Gleanings of the Week Ending June 24, 2023

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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.

A New Day for the Ancestors’; Mounds - Archaeology Magazine – An Ohio Supreme Court ruling in December 2022 increases access to the earthworks. Soon, the mounds will cease to be part of the golf course at Moundbuilders Country Club!

How ‘tornado alley’ is changing - BBC Future – Tornado Alley is widening. Large tornado outbreaks have become most common in Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky rather than Texas and Oklahoma where the term ‘tornado alley’ was invented in the 1950s.

Knit One, Purl Two - Archaeology Magazine – Patterned silk stockings from the 17th century. Volunteers in the Netherlands tried to recreate them. It turned out to be exhausting and highly complex….and required hundreds of hours!

Rooftop Solar Grew Nearly 50 Percent Globally Last Year - Yale E360 – Great progress…the challenge remaining is to be able to use it when we need it. Upgrading electricity and storage infrastructure must keep pace.

50 Years of the Endangered Species Act: A Gulf Coast Success Story • The National Wildlife Federation Blog – The story of the recovery of the Brown Pelican. Now they are easy to see again!

The Fastest-Warming Continent, Europe Has Already Heated by More Than 2 Degrees C - Yale E360 – In 2022 Europe experienced 16,000 heat related deaths and $2 billion weather-related economic damages. With climate change, it is warming faster than any other inhabited continent.

What the Largest-Ever Study of Primate DNA Reveals About Ourselves | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine – Evidently most primate species have more genetic diversity than humans do. However – primates at risk of going extinct are not helped by that diversity; their trajectory toward extinction is happening too rapidly.

Photography In the National Parks: Photo Documentation – Some tips on how to take pictures that help others recognize a special place/feature, understand a concept, or grasp the mechanics of how something happens.

Divers Are About to Pull a 3,000-Year-Old Shipwreck from the Depths | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine – Pieces of wood…hand-sewn together. 23 feet of the 39 feet vessel are in very good condition.

Gleanings of the Week Ending May 14, 2022

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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 human brains were bigger 3,000 years ago – Some possible explanation: human populations reached a large enough size to share/divide labor and knowledge with others, writing….however, brain size/IQ relationship is not deterministic.

Operating rooms are the climate change contributor no one’s talking about – The health care industry accounts for 8.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Operating rooms represent 70% of waste in hospitals and 3 to 6 times as much carbon as the rest of health systems.

Where tornadoes strike most frequently is changing – More erratic tornado activity and the broad impacts of climate change.

Do you have a lost twin? - The rate of twins among live births is only about 1.3%. But as many as 12% of all naturally conceived pregnancies may begin as twin pregnancies.

Wild fox kills 25 flamingos and a duck at National Zoo – We see foxes in our neighborhood. They seem to have adapted to the suburban environment. This one was very efficient to kill 25 birds, though.

A 10,000-year history of geo-ecological change in Yellowstone’s lower geyser basin – A study using a 26.5-foot core from Goose Lake.

US could cut transport emissions by 34% b 2030 – The current trend will reduce emissions by 19% but a bit more focus would provide a bigger reduction.

Garbology: How to spot patterns in people's waste – We’ve been getting rid of a lot as we prepare to move. I try to do as much as possible via donations and recycling…but there is still a lot going in the trash. Some of it came from Texas with us back in 1983…and was still in the same box!

6,000-Year-Old Slate Rings May Have Symbolized Relationships – Friendship rings? Careful analysis revealed the rings had been intentionally broken…and shared (i.e. pieces of a ring were found in two separate burial sites).

How Taipei discovered an active volcano on its doorstep – Disconcerting. Even of there is some ability to provide early warning of an eruption…could the city be abandoned quickly enough?

Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/13/2020

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Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

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Two iris flowers. Iris flowers don’t last that long. Once they start wilting, I snap them off. This morning when I got to my office, there were two more flowers that had opened overnight and another bud that is not far behind. Two others are showing purple. The last two I’m not sure will make it. They might not have been mature enough when I cut the stem.

Morning Drama. As I started to write this post, there was a group of birds that flew past the window making a ruckus. I got up to see the drama. A crow circled around with something in its beak; it was chased by a robin with other robins also flying around. Some grackles watched from the sycamore. The crow flew on with its prize and the robins gave up. I surmised that it was a hatchling from a robin nest…and had a second thought: I hope it was a cowbird rather than a robin hatchling!

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Morning glory and tangles. The central flower is another page from the 1882 Flower Designs book. I kept the page intact rather than cutting it into tiles – discovered that the larger format makes it harder to turn the page to be comfortable making the tangles in the space I normally use for projects.

Spring of 1964. I browsed the Life Magazines from Spring of 1964 on Internet Archive. They became the prompt to think about what I was doing then. I have a vivid memory of my 4th grade classroom that spring…of my pregnant teacher finishing a series of lectures about tornadoes which had been very interesting to all the students…she turned to the windows on the left side of the classroom and said ‘And there is one’….it was still white but was definitely a funnel….the sirens went off and we all trooped out into the hallway to kneel with our hand covered heads tucked toward the wall….it seemed liked it was a very long time before we were able to get up. A Google search found a reference for the event; it happened on April 3, 1964 and was an F5 tornado….one of the 3 major tornadoes to impact Wichita Falls, Texas. I was old enough to have been browsing through the Life Magazines at my grandparents, but I don’t specifically remember any of the stories. I do remember knowing about Douglas McArthur’s death, but I think it was more likely from the newspaper. By 4th grade I was already browsing the morning newspaper before I had breakfast and went off to school. Looking at the magazines now…the photographs that appeal to me the most were from a story about winter in Venice.

Putting out the glass bird bath. I decided that we are unlikely to have another frost so it’s safe to put the glass bird bath out in the front flowerbed. The stand for it is always there. I’m not sure how many birds use the bath because I can only see it from the narrow windows on the sides of the front door; I should check every time I go by now. While I was out I pulled a few trees that had sprouted in the front flowerbed. The one I photographed is a red maple.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts  here.

And now for the after-bath preening of a Carolina Wren

I saw the Carolina Wren hop into the gutter of our covered deck not far from my office window. There was still some water in it from a recent rain. I got up fast enough to see it dunking itself in the water but by the time I had my camera it had already flown to the sycamore and looked very scruffy. Over the next minute it did a lot of preening. It still looked a bit scruffy at the end but at least it was holding its tail up in typical wren fashion.

We’d had a wren in the screened part of our deck earlier in the day and this might have been the same bird…cleaning up after the ordeal. We opened the door to the outside for it to escape but it took more than an hour for the bird to find the opening. It must have been a traumatic experience.