Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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I was raised in the Baptist church. As a grade school child, I memorized the books of the Bible. Maybe because of that personal history, when I started to study geology I didn’t resist memorizing the many pieces of the geologic time scale. The next to the last piece of geologic time is the Pleistocene Epoch (known informally by many as the Ice Age). It is followed by the Holocene Epoch (the warm time we are living in now.) The Holocene Epoch has seen the rise of human c...
During the winter I like to feed the birds. I have a very simple arrangement for this: pouring a mix of seeds on a flat railing outside my dining room window. I regularly attract several species of small birds to the seed. Buster Brown, my mutt from the pound, has a role to play in the bird feeding. It’s his job to make the squirrels wary of coming up to the railing and stealing the seed. Buster has a dog-door, so he always has access to the area in question, and although h...
New Year’s resolutions are being put to the harshest of tests. Gone are the days of early January when all things seemed so easily possible. Now we are in the tougher phase of the year when the will to establish new patterns is being sorely tested by the tug of old habits. One of the most popular resolutions Americans make, year after year, is to lose weight. Earlier studies have shown a correlation between being overweight and having a specific variant of the gene called F...
As you watch the falling snow, do you marvel at the beauty of the scene or immediately dread driving to work on icy pavement? Most of our nation’s roads get at least some snow most years, and that means clearing snow and ice from pavement is big business. For highways alone, agencies in the U.S. spend $2.3 billion each season trying to remove snow and ice. And billions more are spent by local governments battling Mother Nature on city streets and county roads. A traditional w...
Recently I had the pleasure of going to the wedding celebration of my assistant at work, whom I count as a good friend, and her new husband. Theirs is an international marriage; the bride was born and raised in this country, the groom born and raised in China. The wedding celebration had elements of traditions from both the U.S. and China; the bride wore red, as is the custom in China, and the marriage was celebrated with a ring, as is the custom here. Engagement and wedding...
Climate is always changing. That’s one truth that stands out from the record around the world of natural samples of Earth materials, of tree rings, ice layers, and so much more. But how much has past climate change influenced human affairs? In anthropology it’s been relatively commonplace to look at the twists and turns of ancient human history and assign at least some major population collapses to climate change. It certainly stands to reason that climate stress may have imp...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS I own a couple of small gold nuggets. They came from the Round Mountain gold mine in Nevada, which I visited a few years ago. A tour of the open-pit mine was crowned by a visit to their foundry where the molten metal was poured into gold bars. Those bars are what’s called doré gold; that is, it’s the metal as it comes out of the ground with minor impurities in it like silver. The doré bars are then transported to a refinery where pure gold can be se...
What if there were a two–for–one sale on kilowatts? Your power bill would be cut in half, – not a bad result for your monthly budget. Energy drives everything we produce and consume, and global energy consumption continues to grow year after year. The two-for-one image came to mind as I talked with Professor Jeanne McHale of Washington State University. McHale is a chemist who researches an alternative approach to making solar cells that produce electricity. “Ther...
Like millions of Americans, my day starts by plugging in the coffeepot. In my case, it’s an old fashion percolator. It clears its throat and brews my coffee while I rub sleep out of my eyes and brush my teeth. My habit of starting my day with coffee -- and following that initial cup with doses of java in the mid-morning, the late morning and the early-afternoon -- may be at least partially grounded in my genes. Researchers have long believed that genetics influences a p...
Do you have a good gut feeling about apples? Your body may , and that could be important to your overall health. Some of the components of apples survive their trip through the upper part of the human digestive tract. Non-digestible compounds, including fiber and substances called polyphenols, stand up to chewing and the effects of enzymes in spit. They even remain intact after a bath in stomach acid. These compounds move all the way to the colon, where they undergo a...
His teeth had no cavities, but they were heavily worn. He was about my height -- some 5 feet, 7 inches tall. He wasn’t petite, likely weighing around 160 pounds. Well before his death, he broke six of his ribs. Five of them never healed, but he kept going nevertheless. A recent article in “The Smithsonian Magazine” details all this and more about Kennewick Man, an ancient skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River in south-central Washington State in 1996. The occas...
Earlier this year I went to a fundraiser where I bought a bag of Glee flour. Glee is a variety of hard red spring wheat that was developed at Washington State University. I used the flour in my favorite bread recipe, one I have modified a bit from a Mennonite cookbook I treasure. There’s a bit of soy flour and powdered milk in my bread, which ups the protein content. The recipe calls for 50 percent white flour, 40 percent whole wheat, and 10 percent rye. I used the Glee flour...
