Gleanings of the Week Ending July 16, 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.

The Chemistry of Bell Peppers – Green to Yellow to Red….the chemistry of the pepper’s color change.

Ancient Brazilians occupied the same homes for centuries – Homes that were never abandoned…just extended with new floors on top of old ones, different types of ceramics and new building techniques.

Photography in the National Parks: Don’t Forget to Pack Your Flash or Reflector for Some Fill Light – This post shows images in bright sunlight with and without flash/reflector….a good ‘lesson’ in improving photos of flowers particularly.

Discover Your World with NOAA: An Activity Book – For kids and educators. The Earth Origami activity was one I looked at. This is quite a treasure trove of activities…all available online.

How to Raise Brilliant Children, According to Science – An interview with the author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. She defines 6 Cs: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creating innovation and confidence spread across 4 levels of development (summarized as seeing is believing, multiple points of view, opinions, and evidence/mastery/intricacies of doubt).

Professor finds positive effects for bringing physical activity to the desk – A positive link between mood, motivation and physical activity without detracting from work or study effectiveness…what’s not to like. For me – the Swopper chair seems to have these effects.

The People vs Coloring Books: The verdict is in – For children…the overall message may be to ‘step away from the coloring book’ and celebrate difference rather than conformity. When I was cleaning out my daughter’s papers from 1^st grade (over 20 years ago) I found a lot of lightly used coloring book type pages; it appears that she didn’t like them very much. She recognized them for what they were – busy work.

Incidence of cancer in patients with large colorectal polyps lower than previously thought – 92% of the colorectal patients referred for operation were noncancerous! My family had this experience and it is interesting to find out that it is not uncommon. Hopefully the more advanced endoscopic techniques can replace the traditional operation in some of these cases.

7 ways to find things to do in nature near you (US Edition) – Good ideas!

Butylparaben can have several endocrine disrupting effects – This is an ingredient (preservative) in many cosmetics and skin care products. Whatever testing was done in the past on the chemical probably did not even check for this kind of issue. And now we have a pervasive chemical that is impacting our biology in a negative way.

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 25, 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.

What the rising light pollution means for our health – Circadian disruption from ill-timed electrical lighting (particularly at night) may contribute to poor sleep, obesity, diabetes, certain cancers and mood disorders. The night time lights are shifting to LEDs in our cities which has the effect of shifting that lighting toward the blue wavelengths which are most disruptive to our circadian rhythms.

Vitamin D may not be the great solution to health problems – I remember when the testing for vitamin levels revealed that many people were low and doctors started recommending supplementation – sometimes megadoses of the vitamin. Now the results are being reviewed --- and it is obvious that it is not a panacea and may not be of very much benefit at all.

What if the coolest thing about a 21^st-century school wasn’t technology? – The results of a TED workshop on creating a new healthy school from scratch. What do you think of their ideas?

Lightning Strikes: How to Stay Safe – Hopefully most of these recommendations are familiar to you - we’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms recently so I took a look to refresh my knowledge.

Garlic mustard populations likely to decline – I hope this begins to happen soon in our area. Right now we seem to have a lot of this plant around our area of Maryland.

Ancient satellite busts massive gas storage leak, fracking could be next – I’ve always wondered how we could detect leaks more effectively – conserve our resources by reducing leakage – and maybe this is a solution! It’s another example of a NASA instrument (and satellite) working long after its original mission was complete.

Americans are getting heart-healthier: Coronary heart disease decreasing in the US – Hurray! The study compared 2001 and 2012. The prevalence of smoking decreased during that same time period although high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol have not (although control rates have improved). Obesity and diabetes rates have increased significantly but overall control of glucose levels has improved significantly.

Meet an Artist with no Hands – A historical piece about Matthias Buchinger – but with discussion about how the brain accommodates physical challenges such as being born without hands and learning to use feet with exceptional skill.

Flow: What is it and how to find it – How much of your day is in “flow”? I think quite a lot of mine is. The key for me is realizing that I often have more choice in the way I want to be…the way I want to do everything.

Study offers explanation for why women leave engineering – I’m not surprised by the results of this study. I was at the peak of women graduating from computer science programs in the 1980s (mine was in a math department rather than engineering) and was surrounded by so many interesting projects early on that I didn’t get into a marginalized (or menial tasks) role until later when I was strong enough to recognize it and get out it on my own – back into a place I wanted to be.

6th Graders at Storm Water Engineering

Last week I volunteered during a 6^th grade field trip to Belmont Manor and Historic Park. It was the last of the Middle School spring field trips there. The field trips activity were a mixture of history, technology, and science. My station for one of the day was about storm water engineering. The majority of the students realized that Belmont is on a hill and that the rain water would run downhill to the Patapsco River into Baltimore Harbor then to the Chesapeake Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean. Each team of 4-5 students was given a paint tray with a mound of earth at the high end of the tray as a model for what happens to storm water. They could add sticks, stones, and dry grass in any way they wanted to slow the flow of the water when it ‘rained’ (via a watering jug) on the soil. After 10 minutes of engineering by all the teams, the teams did a short description to the whole group and then the ‘rain’ came as everyone watched.

