Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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Today’s snack food aisle in the grocery store contains a lot more products than when I was a kid. Back then, we mainly had potato chips and saltines, but not much more. Now there’s a multitude of choices designed to help you satisfy your cravings for something crunchy. It’s fair to say most of us don’t spend a lot of our time cooking from scratch. “Processed foods” – everything from snacks to boxed dinners – make up a great deal of what most Americans eat. Indeed, the maj...
This is the time of year to get outdoors and observe Mother Nature in all her glory. With a simple field guide to trees or birds and a Sunday afternoon trip to a local park, you can play amateur scientist and immerse yourself in forces larger than those we humans create. A friend and I are making plans for an extended road trip to two national parks in southwest Utah. We will spend two or three days in Bryce Canyon National Park and a day touring Zion. We won’t go until the en...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS Think about the most complicated machine you've dealt with in the past year. Was it a beeping monitor tethered to a high-tech device in an emergency room? Or was it a superfast computer you used at work? Actually, the most complicated machine you've interacted with was the one you used this morning when you switched on a light or plugged in your coffee machine. The entire power grid has to balance supply (generation) and demand (load) on a second by...
The Michael Crichton book "Jurassic Park" and the movie based on the best-seller presented what might happen if scientists were able to clone extinct dinosaurs, bringing them back to life. While nothing like that is possible at this time, a good thing when you recall the mayhem the dinos caused in the world Crichton conjured up ; sometimes scientists surprise themselves in breathing new life into old organisms. One example of some success in what's sometimes called "resurrecti...
My elderly aunt in Canada recently came into some money. She decided – very generously –to send part of it to each of her nieces and nephews. This gave me the rather wonderful task of deciding how I wanted to spend $1,000 that I had not anticipated receiving. After a bit I decided on a new range for my kitchen. I wouldn’t otherwise buy a new appliance, and by spending the money on a range I will be able to remember my aunt and bless her name each night as I cook supper. My old...
When you fill your tank, you likely see a little sticker on the pump saying part of the fuel is ethanol. Ethanol is a biofuel, which means it comes from plants like corn, rather than from fossil fuel -- ancient carbon that’s been buried within the Earth for millions of years. Producing more biofuels is on the agendas of governments and private industry alike. Biofuels can potentially help nations become more energy independent. If a country can grow plants and produce b...
I'm quite a dinosaur. I get some of my news the old fashioned way from hardcopy newspapers, and I still pay my bills with paper checks sent through the mail. But even I own a smart phone. The ability to keep up with work-related email, as well as messages from friends and family, is one fantastic benefit of the modern cell phone. I do, indeed, value the technological revolution through which we all are living. Arron Carter and Mike Pumphrey are two research scientists at...
I once experienced a small earthquake when I was visiting the San Francisco Bay area in California. The natives thought little of the temblor but I was impressed that the ground beneath my feet could suddenly and without warning start to shake. Later, when I majored in geology in college, I learned that my native Northwest is also at risk for earthquakes, as is much of Alaska. Another part of the country with a history of large quakes is called the New Madrid Seismic Zone....
My household accumulates quite a number of plastic shopping bags. Most come home with me from the grocery store. I use them to line the little garbage pail that sits under the kitchen sink and the wastebasket that's in the bathroom. I also have the joy of using them to pick up poop deposited by Buster Brown, my faithful mutt from the pound. But if you don't have uses for the plastic shopping bags you bring home, what do you do with them? Researchers hope that one day -- perhap...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS While I have been dinking around for months, trying to lose five pounds, two of my friends have gotten serious about weight loss. Each of them is down 50 pounds. I'm pleased for them, of course, and truly impressed by their accomplishments. Successfully combatting overweight and obesity is one of the best things people can do for their health. It can help everything from joint pain to heart function, from Type 2 diabetes to certain aspects of mental...
I’ve gained 5 pounds since last summer. My body mass index (BMI) is still fine, but I need to stop gaining to keep it that way. Grizzly bears put my weight gain to shame. In the late summer, they eat some 50,000 calories per day and gain more than 100 pounds. Then, when they hibernate, they fast and live on their body fat. While sleeping the winter away, they don’t pee or poop. They conserve their energy by having heart rates around 15 beats per minute. When they emerge fro...
As a child, I learned about the “valley of the shadow of death” from the twenty-third Psalm. A similar image is conjured up by economists who talk about the “valley of death.” They mean that potentially deadly stage in the life of a business when production needs to be massively scaled up but investors aren’t willing to make that leap based only on pilot-scale results or because the economics of full-scale production are still iffy. One segment of the young biofuels industry...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS I was living in eastern Washington State in May of 1980 when Mount St. Helens erupted after a massive landslide triggered by a magnitude 5.1 quake. Vast amounts of molten rock were violently released to the surface of the earth, erupting not only as sizeable rocks but as fine-grained volcanic ash that floated on the breeze. Us "down-winders" were enveloped in conditions that were dark as night until the ash finally fell to the ground. Volcanic ash isn'...
