Gleanings of the Week Ending July 4, 2015

Hope you are enjoying the 4th of July! We’re going to see the local fireworks display tonight. 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.

Weight loss, combined with vitamin D, reduces inflammation linked to cancer, chronic disease - And the study was done with postmenopausal women! Quite a welcome change from the days where most medical studies were done with middle aged men.

The Mythology and Art of the American Road Trip - 100 billboards along I-10 from California to Florida.

The Colonial Revival Furniture Made at Eleanor Roosevelt's Val-Kill Industries - I like the old fashioned writing chair. If I had one - would I use it for my laptop? I also liked this article because it reminded me of a road trip to New York (state) a few years ago that included a tour of Val-Kill.

Antarctic life: Highly diverse, unusually structured - Will the high diversity help the Antarctic ecosystem adapt as climate changes?  

Photo Gallery: Scenes from the Golden Age of Animal Tracking -  (click on the ‘View the gallery’ link under the three-toed sloth picture) Animals as subjects and samplers of the environment where they live.

Joe Mangrum's Temporary Sand Paintings Are Pure, Beautiful Magic - Videos of how the intricate paintings are made

This One-Ton Fish Is One of Nature's Most Improbable Creations - I’ve seen ocean sunfish in aquariums…and noted how odd they seemed. They can grow to be quite large (heaviest boney fish in the world!

Frame for displaying tiles - After I fill up all the space under the plastic sheet of my breakfast table with Zentangle tiles® - this is my next display strategy form my ‘tile a day,’

How to Make Vegan Parmesan-Style Cheez - Another recipe to try. I’ve noticed large packages of raw cashews in my grocery store; maybe there are more people trying recipes that call for them - like this recipe.

Presentation: Mobile is eating the world - Trends…..but there is a lot of room for disruption of the ‘mobile’ vision that we have right now.

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 13, 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.

18 beautiful houses for tiny people - Photographs of doll’s houses …inhabitants and furnishings too.

How past Native-American settlement modified Western New York forests - Larger nut-bearing trees were more abundant near settlements!

Rebuilding Sandbars in the Grand Canyon - I had learned about the attempts to rebuild sandbars in the recent Coursera offer on Water in the Western US…so this acted to remind me of the class, probably locking in what I learned through a surprise repetition.

Ultrasound is making new waves throughout medicine - Ultrasound is being used for more and more imaging these days….and is more portable than a lot of the other imagining technologies.

10 Ways to Save Pollinators - This is not just about honey bees….it’s about all pollinators.

Multi-tasking: Benefits on exercise - So doing something else while you exercise may not be such a bad thing!

Beyond Automation - Five paths toward employability is an automated…augmented world of the future.

Sewage Pollution: The Next Great Threat for Coral Reefs - 96% of places that have both people and coral reefs have a sewage pollution problem (85% of the waterwater entering the sea in the Caribbean is untreated). Sewage that reaches corals includes: fresh water, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, pathogens, toxins. Ewww! Not good for human health either.

The Shifting Sands of the Sahara Are a Lesson in Dune Dynamics - Illustrations of dune patterns (seen from above)

5 Ways to Make Environmentally Conscious Food Choices - I had thought of all 5…but this is post is a good summary to: support good companies, buy local, storing your food, growing your own, and choose less packaging.

Jockey Ridge State Park

Jockey Ridge State Park was very close to our hotel in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. It’s a dune field on the sound side of the barrier island. They sponsor a school from hang gliding at the park which is just a little south of Kitty Hawk where the Wright Brothers took flight. We also stopped by the park before we headed inland to other wildlife refuges. All the pictures were from that morning in the park.

Walking to the end of the boardwalk from the visitor center that crosses over dunes stabilized with trees -

Some with curly lichen -

There is a wooden platform that looks out to a low place in the dunes where water had collected from the overnight rain.

I took the stairs down to the sand for a closer look at the ripples left in the sand

And a few bird tracks made since the rain had smoothed the sand.

My own footprints were the only human footprints.

I walked down to the edge of the water and heard plops in the water. I never managed to see the frogs but they were probably taking advantage of the water.

At the edge of the forest the shifting of the sand was obvious. Some trees were being buried

And some were clinging to the edge with their roots showing.