Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS On a lark, when I was a college student I took a class in field biology. It sounded romantic and I was young, so even though it didn't really make any sense for a geology student to take the senior level class in another discipline, I was there bright and early on the first day of the semester. One week everyone in the course walked to a grove of old hardwood trees near the edge of campus. We had "boring tools"- - drills with long, hollow bits -- with...
When I was a younger and more sprightly woman, I spent part of my life investigating unusual hot springs in rural California. They were salty and quite stinky springs out in the middle of nowhere, and several of them occurred right in the center of an old gold-laced mercury deposit. No one was actively mining the small area where the springs are found – there just wasn’t enough ore to make the project economic. But the rocks of the location had small veins of chalcedony, cal...
We all know the basic medical facts: we should make healthy choices about what we eat and incorporate exercise into our busy lives. Most of the science of weight loss matches common sense. But it's also true that more and more Americans are overweight or obese. As a nation, we are losing the battle of the bulge. How then can we motivate ourselves to address our ever-growing weight problem? Recently published results from a study funded by Weight Watchers grabbed some...
"It's 8:16 on a chilly, wet morning…You've just arrived at work and are pouring a cup of coffee when you become aware of a low rumbling noise. Within seconds, the rumbling becomes a roar, the floor beneath you heaves, and the building begins to pitch and shake so violently that you're thrown to the floor. The roaring is joined by a cacophony of crashing as windows shatter and every unsecured object in the room - from the desk chair to the coffee pot - is sent flying. Shaken lo...
I don’t know the full heritage of my mutt from the pound, Buster Brown by name. Buster was listed as a “Lab mix” by the Humane Society but my vet has said he is more of a German Shepherd mix. We all can agree he’s a mongrel – indeed, one or both of his parents may have been mutts themselves. When he was young there were a couple of occasions when Buster froze and seemed to point toward the wildlife we encountered as we ambled along the bottom of the Snake River canyon. I...
Normally, when a bacterium invades your body, it’s surrounded and engulfed by a white blood cell. At least that’s what we were taught in high school biology. If all goes well, the white blood cell kills the bacterium and the infection is over: case closed. But a few bacteria have some tricks up their sleeves. One of them is the rod-shaped Brucella bacterium, the agent that causes brucellosis or what is sometimes known as “undulant fever” because it causes people to run deb...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS When I was a child, I read a lot of murder mysteries. At a young age I favored the books featuring Miss Marple by Agatha Christie. When I was a bit older I fell in love with Lord Peter Wimsey in the books by Dorothy Sayers. No matter the book, I liked to follow along as the hero of the tale put the clues together to figure out who-done-it. So the quote from the BBC News got my attention. It was from Prof. Franck Lavigne of the Pantheon-Sorbonne Univers...
Experienced poker players know the basic odds of drawing the card they need to build a better hand. They also are good at estimating if their hand is likely to be better than those of the other players around the table. In other words, probability and statistics are built into the game of poker. Proficient poker players are also good at a more human-based skill. They spend time and effort trying to read the faces of their opponents. The goal is to deduce whether other players...
In 1957, several years before I was born, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - the first man-made object to leave the Earth's atmosphere. That simple little satellite captured people's imagination around the world. We Americans were alarmed that the Soviets had "beat us" to space. Sputnik therefore helped spur both the U.S. space effort and such things as better education for our kids in math and science. It didn't take long for us to catch up to the accomplishments of the...
Cooking is part necessity, but it's also partly cultural. The way we cook says a lot about the societies we live in and the traditions that influence our families. I know that a lot of what I do in the kitchen is an echo of what my mother taught me. When I crack an egg into a mixing bowl, I scoop out that last little bit of raw egg white in the shell with my finger and scrape it off on the edge of the bowl. My mother grew up in the Great Depression and learned not to waste foo...
My brother likes to build buildings in his free time. He has a couple of timber-frame structures on his property that he put up over the years, and now he’s working on a more traditional “stick” building made of 2x6’s and 2x4’s. One thing all of his efforts have in common is that they begin as drawings and become blueprints. And even though he’s built with quite different approaches over the years, all his buildings have some things in common: windows, doors, and stairs to nam...
It’s just a fact: most of us outlive our dogs. Indeed, for people who are dog owners throughout their lives, a lot of grieving is guaranteed. Fido #1 dies, is replaced by Fido #2 who also dies, and so on down the long line of dogs in our households. I was reminded of how short a dog’s life is compared to ours when I read Ted Kerasote’s book, Pukka’s Promise. Kerasote is the best-selling author of Merle’s Door, a book about the relationship he had with a mixed breed dog named...