A surprising number of teams did not think to cover the soil at the top of the tray. It ‘eroded’ when the rain came down and often resulted in fast water runoff and the water was muddy too.

Some of the teams did cover the soil and used rocks and sticks to hold grass in place both over the soil and rocks; the grass turned out to be very absorbent. The water took a long time to get through to the bottom of the paint tray….and was generally clear.

As I watched the teams decide what they were going to do, implement their design, present their design, and then test it, I was intrigued by the ‘light bulb’ moments of learning that were visibly occurring all along the process.

As I walked back to my car after the last field trip – I took a picture of the bald cypress down near the pond – the tall grasses waving in the misty day…. feeling happy to have been a part of the field trips for middle schoolers at Belmont.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 27, 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.

Keep off the grass – Some areas are better as being grasslands than forests…and our planet needs those grasslands!

Dodos might have been quite intelligent – It turns out that Dodos has brains that were the same size as pigeons relative to their body size…and they had relatively larger olfactory bulbs so they probably had a better since of smell.

This bus-size whale is even more unusual than we thought – Omura’s whale devours tiny shrimp-like creatures plus large mouthfuls of ‘dirty water’ (that includes fish eggs and plankton almost invisible to the human eye. They sing a low repetitive melody for an hour or more. What will happen to these whales when the oil and gas exploration gets underway in the area where they live. Is the technology good enough to keep the petrochemicals from leaking into the water?

Reflection – Another photographic project idea!

Collect psychology classes lack curriculum about disabilities – A study pointing out that classes intended to focus on interactions with people of all types have a hole when it comes to people with disabilities – particularly physical disabilities.

Total Solar Eclipse – August 2017 – Planning ahead. It doesn’t happen very often and the path for this one is a diagonal across the continental US.

FDA to test for glyphosate in food – Finally! When Roundup first came out we used it to kill weeds growing in the cracks of our sidewalk. It was never sprayed close to anything we were going to eat. But now, because food crops are engineered to not be killed by it, it is sprayed on food crops like soybeans and corn…so it goes into our food system. It’s a little scary that the study was not done before now.

Antarctica could be headed for a major meltdown – The last time Earth’s atmosphere had about the same amount of carbon dioxide as it does now was about 16 million years ago…the temperatures were 10 degrees warmer and the ocean levels were 50 feet higher. And we have some observations that indicate that the ice shelves of Antarctica are melting rapidly: 7 of 12 ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula had collapsed over past few decades.

Elementary School Lessons about Fossils and Rocks – I’m always on the lookout for one page references and this resource includes a good one for rocks (here).

Share your Field Notes: Nature’s Notebook – A citizen science project about phenology (the timing of natural events like blooming flowers and migrating animals…a great way to spend time outdoors and contribute valuable observations to science.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 16, 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.

New National Parks for the next Century – An Op-ed --- thought provoking.

We're Thinking About ADHD All Wrong, Says A Top Pediatrician – Thinking about attentional capacity and skills as a continuum or spectrum….and supporting attentional functions in everyone….and not always using medication.

Posture Affects Standing, and not just the Physical Kind – One of the things I’ve noticed recently that causes me to have poor posture in front of my computer is tilting my head slightly back so that the top of the screen is in focus through the bottom part of my glasses. I’m going to get glasses that have a full lenses that is just for computer-distance!

14 keys to a healthy diet – Most of these seem common sense to me now….but I’ve been paying more attention to my diet for the past few years. The cholesterol recommendation (number 9 on this list) is relatively new.

First ever digital geologic map of Alaska – The story in Science Daily. If you want to dice into the details – the USGS page for the publication is here.

The man who studies the spread of ignorance – This post starts with a quote from the late 1960s by a large tobacco company to counter ‘anti-cigarette forces:’ “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” And the word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

Kepler has uncovered a trove of new planets in our cosmic backyard – Hurray for the ingenuity of the Kepler team for proposing the K2 mission after the first Kepler mission was no longer possible due to the loss of 2 of its stabilizing reaction wheels. Kepler found 234 new exoplanet candidates in 2014!

The truth about asteroid mining – Iron, nickel, cobalt --- 3D print what is needed in space rather than launching everything from Earth. Then there is the idea of mining water…maybe in the 2020s (that is not that far away!).

Preschool without walls – Children now don’t spend lots of time outdoors like they did when I was growing up…so now there are schools springing up to make it a 21^st century thing. And the preschools are relatively expensive. If I had a grandchild…I’d spend hours outdoors with them!

What earth would be like if humans never existed – A short video (less than 3 minutes).