Gleanings of the Week Ending July 04, 2026

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.

06/24/2026 I’m Plastic Free How to Tell if a Company is Actually Reducing its Plastic Footprint? - In the 2020s, it is no longer enough for companies to say they care about the planet while their products, packaging, and supply chains continue to leak plastic into the environment. Plastic pollution is not only a litter problem. It is a materials, design, energy, waste, and accountability problem.

6/24/2026 NWF Blog Go Plastic Free This July - Reducing our plastic waste helps the environment by not only ensuring it’s pristine, but it also prevents plastic from being ingested by wildlife, where injury and death are common outcomes when they interact with plastic. Plastic is also a known hormone disruptor, which can and does affect wildlife and humans.

06/23/2026 The Conversation We found microplastics in hedgehogs – then we traced them back to pet food - The story began in 2021, when we collected 189 hedgehog faeces samples from residential gardens and rehabilitation centres across the UK. We found plastic in 19% of them. Research suggests that food left out by people is the single biggest reason European hedgehogs visit residential gardens. Many hedgehogs have even become reliant on it, especially during the autumn and winter. We found microplastics in 29 of the 38 pet food products we tested. In 18 products, contamination appeared in more than one retail unit. Although plastic was found across the products tested, those in the “value” price category had more positive samples.

06/23/2026 The New York Times Former NOAA Employees Revive Climate Site Shut by Trump Administration - The new site, climate.us, is an effort by former staff members at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to present climate science previously housed at climate.gov, including data, reports, articles, and congressionally mandated national climate assessments. The new site is effectively the “first full clone” of climate.gov.

6/23/2026 Clean Technica How you fight climate disinformation – Several strategies….including Pope Leo XIV has called “the drug of fake news” a threat to a health society and has called on journalists to “safeguard voices and faces, cultivate seriousness in every report and every analysis, preserve the beauty of cultures and territories.”

6/25/2026 BBC Droughts are transforming the Turkish landscape with massive sinkholes - The "breadbasket" of Turkey, Konya's valleys are filled with the farms needed to feed a growing nation. But the available groundwater is drying up and causing fields to collapse. Turkey has been seized by ongoing drought, with a United Nations report predicting that Turkey would become a water-poor country by 2030. Konya's sinkhole problem is a perfect storm of geology, drought and intensive agriculture draining the groundwater.

6/25/2026 Science Daily Osteopenia is silently weakening bones in millions of people - Exercise, adequate calcium and vitamin D, and other healthy habits can slow or even partially reverse the decline.

6/23/2026 The Conversation Earth’s oldest crater really is over 3 billion years old - Zircon is tiny, tough and unusually good at keeping time. It contains uranium, which slowly decays into lead. By measuring uranium and lead in a zircon crystal, we can estimate when that crystal formed, or when something strongly altered it. Apatite can grow when hot fluids move through broken rock – exactly the kind of system an impact creates, as heat and fractures drive water through a crater. The apatite gave the same age as the modified zircons. Two clocks, in different minerals and different rocks, pointed to the same event about 3.02 billion years ago.

6/22/2026 Smithsonian Magazine Authorities Investigated Reports of an Illegal Excavation in Rome. Then, They Stumbled Upon an Ancient Villa Adorned with Mosaics - In mid-February, residents of Castel di Guido, a village on the outskirts of Rome, notified police of unusual activity taking place nearby. Locals had spotted people digging at night, seemingly without authorization. When authorities investigated the site, they realized that looters had used a backhoe to access an underground cavern protected by fencing. Archaeologists jumped into action to prevent further damage—and soon discovered a well-preserved set of ruins that may have been visited by Roman emperors. Emergency excavations revealed the ancient structure’s entrance hall, which featured a central impluvium, or marble basin at the center of the room, and a mosaic floor adorned with botanical and geometric designs.

6/17/2026 Yale Environment 360 A Missing Piece in Climate Models: Nature’s Own Emissions - For decades, climate scientists have issued warnings about positive global warming feedbacks, vicious cycles in the Earth system in which rising temperatures from burning fossil fuels beget more warming. Feedbacks in which ecosystems emit more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere are so complex that they are often left out entirely. For example, how much more carbon dioxide will be emitted as wildfires increase? How much more methane will bubble up from fermenting wetlands or seep from thawing permafrost? Remarkably, these so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or absent from the most influential climate models. Climate modelers are scrambling to catch up.

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 11, 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.

In search of the Old Ones: Where to find the world's longest-lived trees – 25-30 woody plants can, without human assistance, produce specimens that reach the age of 1,000 years or older. Of those, only about 10 can reach 2,000 years and those are all conifers. 3 can produce trimillenials and 1 can produce quadrilmillenials. The longest-lived trees of eastern North America, bald cypress, grow in swamps and blackwater rivers. The eldest occur in backwater sections of North Carolina's Black River, just miles from industrial hog farms and fields cleared long ago for tobacco….these bald cypresses reach ages of 2,600+ years. Conifers achieve maximum longevity when conditions are cold and dry, or hot and dry, or steep and exposed, or high altitude, or nutrient poor. In the case of Great Basin bristlecone pine, the longest-living plant on the planet, it is all of the above, with some of these plants reaching up to 4,900 years old.