“Eat right and exercise.” It’s good advice. But millions of us Americans struggle every day to live up to our hopes regarding diet and activity. Some of us are pretty good at one thing (for me, it’s exercise) but not good at the other (starch and sweets make up too much of my diet). It just ain’t easy to both eat right and exercise, and do so every day. But maybe we have been making some progress on our personal goals regarding diet and activity. It looks like our collectiv...
Years ago I purchased a headlamp , a small flashlight that straps around your head to light your way. It’s really useful because it leaves both your hands free as you work or walk. I used my headlamp during the dark half of the year to exercise my dog in dark pastures and an undeveloped No Man’s Land on a steep hill near my house. My headlamp used an old fashioned light bulb and a fairly heavy battery to run it. I used it for years but it finally stopped working, so I rec...
From time to time I give public talks on climate change – those large-scale changes geologists have been studying since the 1830s. At those talks I’m often asked a basic question about climate that, until now, has stumped scientists. Here’s the background. In the 1830s, a Swiss naturalist named Louis Agassiz started promoting the idea that Europe had once been enveloped in a cold time in which large areas had been covered in glacial ice. He called that interval “the Ice Age...
My word processor is set up to deal with the errors I make when writing. The programmers who wrote the computer program knew I’d screw things up, so they built in corrective functions like spellcheck and the ability to simply backspace to delete typos. Those of us old enough to remember manual typewriters still sometimes marvel at the ease with which corrections in documents can now be made. Mother Nature also has a built-in corrective function, one at work in organisms as s...
Plants are not as dumb as they look. At least to me, plants have never seemed like the brightest bulbs in the box. They stand around, looking green, hoping for a sunny day but not able to walk, talk or turn on the TV. However, due to a recent university press release, I’ve got to rethink my attitudes about vegetation. Two scientists at the University of Missouri, Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft, studied a plant called Arabidopsis. That’s a common experimental plant, used by res...
As a kid, I read the Sherlock Holmes stories and the mysteries of Agatha Christie. As an adult, I wrote four mysteries that focused on a Quaker heroine solving crimes she happened across in her religious community. (I published them using my grandmother’s name, Irene Allen, as a pseudonym.) And, as a geologist, I’ve read about real-life criminal investigations that involved samples of sand and soil. But it wasn’t until I talked with Dr. Nathalie Wall of the chemistry depar...
A good friend of mine checks each morning on the web for the final “Jeopardy” question. It’s the last question on the taped “Jeopardy” program to be broadcast later that day. I don’t go to movies or follow sports, so I’m often at a loss when it comes to many quiz show questions. But recently I was in a position to answer the “Jeopardy” question because of my early training in geology. The category of the question I got right was “to ‘dum’ it up.” That means, in Jeopardy-s...
Alex Waroff had a fantastic summer job this year. The veterinary student at Washington State University worked with faculty members as they tested just how clever grizzly bears are. What’s at issue is the use of tools. “Besides primates, scientists know that certain birds, dolphins, elephants and some other animals use tools,” Waroff told me. “Tool use might seem to be more common in social creatures. Bears are a little hard to categorize in that regard, because they live with...
I was hospitalized for ten days in late July. In August, to rebuild my strength, I took my dog on increasingly long walks around town. We went virtually every day; the exercise was good for both Buster Brown and me. Buster is such a mongrel it’s hard to be sure what breeds have contributed to his makeup. He retrieves sticks thrown into the water and he looks like he has some Labrador in him, but he has the tail of a German Shepherd. His wide head makes me think of a pit bull....
My day starts with coffee. I'm too cheap to buy it by the cup from baristas, so I just brew my own Folgers by the pot. I have a cup or two as I settle into work each morning, and another cup - sometimes two - in the early afternoon. That may not be wise for a chronic insomniac like myself, but it's a lifelong habit that at this point would be quite tough to break. I'm in good company as a coffee-drinker. Coffee is one of the most popular beverages on the planet. That means tha...
It’s astonishing to think about, but when my grandfather was born, tuberculosis was the number one cause of death in our country. Worse still, one in five children didn’t live to see their fifth birthday, in large part due to endemic and epidemic diseases. Today that’s all changed. But although doctors can now often do a great deal to help the ill, it’s also true that chronic diseases plague us. And a number of these maladies seem to be on the rise. Diabetes, asthma, celiac...
I need to get a cap on my front tooth redone; it has a significant chip in it. Luckily I live at a time in which dentists are in every city and town, plying their trade in ways that can help us each day. A young woman who scientists are calling Naia was not so lucky. She lived about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago in what’s now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. A recent article in New Scientist reports that Naia’s teeth have a number of large cavities in them. Her mouth likely hur...
