Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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Born in 1632 in the Netherlands, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a self-taught man who made microscopes – ultimately producing some 500 of them. Microscopes consist of lenses of carefully ground class. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify objects up to two hundred times. That opened up a range of investigations to him and he took advantage of the new devices he was creating to look at almost anything and everything, including bacteria he obtained from between his teeth. Van...
There are two features of this time of year that make my heart glad. One is the rapidly increasing length of the day. In September we lose daylight quickly, but in the spring we gain it all back just as rapidly. Although the same pattern is repeated each year (so you’d think I’d be used to it), I’m always somehow surprised and delighted when we get to this time of year and have early sunrises and spreading daylight in the evenings. The other part of this time of year that...
There’s a new debate in paleontology, one that took me by surprise but that shows nicely how some science works. There’s a particular type of ancient fossil called the “Ediacara fauna” found in rocks about 550 million years old. The term Ediacara is reference to a place in Australia where the fossils were located and well-described. In a complex tale that unfolded over decades both before and a bit after the Australian discovery, similar fossils were found around the world at...
I think the most memorable single day of all my years as a student was the afternoon I got to examine Moon rocks in graduate school. Rocks here on Earth are exposed to water throughout their existence, and water acts to break down mineral grains on a tiny scale. If you look at thin slices of rock under a microscope – a normal activity for geologists like me – you see this tiny breakdown at work. To use a technical term, the mineral grains appear “cruddy” because they are bre...
Eighty years ago my mother was in grade school where schoolroom paste was made by mixing a little flour and water together. Memories of that simple glue came back to her when she and I recently stood in my kitchen, mixing two small batches of flour and water. First I mixed regular “better for bread” flour with water in a little dish, then I did the same with special test flour made from soft durum wheat. The first mixture was a pasty, lightest-of-light-tan color, the second ha...
My father taught me the line when I was a child: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Those were the words William Shakespeare put into the mouth of King Richard III when he was knocked off his horse in the midst of the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Richard was killed, ending the rule of the Plantagenet royalty in England and ushering in the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare famously depicted Richard III as a hunchbacked villain who murdered members of his own fam...
A few weeks ago I lost the use of my toilet and learned first hand just how much I missed it when it wasn’t there. My plumbing went out of order when the pipe between my house and the city’s sewer line in the street collapsed. It was about 60 years old and made out of compressed fiberboard of some sort – I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Pipes like that belong to the homeowner, so it was my responsibility to get it fixed. It took about a week for the workmen to come...
To a geologist like me, it was most notable by its absence in the political campaigns that lurched to their conclusions in November. I’m talking about an energy plan with real teeth, one that addresses everything from national security to the cost of energy to greenhouse warming of the planet. The best-known geologist in the country is T. Boone Pickens. He’s been in the energy business for decades – he’s now in his 80s – and he is still tirelessly devoted to pointing...
I’m not going to give you permission in this piece to live a sedentary life, sitting at a desk at work all day and then on the couch watching television each evening. But medical science increasingly has some evidence of a general principal your mother warned you about: there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. A few folks really throw themselves headlong into aerobic exercise, running, biking, rowing or swimming for hours and hours each week. Most of these hard-core...
I have an elderly aunt who was diagnosed with breast cancer many years ago. She was treated and remained cancer-free for years. But I also had a next-door neighbor who got the same diagnosis. She was treated, but succumbed to the disease not too long after. My experience is not unique. Those of us who have been around the block a few times know people who have survived breast cancer and people who have died from it. Why the differences in results from person to person? Part...
Some say it’s the most complicated machine we’ve ever built. We rely on it not just each day, but each moment of each day. It reaches into our homes, factories, offices and stores. And at times it’s surprisingly fragile and subject to massive failure. I’m talking about the electrical grid. We’ve recently seen it tested by Superstorm Sandy. And I’ve been reading up on it in several sources, including an interesting book appropriately called The Grid by Phillip F. Schewe. I t...
Not too long ago I rewrote my will. There’s nothing like such a project to remind me of my mortality. But imagine not just your own individual death, but the finality of the death of all the members of your species. You’ve likely heard of the mass extinction that removed the non-avian (non-bird) dinosaurs from the face of the Earth some 65 million years ago. There have been other periods, too, of enormous “die offs” in Earth history. And even apart from times of mass extinct...
Lots of us have observed that foods that are good for us - broccoli and bean sprouts - don't trigger intense cravings. In the late afternoon, when my energy is low, I want a cookie or a piece of chocolate, not a green pepper. Similarly, when I walk around the grocery store, I go through the meats and produce section without feeling deep cravings for the food I see. But when I get to the bakery, all bets are off, even if I'm not hungry. These patterns of cravings are...
