Gleanings of the Week Ending July 19, 2025

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.

Doctors say we’ve been misled about weight and health - Doctors' advice about healthy eating and physical activity is still relevant as it may result in better health. The main goal is to offer good care irrespective of weight, which means not caring less but rather discussing benefits, harms, and what is important to the patient.

Let’s Consider a Couple of Workable Solutions to the Plastic Crisis – The first is to reduce the reliance on plastic shopping bags. Research shows that plastic bags were much less frequently found in beach litter where communities had implemented plastic bag policies. The second is green roofs in cities. Green roofs were shown to be more than capable of intercepting microplastics — at the rate of 97.5% efficiency for trapping microplastics from atmospheric deposition…..and roof areas make up 40-50% of urban impermeable areas.

Melting Glaciers Will Lead to More Volcanic Eruptions – New research from the Chilean Patagonia. Glaciers tend to suppress the volume of eruptions from the volcanoes beneath them. But as glaciers retreat due to climate change, the findings suggest these volcanoes go on to erupt more frequently and more explosively. According to a 2020 study, 245 of the world’s active volcanoes are within three miles of ice. 

A Partnership for a Healthier Appalachian Forest - The story of the southern Appalachians – and many forests across the United States – is one of widespread logging between the early 1900s and 1940s. That was followed by the “Smokey Bear era” of fire suppression. Now active management is the strategy including thinning, herbicide application and controlled burns.

The Vienna cemetery where endangered species and biodiversity thrive – 2.4 sq km (0.9 sq miles). The cemetery is home to European hamsters, Europea green toad, Alpine longhorn beetle, European ground squirrel, and Eurasian hoopee….and many other species.

Photos: Before-and-after satellite images show extent of Texas flooding destruction – It’s hard to fathom the scope of the destruction...and how fast the water rose in the darkness.

Florida Seniors Face Rising Homelessness Risk - Florida seniors make up a growing portion of the state’s unhoused population as the housing crisis continues. Cost of housing is increasing with institutional investors buying up land and insurance costs skyrocketing.

Researchers Unearth 3,500-Year Old Peruvian City with an Illustrious History - Probably a market hub, and that once connected Pacific coast communities with those in the Andes and Amazon thriving around the same time as early Middle Eastern and Asian civilizations. The urban center is known as Peñico and was founded between 1,800 and 1,500 B.C., experts said. It is near the location where the Caral civilization, said to be the oldest in the Americas first appeared 5,000 years ago. Following eight years of research, the experts classified as many as 18 structures including ceremonial temples and residential housing complexes. Sculptural reliefs and works showing the pututu, a conch shell trumpet can also be seen on some of the walls. Researchers also found clay sculptures of human and animal figures, as well as necklaces created with beads and seashells.

Emily Sargent’s Long-Hidden Watercolors Debut at the Met – John Singer Sargent’s younger sister watercolor paintings. They were lost for decades, until some of her relatives found a forgotten trunk in storage containing hundreds of her paintings.

Blast From the Past: Arizona’s Meteor Crater - Meteor Crater (also called Barringer Meteor Crater) is located between Flagstaff and Winslow on the Colorado Plateau as seen by the Operation Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. I’ve seen it from the ground!

Cemetery Reflections

Since we made our visit to the cemetery on Thanksgiving morning to put flowers on my mother-in-law’s grave, I’ve been thinking about it more.

It’s always a quiet place surrounded by relatively busy suburban streets and it’s big enough that there are always other people around. Going there is conducive to reflection – feeling alone but not too alone. On this Thanksgiving Day there seemed to be more people than usual scattered at graves to contemplate/put out silk flowers…one or two people usually although there was one group of 8 or so spaced out around a grave. We go on Thanksgiving because she died the Friday after Thanksgiving 30 years ago (and we also go on her birthday in June). I wondered if others in the cemetery had similar rationale or whether Thanksgiving is the type of holiday to remember past family gatherings…to savor those times that we had years ago…and an opportunity to be outdoors in a low-risk way during the pandemic.

The physical aspects of the place have improved somewhat over the years. The curb on the street where we park was asphalt and broken in the beginning; it’s been replaced with a concrete curb. And the pines have gotten bigger in 30 years. This year either they didn’t produce cones, or the cones had dropped and been gathered up by the maintenance crew. For some reason, I noticed that some of the grave makers did not include places for urns…and one was missing the urn (i.e. there was just a hole). Most of the markers are flat to allow for easier maintenance although there is a vertical marker that makes it much easier for us to find my mother-in-law’s grave. Even after 30 years – the markers are still level…not sunk into sod. I still like the dogwood flowers on the marker we chose for her.

What will happen when we eventually move from away from Maryland? My mother-in-law will be the only family member buried here…the rest of the family living elsewhere across the country. If we are ever back in the area – we’ll probably put flowers out again but our reminders of her will be the things that were hers that we use almost every day in our home – several end tables, a jar opener, a tin for cookies, a China cabinet, a desk. Actually – we probably think about her more often because of those items than the calendar prompting us to visit the cemetery. The cemetery is not central to our memories of her. I wonder if that is true for other families and eventually our cultural norms will shift way cemeteries.

Belmont in January 2019

Last week, I attended a lecture for Howard County Conservancy volunteers at the Belmont Carriage House – arriving early to walk around a bit before the lecture. There was still quite a lot of snow on the ground.

I stayed on the cleared roads until I made the trek up to the old cemetery.

The old tulip poplar looks even more ancient in the winter with all the hollows and bark injuries more clearly visible. It had a lot of seed pods from last season just as the younger trees do.

One of the people I was hiking with pointed out an ash tree on the Patapsco Valley State Park side of the cemetery that had evidence of emerald ash borer (the lighter color on the bark). This tree will have to be cut down before it falls on the cemetery taking down fences and stones.

On a positive note – the hemlocks in the cemetery seem to be thriving. A few years ago they were infested with wooly adelgid but they were treated and it seems have saved them.

The wind must have ‘pruned’ the holly in the cemetery. A branch was draped from one of the headstones – no footprints in the snow around the headstone.

There were lots of deer tracks in the snow as we walked up to the cemetery and back. We didn’t see any rabbit tracks. Maybe a coyote?

We circled back along the row of white pines. The snow stands out even on a very cloudy day.

It was time to head back. I stopped near the mailboxes to take a picture of the pond with the bald cypress standing just to the left of it. It does have a classic cypress shape but if I wasn’t familiar with the tree, I’d have to hike down to the pond and see the cypress knees that surround it for a definitive identification.