Gleanings of the Week Ending December 2, 2023

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.

Scientists found hundreds of toxic chemicals in recycled plastics - More than 13,000 chemicals used in plastics with 25% classified as hazardous. Numerous studies show that hazardous chemicals can accumulate even in relatively close-loop plastic recycling systems. We need to rapidly phase-out plastic chemicals that can cause harm to human health and the environment.

Giant Sequoias Are in Big Trouble. How Best to Save Them? - Giant sequoias are, by volume, the largest trees in the world, indigenous only to California. Reaching heights of 300 feet, they occur in 80 groves or grove complexes along the western flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Central California. Many of these trees live for thousands of years: The oldest sequoia is more than 3,200 years old. In North America, only bristlecone pines grow longer. The 2020 and 2021 fire seasons were a wake-up call: flames had killed between 13 and 19 percent of all giant sequoias more than 4 feet in diameter, and many trees were far larger.

Batteries of the future? How cotton and seawater might power our devices - In markets where consumers appear to really care about the sustainability of the products they buy, appropriately sourced alternative battery materials might have more of a chance – whether batteries are made with biowaste-derived carbon or any other potentially more sustainable substance. The public could play a big role in really pushing that effort forward.

Designing cities for 21st-century weather – A data-driven model to predict how urban areas across the country will grow by 2100 found that how a city is laid out or organized spatially has the potential to reduce population exposures to future weather extremes. Carefully designed urban land patterns cannot completely erase increased population exposures to weather extremes resulting from climate change, but it can generate a meaningful reduction of the increase in risks.

Stunning 2,700-Year-Old Sculpture Unearthed in Iraq – 18 tons of alabaster. 2,700 years old. 12.5x12.8 feet. Largely intact except for its head which is missing.

Larger Beaks, Smaller Bodies: Could Climate Change Literally Change Birds? – A study analyzed 129 species of North American migratory birds collected over the prior 40 years and found bodies are shrinking and wings growing longer. Smaller species of birds, like tiny warblers or kinglets, shrink faster than bigger birds like robins and grackles, so their rate of change over the 40 years, is much, much faster. They’re able to maybe adapt to warming temperatures faster than these bigger birds.

A step closer to injection-free diabetes care: Innovation in insulin-producing cell – Potential this safer and more reliable way to grow insulin-producing cells from a patient's own blood could eventually allow transplants without the need for anti-rejection drugs.  

The Life and Death of American Dams - Many dams are now poorly maintained, clogged with silt, and pose an increasingly high risk of catastrophic failure. The recent recognition of the damage dams cause and the movement to remove them is part of the rewilding of America, long overdue.

An exotic tick that can kill cattle is spreading across Ohio – Asian longhorned ticks. The size of a sesame seed in some life stages and pea-sized when engorged. Surveillance showed they returned the following summer to the farm despite the application of pesticides in 2021. Asian longhorned ticks' secret colonization weapon is the ability to reproduce asexually, with each female laying up to 2,000 eggs at a time -- and all 2,000 of those female offspring able to do the same.

How Urban Design Impacts Public Health – Urban planning and design affects everything from air quality to temperature to risk of injury on roadways. Often with developers of public spaces it’s a sin of omission rather than of commission. In many cases, what is rarely apparent is what the health cost is, because that cost is born in a different sector and often at a different time.

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 6, 2023

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.

Digesta: An overlooked source of Ice Age carbs – Partially digested vegetable matter from large herbivores (such as bison) might have provided carbohydrates and other macro nutrients reducing the burden of ‘gathering’ for a time after an animal was slaughtered. Perhaps during migration, it was the dominant source of carbohydrates in a situation with reduced accessibility of plants. And maybe women participated in hunting to a larger extent than previously thought; ‘grave goods’ in burials found that perhaps 30-50% of all large-game hunters in the Americans during the late glacial era may have been female!

Anemia found to be common in ancient mummified Egyptian children – CT scans were done on 21 child mummies (between ages 1-14 at death) to study the skeleton inside the wrapped remains. 7 of the children had pathological enlargement of the cranial vault, typically associated with anemia. The study also found a child that died less than a year after birth of thalassemia (the body could not produce hemoglobin).

Bathing through the ages: 1300 – 1848 – 14th and 15th century bathhouses provided services beyond bathing (lancing abscesses, pulling teeth, steam rooms, mineral baths, cupping, herbal concoctions); they helped shape the public health services of larger cities as they grew, and health conditions deteriorated. By the 16th century, bathhouses started to disappear as Europe was ravished by plague, smallpox, and syphilis. But – by the 1800s, sanitation reformers were arguing that making bathing facilities available to the poorest classes of society offered an ‘affordable and immediate way’ of improving public cleanliness and health. Bathhouses, along with waterworks and sewage systems, laid the foundation for the UK Health Act of 1848.

Glass or Plastic: which is better for the environment? – There is not a clear-cut answer. I will lean toward glass because of its non-toxicity….but I also realize we need to improve the ways we use it (less single use) and recycle it (better sorting and improved processing that avoids melting it twice),

Greener batteries – Batteries with Organic Electrode Materials (OEMs) are one alternative that is being researched…in this case using azobenzene by a research team at a Chinese University. Hopefully there are researchers around the world also focused on producing greener batteries.

Protein powders: When should you use them? – I think of protein powder as an ultra-processed food….a food I only want to use if I can’t manage to get enough protein from unprocessed or lightly processed foods in my diet. It is not something I want to use every day!

Long Reviled as ‘Ugly,’ Sea Lampreys Finally Get Some Respect – Not so long ago…lampreys were an organism that seemed destined for extinction because we only saw it as a predator that wiped out the Great Lakes lake-trout fishery. Now, the consensus is that, in their natural habitat, marine lampreys are “keystone species” supporting vast aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. They provide food for insects, crayfish, fish, turtles, minks, otters, vultures, herons, loons, ospreys, eagles, and hundreds of other predators and scavengers. Lamprey larvae, embedded in the stream bed, maintain water quality by filter feeding; and they attract spawning adults from the sea by releasing pheromones. Because adults die after spawning, they infuse sterile headwaters with nutrients from the sea. When marine lampreys build their communal nests, they clear silt from the river bottom, providing spawning habitat for countless native fish, especially trout and salmon. Wow!

The Pacific Garbage Patch Is Home to Coastal Species—in the Middle of the Ocean – A surprise for researchers…they found shrimp-like arthropods, sea anemones and mollusks, Pacific oysters, orange-striped anemones and ragworms. Crustaceans were taking care of eggs and anemones were cloning themselves. This does not make the Garbage Patch acceptable!

Photography In the National Parks: Same Spot, Different Time / Season / Weather – Spots in Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, and Olympic National Parks.

Greater fat stores and cholesterol increase with brain volume, but beyond a certain point they are associated with faster brain aging – People in wealthy countries have largely grown accustomed to eating more and exercising less -- habits that are associated with decreased brain volumes and faster cognitive decline. This study looks at indigenous people (two tribes in Bolivia that live along tributaries of the Amazon). The tribe that was closer to our subsistence ancestors had the lowest rates of hear disease and minimal dementia; in this group - BMI, adiposity and higher levels of "bad" cholesterol were associated with bigger brain volumes in older adults!