My mother lives with me and I'm involved in her medical care. She's a tough cookie. But like many 88-year-olds, she has several health problems. We visit her doctor at least once a month to report what's working and what isn't doing the trick. Recently the doctor ordered blood work that showed she was low in vitamin D. So now I've added vitamin D tablets to her daily medication regime. In the summer our bodies produce vitamin D when sunlight strikes our skin. But during the...
Even if I walked to work each day, I would still be indebted for my daily bread to cars and trucks. The many goods we buy in stores arrive at their destinations courtesy of the internal combustion engine. Motors and engines are woven into the warp and weft of all our economic activity from farming to manufacturing. Although small amounts of biofuels are mixed with the gasoline we purchase, most of the fuel we use comes from crude oil. Energy companies work night and day to...
We've all seen globes in classrooms. They represent the Earth well -- better than flat maps can do. But all the globes I've seen in schools have national boundaries on them, usually indicated by having nations in different colors. The U.S. is yellow, Canada is light green, Mexico is pink, and so on. When I was a child my big brother owned a globe like that, and I got to pore over it sometimes. My sister-in-law has a different globe, one specially purchased for her by her...
Every time I fill my gas tank, I see the notice on the pump that explains part of the fuel I'm buying is ethanol. Ethanol is alcohol, a type of biofuel rather than fossil fuel. While biofuels can be good to promote national energy independence and possibly help with greenhouse gas emissions, the ethanol in our gasoline is made from corn. (The starch in the corn is broken down into sugars that are then fermented into alcohol.) With corn ethanol, we are essentially putting food...
There are two main things most people would like to know about particular volcanoes: when is the next eruption and how big will that eruption be? Scientists in Iceland have taken another step forward in monitoring volcanoes to best predict when they will erupt and even warn people of the size of the coming eruption. In May of 2011, a volcano in Iceland named Grímsvötn erupted. It generated a 12-mile-high plume of volcanic debris that temporarily grounded airplanes as far a...
Dr. Haifang Wen grew up in a rural area of Shandong province, in eastern China. In his youth there were not many paved highways in the Chinese countryside. "Lots of the roads were gravel," he told me recently. "They were muddy when it rained. I remember riding a cow on them, or going along in a wagon pulled by a donkey." Living in those conditions, Wen could see quite a bit of room for improvement in road materials. "I thought, we can do better," he said with a smile. Thus...
One of the things my mutt from the pound and I like to do together is go on long walks. Sometimes on weekends Buster Brown and I stroll at the bottom of the Snake River Canyon where dogs can be off-leash (as Mother Nature intended). There’s a six-mile walk in the canyon we like to do: me limping along in a straight line, Buster ranging over a wider area of ground sniffing for wildlife. Closer to home, there is a six-mile loop around town we enjoy. I think I can speak for both...
I've written here before about the problem of unwanted fires burning in coal deposits. Above and below ground, coal fires are a problem in both developed and developing nations. If we are serious about reducing our carbon dioxide emissions, we should address the unwanted fires burning around the world. Unwanted coal fires are not a huge slice of the carbon dioxide pie, but putting them out is one way we could decrease the emission of greenhouse gases without putting a damper...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS We live in an age shaped by scientific research. Medical practice, for example, changes a bit each year because of new discoveries in the laboratory or in drug trials. We have come to expect progress in a variety of technical fields, and science often lives up to our hopes for it. But science can also falter. One of the challenges for non-scientists -- whom I call "normal people" -- must address is how to interpret new scientific studies. Which ones...
Thirty years ago I was a light smoker. What can I say? I liked the effect nicotine had on my brain. Once I was hooked, I even liked the smell of tobacco smoke. Then there was the ritual. I enjoyed lighting up with others, sharing a match, having a few minutes to talk together. But I also realized smoking was a dangerous habit. After several failed attempts to quit, I was able, for some reason, to go cold turkey and finally be done with tobacco. There were some difficult days a...
When I was a kid, Jimmy Carter was in the White House. His wife, Rosalynn, was quite an active First Lady. She sat in on official meetings held by her husband and was said to be one of his closest advisors. Many First Ladies have used their position to promote a cause. One of the things that most interested Rosalynn Carter was mental health research and treatment. She has remained active in promoting those areas since leaving the White House. So it was fitting when Health and...
Alcoholism runs in part of my family. I lost a grandfather to it, and a couple of others in the family have been affected by it to greater or lesser degrees. Perhaps something like that is true for you, or maybe you have a friend or coworker who wrestles with the malady. This is a challenging time of year for alcoholics trying to stay sober. New Year’s Eve alone can be a real test. But medical researchers are investigating new ways that doctors may be able to help people not d...
