Gleanings of the Week Ending September 17, 2016

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.

Sensory Biology Around the Animal Kingdom – Beyond sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing.

A Variety of Ways for Students to Explore National Parks Online – Not just for students….these resources could be worth a look before traveling to a national park or helping to savor the visit after you return.

Proprioception: The Sense Within – The sense of position and movement of our limbs, the senses of muscle force and effect, and the sense of balance --- easy to take for granted, more important that you might think at first.

Six Snapshots of Geoscience Research from National Parks – Our National Parks highlight the value of these special places for more than recreation…they are often places uniquely suited to increasing our understanding of Earth.

Thanks to this man, airplanes don’t crash into mountains any more – Don Bateman’s terrain mapping device....a long development cycle.

Bumblebees Pick Infected Tomato Plants – And does this compensate to offset the costs of viral infection when it comes to seed production from the tomato plants?

The Flower Sense of Hawkmoths – Olfactory receptors in the proboscis….but what attracted mw to the article was the picture of the hawkmoth (made me think of my recent hummingbird moth observations).

Late boneset: A fragrant late-summer pollinator favorite – Thinking about late blooming plants that sustain pollinators into the fall. Late Boneset is one….goldenrod is another!

“Skeleton Flowers” Turn Beautifully Transparent in the Rain – Botanical eye candy from colder regions of Japan and China

The Value of Water in the Nebraska Sandhills – Water is valuable to every environmental niche on Earth…this blog post focuses on detailing water in one type of place. Water percolates down and into aquifers below the root zone of plants!

Views from an Airplane Window

I had a window seat on the flight between Tucson and Las Vegas on the way home from Baltimore last month. That is a scenic stretch from the air. Taking off from Tucson – one notices how flat the area of the city is…and how it is almost surrounded by mountains – some of them with snow at the top.

I saw one of the mines that we saw from the highway as we drove between Madera Canyon and Tucson earlier in our vacation. It is easier to see the pit and the slag from the air.

This looks like another mine – one that is literally taking the top off the mountain.

A little further on I noticed a different pattern in one of the circular irrigation fields. How could that happen. Did the waterline fail in some patterned way?

And then there were massive housing developments with red or white roofs – some around artificial lakes. They seem to build right up the base of the low mountains.

We flew over Lake Mead! I took a lot of pictures but the two below were the best.

As we turned toward Las Vegas there was more snow on the mountains. Sometimes the snow made a crest stand out…snow on one side and not as much on the other – a visual of the ‘rain shadow’ effect that applies to snow too.

Hawaiian Vacation Lesson Learned

To wrap up the posts about my trip in December to Hawaii – I am noting some lessons learned from the trip --- what did I learn from this trip that I will apply to trips in the future:

Have a contingency for much longer flights than planned. This could include a change of clothes and must-have toiletries in carry-on luggage, medications and refillable water bottle, and healthy snacks. I’ve discovered that peppermint lifesavers help me feel better even when I am very tired. Most of my healthy snacks are pita bread wedges, veggies (celery, carrots, cucumber), fruit (apple, pear), nuts, and protein bars.

Planning a trip to a place you’ve never been before is best done with someone that has been there before…and recently. The Hawaii trip was enhanced by my daughter’s previous trip to some of the same places on a geology field trip. It helped that she was there with us too.

Look at brochures for local attractions. We saw the 2400 Fahrenheit brochure in our vacation rental; it was about a mile away! Sometimes the unplanned is icing on top for a vacation.

Seek out local food. The foods with purple sweet potato were the theme for this trip for me: pie and pastries. And I enjoyed eating at the Kona Brewing company twice! I followed my daughter’s suggestion and tried the Black Sand Island Porter.

Maximize variety. There were so many ‘high points’ for this vacation: water falls, helicopter, telescopes, volcanos, tropical forest, unusual sand, geology…..overall the variety and ‘first time’ aspect of so much of that variety is what made the trip to Hawaii so spectacular.

Avoid overeating. We feel better when we eat out less and we eat less when we prepare it ourselves! In Hawaii we ate the majority of our meals at the vacation rental (that had a full kitchen) or as picnics that we prepared and took with us for our meal at mid-day. Over the past few years, we’ve done this more frequently and now we have made it our ‘normal.’

Don’t leave valuables in the car. We didn’t have anything stolen but some fellow tourists did at one of the state parks. That kind of thing can ruin a vacation. Sometimes it is hard to not have valuables in the car. On the day we left we had to pack the car and leave our vacation rental by 11 AM and we didn’t need to be at the airport for many hours….so everything was in the car. Most of the places we went were places where there were more people around – where someone breaking into a car would be noticeable…maybe.

Take time to savor the place – while you are there and when you get back. I tried to review my pictures each evening while I was in Hawaii and then writing the blog posts was a good way to enjoy what we did all over again.

Previous Hawaii Posts:

Getting Home from Hawaii - An Adventure

It was always going to be a long flight from Hawaii back home to Maryland. Our plan was to begin in the evening and try to sleep through as much of it as possible.

But the plan fell apart almost immediately. Our fight from Kona was delayed from 10:15 PM on a Sunday to Monday at 6:30 AM. We stood in a long slow line to get out larger bags checked and a voucher for a hotel room and transportation to/from the airportt – even though it would only be for a few hours. The Kona airport is open air and the wooden benches in the waiting areas have unmovable armrests (i.e. very few places to actually lay down and try to sleep in the damp and cool night). The Royal Kona Resort voucher gave us the ability to shower and change clothes which helped us feel a little better; we only got about90 minutes of sleep!

When we got back to the airport early the next morning, we discovered that the art glass we had purchased (nicely wrapped in bubble wrap in my husband’s carry on) had to be hand inspected by TSA. It was good that there was not much of a line. They managed to preserve most of the bubble wrap and re-taped the package. As we got to the waiting area, we discovered that about half the passengers from our flight had spent the night in the airport; evidently there was some confusion by the airline personnel re vouchers. Aargh! I felt very sorry for the rumpled and sleep deprived people.

The airline brought in donuts and granola bars for breakfast….and then we waited for the plane to be ready to board. We got off later than planned so that everyone missed their connecting flights in Los Angeles – including us. That made the second time the planned trek home had to be modified. The airline had rescheduled us onto another airline’s flight into Dulles – and our car was in the parking garage at BWI. After a little haggling – we were provided a voucher for transportation from Dulles to BWI. We had time for a regular meal in the Los Angeles Airport before catching our cross-country flight.

The biggest miracle of the trek home: our luggage that had originally been checked to go to BWI arrived at Dulles with us in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. By that point our biological clocks were totally confused having gotten no solid sleep for over 40 hours. We got home and slept a few hours then go up to ratchet ourselves back toward Eastern Standard Time. It took us several days to recover!

Previous Hawaii Posts: