windows - What fun! I’d like these in the windows of my office rather than sunglasses! Maybe the window could be powered by a solar cell.