Closer to Home

This week has been a great one, I must say.  But first, I have to brag that my daughter took one in the face for her basketball team and still scored 8 points in the game.  Way to wear a shiner to the dance, and make your team proud! 

Our visit to the Elwha River last weekend was a great opportunity to become more familiar with the Olympic National Forest and to hang out with the other Seniors from the peninsula campuses of Huxley.  The rivers in Western Washington were all running at or just above flood stage, so the Elwha was raging, and it made the discharge falls from the lower dam loud and powerful. 

We all chose our top three category picks to work on for the Environmental Impact Statement of the dam removals, and I'm hoping to get Natural Resources so I can have a chance to research the historic fish run numbers.  It will be interesting to keep an eye on recovering run numbers and see if, and how long it takes to see those numbers again.  So far, I haven't seen anyone else choose the category.

I'm interning much closer to home these days, and have a lot of great projects lined up at the City of Arlington.  Last year the city was able to obtain enough grant money to combine with their funds to purchase the old Country Charm Dairy.  Plans for the lower flood plain portion of the acreage include a large open play field (which I intend to write a low-mow plan for), a community farm and garden on existing farmland, a fishing pond, trails, a 26 site campground, and a safe swim area with an interpretive salmon education sign system.  To connect this property with the future downtown riverfront park plan an interpretive ecological and historical water trail for human powered watercraft with four pull-out areas is being designed.  Then Arlington will be a walkable and rowable city.  How cool is that? 

I'm also helping a fellow Senior intern with a four night ecology class curriculum sponsored by the city.  I'm not a great teacher, but I'm getting more patient.  At least this will be in front of a crowd and not as frustrating as tutoring.  I'm thinking about what portions I would be able to teach well and I'm leaning towards toxicology, flooding and perhaps some forest ecology if my friendly ex-forester neighbor will let me borrow some books.  The final night will be a green networking night, and I'm hoping to get the SnoCo PUD, the SnoCo Green Team and SnoCo Public Works there.  The Public Works biodiesel booth was an absolute hit at the Darrington Community Science night two years ago when I asked them to make some on site.  I love watching the public get excited about science, especially loggers.

Stellar solar ideas

There have been some really cool developments in nanotechnology lately that I've started an idea journal complements of Engineering 104. Northwestern University and the University of Illinois have teamed up in the development of flexible circuitry. The latest edition of Popular Science also featured a breakthrough in a new anti-reflective technology by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that takes advantage of the structure of titanium-oxide and silicon layers to capture 96% of sunlight, no matter what the weather or region of the country.

I'm very excited about both of these stories because I've had an idea for a couple of years that I want to try and develop my Senior year at Western. I've seen too many movies to tell you what it is, but it is now in the journal along with notes about these breakthroughs.

The last couple of weeks have gone by fast and have been very weird. We've spent the last 2 weeks with cold and clear weather up here and it snowed again. In fact to get anywhere in the yard, you just walk on top of the frozen foot-plus of snow. In the low-lands they had continuous fog - day and night. It was like driving from Alaska to San Francisco within a half-an-hour. Today it seems like everything may be returning to normal. It is in the upper 30's and raining, so I'm hoping some more snow melts. I've been having dreams about seeing my lawn - do you think they mean something?

A New Dawn in American Science

Today, the FDA approved stem cell transplants from pure human lines! I don't have much time to get technical, although Molecular Biology was my favorite class, but we will now be able to catch up with Europe's scientists. And I won't go into the political side, because face it, there are not enough wishful parents to adopt the frozen embryos from people playing God and having litters. Enough said.

Geron, who applied for FDA approval, will begin with embryonic stem cell transplants in paraplegic adults to see how well their spinal cord and nerves regenerate. As soon as they can prove it is safe in adults, which they already have in Europe, they can begin trials on children and on auto-immune diseases. Imagine if a Type 1 diabetic can get all new Beta cells in their pancreas, or if Multiple Sclerosis patients can get new nerve generation, or a lymphoma patient new marrow, and the list can go on and on. It's such an exciting day in Nerdworld!