The Crazy Colorado River

Recent geological research indicates that the Colorado river's route from the Colorado Plateau was influenced by tectonic deformation and vaciliating sea levels that caused a series of stops and starts between 6.3 and 4.8 million years ago. A team led by geologist Rebecca Dorsey of the University of Oregon has made a case for a complex history of the river, showing that, contrary to conventional thinking, a river's connection to the ocean is not a once-and-done deal.

"The birth of the Colorado River was more punctuated and filled with more uneven behavior than we expected," Dorsey said. "We've been trying to figure this out for years. This study is a major synthesis of regional stratigraphy, sedimentology and micropaleontology. By integrating these different datasets we are able to identify the different processes that controlled the birth and early evolution of this iconic river system."

Dorsey said that no single process controlled the Colorado River's initial route to the sea. "Different processes interacted in a surprisingly complicated sequence of events that led to the final integration of that river out to the ocean," she said.

The region covered in the research stretches from the southern Bouse Formation, near present-day Blythe, California, to the western Salton Trough north of where the river now trickles into the Gulf of California. The Bouse Formation and deposits in the Salton Trough have similar ages and span both sides of the San Andreas Fault, providing important clues to the river's origins.

The Colorado River starts in the peaks of the Rocky Mountain in the United States and flows into Mexico, where it empties into the Upper Sea of Cortez. Its natural course has varied over thousands of years, and the demand for water to serve an estimated 40 million people now exceeds the river’s supply, resulting in the desiccation of the Colorado’s last hundred miles.

The Colorado River's seven basin states are managing water under the Drought Contingency Plan, an agreement to safeguard water levels at the river's two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The two lakes are critical to providing water in times of drought. The Colorado River Basin states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

Related reading: The Colorado River's Connection with the Ocean was a Punctuated Affair; Arizona Starts Talks on Dwindling Colorado River

Don't Forget the Cranberries!

An old-fashioned cranberry scoop. Today machines pump the berries from the bogs.

What is Thanksgiving dinner without cranberries? Some prefer the jellied form and others want the sauce made with whole berries. This traditional holiday condiment goes perfectly with the heavier foods enjoyed at the holidays. It is sweet and tart and sometimes a little spicey.

There are 100 varieties of cranberries, some of them heirloom varieties dating to the 1840's. The Ojibwa cultivated high-bush cranberries since the mid-17th century.

The red color of cranberries comes from pigments called anthocyanins.The range of red hues is due to the differing porportions of anthocyanins.

Cranberries have a high nutrient and antioxidant content. Research has linked the nutrients in cranberries to a lower risk of urinary tract infection, the prevention of some cancers, improved immune function, and decreased blood pressure.

It takes about 16 months for the cranberry to mature from a bud to a fruit ready to harvest. Most cranberries sold in the United States are grown in Wisconsin. Other states known for cranberry production include Massachusetts, New Jersey, and coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest.

Cranberries are grown in bogs which the growers sometimes flood to keep the leaves from drying out in the winter, and to make it easier to harvest. Once a bog is flooded, machines knock the berries into the water, and then harvesters don waders and corral the berries into an area where they can be pumped through a suction line and loaded on a truck.

Read more here. 

Ice Age Plant Resurrected from Frozen Seeds

The oldest plant ever to be “resurrected” has been grown from 32,000-year-old seeds, beating the previous record holder of the Judean Palm by 30,000 years.

The narrow leafed perennial campion called Silene stenophylla is a small plant whose modern relatives are found in eastern Russia and northern Japan. This species that grows on stony cliffs or sandy shores. Once a year, it produces five-petalled flowers that range in color from white to pink to lilac.

A team of scientists from Russia, Hungary, and the United States recovered frozen Silene stenophylla seeds in 2007 while investigating about 70 ancient ground squirrel burrows or caches, hidden in permanently frozen deposits in northeastern Siberia.

The age of the seeds was estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 years, dating the seeds to the Pleistocene epoch. More than 600,000 fruits and seeds thus preserved were located at the site.

Normally, the rodents would have eaten the food in their larders, but in this case a flood or some other weather event buried the area. The larders were at the level of the permafrost which resulted in the material freezing almost immediately. More than 600,000 fruits and seeds thus preserved were located at the site.

Years later, a team of scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences successfully revived one of the plants: a flowering plant from a 32,000-year-old fruit!

Witch's Hat or Priest's Hat?