Conservation of Monumental Mexica Snake Sculpture Continues - Discovered last year in the heart of Mexico City at the site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. The 500-year-old sculpture, which measures about six feet long and three feet tall, was painted with yellow, blue, red, black, and white colors made from minerals and plants employed by the Mexica on cult images and temples.

Fungal infection in the brain produces changes like those seen in Alzheimer's disease - When the fungus Candida albicans enters the brain, the body’s response generates amyloid beta (Ab)-like peptides, toxic protein fragments from the amyloid precursor protein that is considered to be at the center of the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners show the beauty — and precarity — of nature – My favorite is the Plants and Fungus winner (Last Breathe of Autumn) taken on Mount Olympus.

Scientists says identifying some foods as addictive could shift attitudes, stimulate research - Most foods that we think of as natural, or minimally processed, provide energy in the form of carbohydrate or fat -- but not both. Many ultra-processed foods have higher levels of both. That combination has a different effect on the brain. In a review of 281 studies from 36 different countries, researchers found ultra-processed food addiction is estimated to occur in 14 percent of adults and 12 percent of children. Viewing some foods as addictive could lead to novel approaches in the realm of social justice, clinical care, and public policy.

Flood Resilience Through Green Infrastructure - Green spaces don’t just mitigate flooding. They beautify the urban landscape and improve residents’ mental health. They filter out microplastics and other pollutants, keeping them from reaching sensitive water bodies like rivers. And when the weather is hot, they cool neighborhoods, because plants ‘sweat.’

15th-Century Theater Floorboards Uncovered in Norfolk - A combination of tree-ring dating and study of the building's construction dated the floorboards to between 1417 and 1430. This suggests that William Shakespeare may have performed on the boards!

Second report on the status of global water resources published - Large parts of the world experienced drier conditions in 2022 than those recorded on average for the equivalent periods over the last 30 years. The report results from the expertise provided by 11 international modeling groups to extrapolate from the data/statistics available. There is a particular lack of data on the situation regarding groundwater.  

More Mammals Can Glow in the Dark Than Previously Thought - By examining museum specimens, researchers documented the glowing property across 125 mammal species. Humans, for example, have fluorescent teeth, like all mammals do. In 1911, researchers reported fluorescence in European rabbits, marking the first documented case of the glowing ability in a non-human mammal.

21 species have been declared extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says – 10 birds, a bat, 2 fish and 8 freshwater mussels. There are now 650 species that have gone extinct in the U.S., according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which says factors such as climate change, pollution and invasive species contribute to species loss.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 11, 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.

Why the world feels so unstable right now – Intermittent instability of nonlinear systems of nature and global society –weather and climate, the economy, a pandemic, a war. We attempt to model nonlinear systems to predict these intermittent instabilities…but it is hard. Right now there seem to be significant nonlinear systems interacting: weather/climate + diseases (COVID-19 and bird flu (US)) + inflation + Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Completing The Electrical Circuit at Kilauea in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park – The technique to get a detailed ‘CAT scan’ of the volcano…..mapping locations of subsurface magma in 3D.

Ex-cell-ent Clouds off Chile’s Coast – Open and closed-cell marine stratocumulus clouds photographed by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. Learning more about these clouds….contributing to better weather prediction and improving the accuracy of climate models.

The Surprising Substances Ancient Egyptians Used to Mummify the Dead – Evidently some of the substances the embalmers were using came from Southeast Asia. Perhaps embalming instigated early global trade.

Algae robots transport antibiotics to infected tissues (infographic) – Researchers inserted the modified algae into mouse windpipes…they spread into the lung tissue and killed pathogenic bacteria!

Hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Designs were never built. Here’s what they might have looked like. – Computer generated models from David Romero.

5 expert tips to protect yourself from online misinformation – We all need tools to help us distinguish information from misinformation.

Montessori: The world’s most influential school? – I sought out a Montessori pre-K and K for my daughter about 30 years ago…and it fit her needs. I have no way of analyzing how closely the school adhered to classical Montessori ideals.

An action plan to prevent Alzheimer’s disease – Defining what 2nd generation memory clinics should include.

Gallup: Fewer than half of Americans believe US healthcare is good enough – Not surprising really – it’s expensive and we are all getting more skeptical that the system is as effective as it should be for what it costs. Evidently the people in my age group (over 55) were generally more satisfied with their health care than other age groups; people old enough to qualify for Medicare may not be as anxious about costs but I was surprised that I am in the minority in thinking US healthcare is ‘subpar’ rather than ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ based on the effectiveness issue and the structure of the system overall.