Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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About 10,000 years ago Earth’s climate lurched from bitter Ice Age conditions to the much balmier time in which we live today. We don’t fully understand what caused that great climate shift, but we know it was near the time of that great temperature transition that people started to farm. And one of the crops people in some parts of the world learned to tend was wheat. In the Western world, our love affair with wheat is as intense as it is old. Peasants have lived on bre...
The solid earth is riddled with faults. Each fault is a plane of weakness in the rocks that make up the outer rind of the Earth. Some of those faults have been mapped by geologists, but others are unknown to even the most advanced science we have today. And now, courtesy of officials in Ohio, at least one state of the union is going to have new regulations that could hold energy companies to account for some “side effects” caused by previously unknown faults. The tale hin...
It’s pretty common for us “little peanuts” to feel some envy about the wealthy and better-known citizens among us. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to be a millionaire? But recently the news carried a piece about Ed Bazinet, 68, a wealthy New Yorker who went on a wild spending spree that ran into the millions of dollars. His problem, it turns out, is the brain malady known as manic depression (or bipolar disorder). According to ABC News, Bazinet spent five days buying million...
My household has no less than three nightlights that give good service to me and mine. Perhaps you have a nightlight or two yourself. And beyond those useful little devices, of course, there are the regular lights that a person may switch on in the middle of a windless night. Those basic facts highlight the idea that we all have need for electrical power in the grid at times that solar and wind can't help us. The kind of electricity we need at all times is what utilities call...
It does seem like there’s something magical about artesian wells. Digging down to a level in the Earth from which water then spurts unaided is like a dream come true for some. And, after all, why pay the electric company for power to run a pump if Mother Nature will do all the work herself? From times immemorial people have thought that water gushing from artesian wells must have different medicinal or even spiritual properties from plain ol’ water in a creek or a typical wel...
Nothing about Earth history is static or unchanging. That’s particularly true of climate, and thereon hangs more than one interesting tale including recent news of a scientific advance in understanding how past climate has changed. It wasn’t too long ago by my standards – about the 1830s – that naturalists started to seriously think the globe has undergone revolutions in climate. The evidence for that came from Europe, where glacially polished and transported rocks dot the...
Little kids are amenable to learning new habits - generally much more so than those of us who are set in our ways because this isn't our first rodeo. That's why it's sometimes more effective to teach children health science information rather than to do outreach aimed directly at their parents. That's part of the background to the Global Soap Project. It's a project that rests on some simple science long ago worked out by biologists and medical researchers. The basic fact is...
If you've made a New Year’s resolution to eat right and trim down, be forewarned that medical science shows your brain has it in for you and will actively promote your failure on two different fronts. That’s not good news, of course, but you should know about it so you can strengthen your resolve as best you can. Here’s the scoop. It’s relatively easy – particularly if you are significantly overweight – to lose a few pounds by reducing the number of calories you consume eac...
The more we learn about animals, the more complex and interesting is the behavior they exhibit. My faithful mutt-from-the-pound, a dog named Buster Brown, impresses me from time to time with complex behaviors aimed at getting what he wants out of me. Most people who live with animals can tell you a tale or two of diabolical - or thoughtful - animal behavior they've witnessed. But even knowing all that, a recent study on lab rats took me by surprise. The research makes it...
As the long season of darkness sweeps over the country, it’s a natural time to think about lighting – and how dependent we are on electricity during this dim time of year. You can heat your home with several different energy sources, including natural gas, heating oil or wood. But unless you’re living off-the-grid, the lights throughout your abode burn brightly because of electricity from the grid. Yes, I have a couple of candles, a flashlight and two kerosene lamps in my ho...
Mt. Rainier in my native Washington State is a stunning site. It’s a beautiful mountain, covered in snow and ice in both winter and summer. At over 14,000 feet, its summit is worthy of respect from even serious hikers. There’s no wonder it’s a National Park. Like most all of the other beautiful peaks in the Cascades, Mt. Rainier is also a deadly volcano. It hasn’t erupted since 1894, but that’s not long ago to a geologist – we are sure it’s only sleeping and will be heard...
Dogs are loyal, playful, loving and sometimes cute as a button. It’s no wonder we love them (some of us more than others, to be sure). Dogs were likely one of the very first animals we humans domesticated. They’ve been sitting around our campfires for a very long time, indeed. We train our dogs to sit, shake and lie down. It also could be said the dogs train us to dispense kibbles, rawhide treats, and scratches behind the ears. What matters isn’t which side comes out ahead...
At first I wasn’t sure I was reading the CNN report correctly. The story hinged on special pavement that uses the impact of human feet to generate electricity. That’s right. A young man in Britain has invented a device that harvests the energy from a footfall hitting the pavement to power things like LED lights. Talk about a bright idea. The “PaveGen” project is the brainchild of Laurence Kemball-Cook, age 25 years. He’s an engineer who built a prototype of the device du...