By DR. E. KIRSTEN PETERS As an aging citizen of Scandinavian descent, I dread this time of year. Each evening the sun sets significantly earlier. Deep in the bones of us northern people is the notion that summertime is the season of life and hope while winter is, well, cold and horribly dark. This week all of the globe enjoys roughly 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of night. The "reason for the season" relates to the Earth's orbit around the sun. During summertime, our...
When my dog and I walk along the Snake River during the warm seasons of the year, we can both come home with a tick or two. I'm used to feeling those little legs on my skin or scalp and picking off the critters. If I'm lucky, I get to them before they attach and start sucking my blood. Because I've been doing this all my life I don't get stressed out about ticks, but I do know they can carry certain diseases. Recently the Shots website of National Public Radio reported that...
“Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting.” So begins Stuart Firestein’s book Ignorance: How It Drives Science. Part of the core message in the book about how science should work is wrapped up in a brief story about a physicist named Isidor Isaac Rabi. When Rabi came home from school each day his immigrant mother didn’t ask him what he learned, but rather whether he had asked any good questions in class. That approach to thinking about l...
I have been hard at work in recent years combating a significant disease of wheat. Stem rust is caused by a group of nasty fungal organisms that can infect wheat plants and devastate yields. In some cases up to 100% of the crop can be lost. That’s a disaster for farmers, obviously, but it’s also potentially an enormous problem for those of us who eat bread, hotcakes and muffins, and who want to keep such foodstuffs in our diet. The battle between stem rust and agr...
What are the odds? That was my thought when I read recent pieces about a very special fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. Here’s some background: if you saw the movie Jurassic Park, you may think that Tyrannosaurus rex was the biggest predator of all time. That’s certainly the way the movie portrays the 40-foot-long dinosaur that could weigh seven tons. But there’s actually been a long debate in scientific circles about whether T. rex was a predator chasing d...
Ireland enjoys a mild and stable climate. But even in Ireland there are years that stand out as unusual. Recently a team of researchers led by Harvard's Francis Ludlow announced results of a study of Ireland's climate based on the Irish Annals, a body of writings containing more than 40,000 entries. The Annals record events from 431 A.D. to 1649 A.D. During the Medieval period they were written by monks. From the 1200s onwards some entries were written by historians of the...
I’m never quite sure how to respond when the focus of the national media shines briefly on the region where I live – usually described as a “remote” part of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in eastern Washington State and have lived most of my adult life here, so it hardly seems remote to me. But when reporters from national media outlets make the trip to the region I call home, they invariably emphasize how far it is from parts of the country that are more populated. Earlier...
Late in the last century scientists published reams of data about Earth's climate derived from ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctic. By drilling down into the polar ice with hollow bits, workers were able to pull columns of ice up to the surface. The material brought to light in this way was very special for several reasons. First, the ice cores show annual layers going back in time. That means scientists can count backwards through time from the surface downward, a...
The name “natural gas” might be a puzzle. After all, how could there be such a thing as unnatural gas? The reason we call natural gas what we do has to do with history. There was a day that people made burnable gas by heating coal. The gases that came off the coal were piped around cities where they did things like light street lamps and even power cook stoves in homes. Coal gas had its down side. For one thing, it often contained carbon monoxide. And it took energy to make th...
Modern veterinary science is a technically advanced field. Some animals receive not just x-rays, but sophisticated scans like MRIs. If you visit a large veterinary hospital you will find cats getting chemotherapy and dogs on the receiving end of complicated surgeries. Naturally, a lot of the training vet students receive is focused on the “hard science” parts of what they will do as practicing veterinarians. But there’s also a softer side to veterinary medicine, one that...
One of the most breath-taking geologic events is a major earthquake. In just a few moments, shaking of the Earth can result in billions of dollars of damage and thousands of lives lost. Many earthquakes are related to the movement of tectonic plates, the large chunks of the Earth’s outer surface that move with respect to each other. Plates are “born” in places like Iceland, where magma comes up from below and creates oceanic plate material. Plates “die” where one plate div...
When I was young my family ate a lot of Red Delicious apples. Some came out of my trusty lunchbox at school, some were straight from the refrigerator at home. The apples were big and eye-catching, but in my opinion they left something to be desired in their eating qualities. Still, they gave us a reasonably economical and convenient fruit choice, and we were glad to have them. These days there are lots of options in the stores when it comes to apples, from the traditional vari...
Limestone and a couple other related sedimentary rocks are common in some parts of the country, including in Florida. The chemistry of limestone and groundwater can combine to make for sinkholes, or vertical holes in bedrock that can open up quickly. Sinkholes are caused by the fact that groundwater, percolating downward from the land surface, is acidic. And acids eat away at limestone, dissolving it. That means over time limestone bedrock can start to resemble Swiss cheese,...