 

Yazilikaya Water Shrine in Turkey

Alice C. Linsley

Halloween may bring a few witches and wizards to your door and provide an opportunity to explain that the pointy hat originated among Hittite priests and kings. The children won't be that interested, but their parents might be!

The oldest known pointy hats were worn by ancient Hittite rulers and priests (1600-1180 BC). Today pointed black hats are associated with witches and wizards, but that is due mainly to popular movies. 

Below is a 3400-year gold pendant with a pointed hat found at Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire in ancient Anatolia (in modern Turkey).

This stone relief from Hattusa shows the Hittite King Suppiluliuma II who reigned from 1207-1178 BC). He wears a pointed crown.

This is a Hittite ruler-priest. The artifact dates to about 1600 BC. Note the ram horns on the hat, a symbol of divine appointment.

This stone relief was found at Yazilikaya, a Hittite shrine in modern Turkey in Chamber B. It shows King Tudhaliya IV wearing a pointed crown. It dates to between 1250 and 1220 BC.

This is a reproduction of reliefs that appear at Yazilikaya. The queen wears the solar crown (similar to that worn by Hathor, shown below).

Here again the king is seen wearing a pointed hat with horns. The ram's horns were sacred to the Hittites (People of Heth). Today the ram's horn, called shofar, is still blown as a horn at special ceremonies in Israel. God provided a ram for Abraham to sacrifice in place of his son. Abraham learned an important lesson there on Mount Moriah.

Related reading: What Abraham Discovered on Mount Moriah; Abraham and the Hittites

Asian Hornets Kill Honeybees

The Pacific Northwest of the United States has seen an increase in the number of “murder hornets” or Asian giant hornets (Vespa mandarinia). This hornet is a threat to honeybees and is potentially dangerous to humans.

A party of several dozen Asian giant hornets can kill a whole bee hive and can kill thousands of bees in just a few hours.

This species feed their young the bodies of bees. They can sting over and over, in contrast to honeybees that die after its single-use stinger rips out of its body.

Another difference: Honeybees collect plant pollen as protein whereas the giant hornets slaughter the adult bees, then carry back the brood as food for their larvae.

Watch for the Latin terms vespa (hornet) and apis (bee). These terms distinguish between hornets and bees.

Related reading: What You Need to Know About Murder Hornets; Ancient Mythology About Bees; Oldest Bee Hives Discovered in Israel

Andrea Ghez Nobel Prize Winner

 

UCLA astrophysics professor Andrea Ghez is honored for her pioneering research on the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.

Ghez shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. The Nobel committee praised them for “the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” The other half of the prize was awarded to Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

In July 2019, the journal Science published a study by Ghez and her research group that is the most comprehensive test of Albert Einstein’s iconic general theory of relativity near the monstrous black hole at the center of our galaxy. Although she concluded that “Einstein’s right, at least for now,” the research group is continuing to test Einstein’s theory, which she says cannot fully explain gravity inside a black hole.

Ghez studies more than 3,000 stars that orbit the supermassive black hole. Black holes have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light. The center of the vast majority of galaxies appears to have a supermassive black hole, she said.

“I’m thrilled and incredibly honored to receive a Nobel Prize in physics,” said Ghez, who is director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group. “The research the Nobel committee is honoring today is the product of a wonderful collaboration among the scientists in the UCLA Galactic Center Orbits Initiative and the University of California’s wise investment in the W.M. Keck Observatory.

“We have cutting-edge tools and a world-class research team, and that combination makes discovery tremendous fun. Our understanding of how the universe works is still so incomplete. The Nobel Prize is fabulous, but we still have a lot to learn.”

Source: UCLA Newsroom

Spinach Power!

 

"Eat your spinach," is a common refrain from many people's childhoods. Spinach, the hearty, green vegetable chock full of nutrients, doesn't just provide energy in humans. It also has potential to help power fuel cells, according to a new paper by researchers in AU's Department of Chemistry. Spinach, when converted from its leafy, edible form into carbon nanosheets, acts as a catalyst for an oxygen reduction reaction in fuel cells and metal-air batteries.

An oxygen reduction reaction is one of two reactions in fuel cells and metal-air batteries and is usually the slower one that limits the energy output of these devices. Researchers have long known that certain carbon materials can catalyze the reaction. But those carbon-based catalysts don't always perform as good or better than the traditional platinum-based catalysts. The AU researchers wanted to find an inexpensive and less toxic preparation method for an efficient catalyst by using readily available natural resources. They tackled this challenge by using spinach.

Read it all here.