Between the debt-ceiling kerfuffle and Hurricane Irene, you may have missed two bits of summertime news that will be important for what we drive in the coming years. First, President Barack Obama announced that the administration and automakers had reached a deal to double the fuel economy of our national fleet of cars starting in model year 2017 and reaching the goal by 2025. Right now, cars and light trucks – light trucks include what I call my “little old lady SUV” – get...
When I was youngster in the 1960s, I had all the shots little kids went through back in the day. And because I’m a klutz and regularly hurt myself outdoors, I’ve periodically had my tetanus immunity updated. A few years ago I underwent a series of shots for rabies after having a scary adventure with an ill coyote. Last summer I got the shingles vaccine when my assistant was suffering from a shingles outbreak. And to round it all out, tonight after work I’ll be getting the i...
Just over a century ago, when William Howard Taft was president and I was a young woman, an entrepreneur named Thomas Aldwell started building a dam in the Northwest woods of the Olympic peninsula in Washington. The 108 foot-high Elwha dam became an early hydroelectric powerhouse, helping to fuel population and industrial growth related to activities as varied as forestry and ship-building. Over the following decades more hydro-dams in the West were built. Mega-dams like...
I spent this past summer trudging through six-mile treks each weekend with two good friends. We walked along the edge of wheat fields outside of town. (My friends and I qualify as middle-aged ladies, so the walks counted as significant exercise. Sad but true.) One of the interesting things about the walks was simply observing the growth and ripening of the wheat fields by which we passed. We depend on wheat for bread, pasta, animal feed, noodles and – perhaps most i...
The laws of physical science teach us we can neither create nor destroy energy. But it’s also a simple fact that we can surely waste it. And that raises the possibility of saving money by refusing to let energy slip through our fingers. Typical families in the U.S. spend about $1,900 each year on home utility bills. That’s $160 per month. Your bills may be higher if your household consumes a lot of energy, if you heat with oil or if you live where the cost of electrical pow...
Occasionally I’m guilty of just a tiny bit of cynicism about people and their motivations. And sometimes I grow weary of news reports about the nasty behaviors of which some folks are capable. But any and all residue of my negativity evaporated instantly when I read of a cadre of truly courageous volunteers in Japan. The Japanese who affected me so strongly are retirement-age citizens who are offering to help with the Fukushima clean up. They are doing so, they say, because t...
My friend Sharon Rogers lives in suburban Virginia. On Tuesday she and her husband were leaving their house to go to a late lunch when she felt something like thunder sweeping over the neighborhood. “I thought it was a military jet going over too low,” she told me on the telephone. “I said to myself ‘It’s another damn general being buried in Arlington.’” It was no jet, but a Richter 5.9 earthquake that struck near Mineral, Virginia. Why, you may ask, should there have be...
This summer has been filled with acrimony about the federal budget, with red versus blue politicians squaring off to hurl criticisms at each other. For a lot of us, turning on the news has felt like an exercise in masochism. Imagine my pleasure, then, at going to a recent meeting where Americans from quite different walks of life were gathered to learn together about something we all need – a nutritious food supply. On a recent and beautiful summer morn’ without even a bre...
Out of sight, out of mind. (At my age, alas, I no longer live within the confines of that dictum. I can forget, misplace and overlook things that are smack in front of my face. But I digress.) What many folks can’t see they can indeed overlook. And all too many Americans have never seen what happens to the water that flows down the kitchen sink and out of the house. But with each load of laundry or flush of the toilet, we create wastewater that gets mingled together and h...
These are the good times. I was driving through the country last Saturday, looking at deer happily chowing down in wheat fields. Everyplace is a drive-through if you’re a herbivore at this time of year. It’s a simple historical fact that wheat farming has been central to American agriculture since the country was young. And today wheat grown in the U.S. supplies American consumers and millions of other people around the world with largequantities of economical nutrition. Eve...
When I was younger, I used to enjoy picking a pint or two of huckleberries in the mountains in the summer. But even when you work hard, huckleberry picking doesn’t yield a lot of fruit per day. Picking raspberries goes faster because the fruit is larger and the berries grow more thickly on the plant. And picking apples is faster still, with output measured in bushels rather than pints. Still, it’s one thing to pick a bag of apples from an old tree by the side of a gravel roa...
You and I have our challenges and some real worries, too. There are bills to pay and doctors to visit, to say nothing of mulling over those strange sounds coming from the rear of the car. But I confess I thought the life of a cow was rather placid. Eating and sleeping, I would have guessed, pretty much summed up the existence of the more than one billion bovines that share the planet with us. But as I've recently learned, both beef cattle and dairy cows often have trouble...