It’s commonplace to observe that we live in very partisan times. Red versus blue factions dominate our public discussions, and there often seems very little room made for agreement in the middle. It’s surely not easy to get environmental groups to agree on a policy that industry endorses. And if you add organized labor, consumer groups and the state of California to the mix, you might think agreement on one particular course of action would be impossible. But the imp...
The next time you have a saltshaker handy, you might want to remove a few grains. If you have a simple magnifying glass, you’ll see the salt is really tiny cubes. Salt is a mineral and each grain is a well-formed crystal that breaks into cubic shapes. Salt in your saltshaker looks like a simple solid, just another bit of sturdy matter that doesn’t flow or deform. But salt that’s under pressure is different. Salt far enough underground behaves like Silly Putty, oozing and f...
I was minding my own business in my kitchen the other day, tossing some eggshells into the small garbage pail that sits underneath the sink. Suddenly I heard a rustle coming from the plastic lining the garbage pail. Puzzled, I looked into the cupboard more carefully. In a blur of gray, a mouse dashed up and out of the pail and disappeared down the hole in the wood where the water pipes come up from the basement. He was a small little fellow, but fast as an Olympic athlete...
Taken together, the microbes living in you weigh a few pounds. Just for example, a 200-pound man could be carrying up to six pounds of little organisms in and on him. And even more amazingly to me, within our bodies we have more than 10,000 different species of microbes. That’s a lot of different life forms, all co-existing with each other and with us. Those arresting facts got my attention when scientists from the government’s Human Microbiome Project recently announced som...
I swim laps at noon several times a week. I enjoy the water, and the gentle exercise is good for my aging joints. Like other old ladies in the pool, I’m no speed demon. Even a bucketful of performance-enhancing drugs would not make me slice through the water quickly. But like all the lap swimmers I know, slow or fast, I take an interest in Michael Phelps and the other American swimmers soon to compete in London in the 2012 Summer Olympics. Phelps is famous for the eight gold m...
Hot enough for you? I’ve been thinking about heat lately, and not just because of the nation’s mostly torrid weather. We all can easily verify that hot air rises – when you change a light bulb near the ceiling of your living room, you find the air up there is warmer than it is near the floor. Another fact about heat rests on a simple experiment. If you rub your palms together you’ll feel some warmth. Then, if you bear down on your hands, pressing them together hard, you’ll cre...
I work just a couple of blocks from a special kind of bank. It doesn’t accept money for deposit, it won’t finance a new car, and it wasn’t part of the housing bubble. This unusual kind of bank deals mostly in seeds that it preserves, sometimes propagates, and often disperses without charge to anyone who has a research use for unusual strains of crop plants. Seed genebanks are part of the unseen work that helps increase the chance more people will have enough to eat for suppe...
The next time you eat a baked spud you might want to think of the agricultural scientists who are hard at work trying to help the humble potato deal successfully with some significant diseases. Students of history will remember the Irish potato famine of 1845-1852. The denizens of Ireland had come to depend on potatoes as their main staple crop. The plant did well in the wet Irish climate, and the potato produced a lot of food for each acre that was planted. But a crisis...
Energy is the lifeblood of modern economies and there’s no more amazingly useful form of energy than electricity. That’s why I was initially startled to read the recent news that the last of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants has been shut down, a turn of events that makes Japan the first major economy of this century to run without operating any such reactors. The news impressed me because prior to the mega-quake and tsunami of 2011, Japan powered 30 percent of its elect...
We humans go to some trouble so that we can choose which among our domestic animals gets to breed the next generation, thereby over time shaping various lines of animals ranging from types of sheep to varieties of chickens. Perhaps nowhere is the impact of selective breeding more clear to many of us than with the domestic dog. From ancient breeds like the greyhound and the Dalmatian to more recently derived types like the cocker spaniel, the diversity of dog breeds is a...
You have certainly done business on them, and you may well have lived within their boundaries. Whether you recognize it or not, and whether you are reading this in the desert West or the soggier regions of the country, floodplains are a part of the landscape around you – and they can be highly dangerous places to be. A floodplain is the flat part of the Earth beside and around a river. It’s also the place we like to build houses and schools and stores because it’s easie...
The Ice Age is my favorite bit of Earth history, a time when mammoths, giant beavers and saber tooth tigers roamed the world. I was so impressed by the Ice Age when I was a child, reading about it in the school library, that I recognized the book I had studied decades later when I stumbled across it as an adult. Being devoted to books, I happily bought a copy and perused it immediately. Image my pleasure, then, about the recent news that an Ice Age flowering plant some 32,000...
