Do you have a unique voice that sets you apart from the crowd? Contribute your stories to QUEST!

KQED QUEST is looking to add new voices to our blog, which already offers commentary from our producers, reporters, and local writers from our partner institutions at Chabot Space & Science Center and The Tech Museum.

We're looking to include folks who are actively involved in the science, environment and nature blogging community – e.g. have a blog, guest post on others' site, and comment / participate in relevant discussions. And we're looking locally. Our blog has a strong SF Bay Area focus, though we do occasionally cover and/or perform analysis on how this stuff elsewhere that affects the Bay Area.

What we cover

QUEST’s geographic coverage is from Mendocino to Monterey and from Sacramento to Santa Clara, and generally covers 9 content areas: astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, environment, geology, health, physics and weather.

Requirements

• Original posts, 3-500 words with at least 1 image. Schedule determined on availability, but weekly or bi-monthly is preferred.
• Posts should relate back to at least one of our 9 themes for the program: Astronomy, Chemistry, Engineering, Physics, Weather, Geology, Biology, Environment, Health.
• Topic should be something about which you have some expertise and/or passion.
• A unique voice and ability to follow our QUEST writing guidelines (see below).
• Experience with WordPress or similar blogging platform.
• Willingness to occasionally be assigned a post topic by the editor as current events dictate.
• Respect for copyright and fair use.

Would I get paid?

Yes – we offer a small stipend on a per post basis.

Alrighty, then. How do I apply?

Email us a note and bio to questeditor@kqed.org explaining what you'd like to write for us. Please also include some links to relevant blogs you admire, and/or participate in, and why. Send us a writing sample or two (links are fine), and we'll review it in the next couple weeks. Last day to submit is February 1st. Our hope is to bring aboard a few new bloggers by mid-February.

Some beats we're interested in

Although we want to hear from a wide range of writers, here are a few coverage areas we're keen on in particular:

• Bay ecology background and issues
• Science education
• Silicon Valley / engineering innovations
• Hacks, DIY, and hands-on science activities
• Hiking and outdoors (with a science focus)
• Food science
• Convergence of art & science
• Nature & science photography

Writing Guidelines

(As laid out by our managing editor, Paul Rogers)

Why does my grandmother care? A key requirement of QUEST bloggers will be to explain scientific and environmental issues in a way that the general public can understand. Our audience is mostly made up of people who aren’t scientists or environmental activists. Posts should explain why the topics they are writing about are relevant to Bay Area residents.

Get to the point. Studies have shown that readers spend only a minute or two on most web sites before moving on. The average reader reads about 200 words a minute. Write tight, and lively. Keep it interesting and informative.

Avoid jargon. The purpose of good writing is to communicate clearly. Don’t use complex, esoteric scientific terms. Instead of saying "non-point source pollution," say "polluted runoff." Instead of "extravehicular activity," say “space walk.”

Be personal. Relate personal experiences. Speak in the first person. Tell them where you saw the blue herons or which movie best depicts what a real moon base might look like. Find your own voice and write in a compelling, approachable way.

Be passionate. Write about subjects and topics that you care about. Please don’t feel you have to stick to a script or formula. Express yourself.

Drive traffic to the blog. Place a link in your correspondence and comments to the blog. Mention it on other web forums.

Write for the bigger picture. Don’t view the blog as a place just to promote your institution or pet cause. Keep in mind your audience is made up of a wide diversity of people, with wide interests.

Speak your mind, but check your facts. Or your audience will do it for you with painful results.

Know your fellow bloggers. You'll be part of a vibrant community with fresh ideas and discussions nearly every day. Don't be afraid to comment on their posts, or link to their entries. Have fun with it! Dreary bloggers or insufferable policy wonks need not apply.

The next time you go to the beach, whether at the ocean or beside a river, take a closer look at the sand and think about the stories those grains can tell!

Sand . . . we play in it, we stroll on it, we make castles out of it, but what do we really know about it?

Most people use the term “sand” to refer to loose material on a beach, but sand is actually a grain size measurement used by geologists to describe sediments varying in size from about 1/16 mm to 2 mm in diameter. Sand can be found not only along ocean beaches, but along flowing rivers and beside land-locked lakes.

Mineral and volcanic sands are terrigenous, meaning that they come from the land. Mineral sands start as mountains and boulders and are gradually broken into smaller and smaller particles by weathering and erosion. Being alternately heated and cooled through the seasons, rolling and tumbling around in mountain streams and rivers, rocks are broken apart by the water’s movement. The black sand beaches of some islands (e.g. Hawai’i) are volcanic in origin. Lava rocks, chunks of cooled molten lava, are broken down into sand over time by physical and chemical weathering.

Some sand is biogenous, meaning that it comes from living things, such as mollusk shells and corals. The energy from water breaks shells down into tiny pieces that eventually are washed onto beaches. Parrotfish in the tropics use their teeth to scrape off and grind down bits of coral reefs; the undigested particles pass through the fishes’ digestive systems and end up as sand on tropical beaches!

If you examine the beauty of beach sand with a magnifying glass, the shape, size, and color of the sand grains can tell many stories.

Shape indicates the age of sand grains. Different materials break down at different rates. For example, quartz is very sturdy and takes longer to become sand than the calcium carbonate material of mollusk shells. Younger sand has sharp and angled edges; it needs time and wave action to become rounded. Sand particles that are smooth and well-rounded are evidence that they have been rolled around for awhile.

Wave action is the story told with grain size. The story is simple: small waves move small sand grains around; large waves move large grains. In addition, Aeolian transport, or sand movement driven by winds, shifts the sand around on the beach, shaping and reshaping, covering and uncovering.

Color offers evidence for source materials – sand particles that are clear, tan, gray, or brown might be quartz or feldspar, black or gray particles could be ilmenite (titanium oxide) or magnetite (iron oxide); garnets are red, mica is silvery black or gray, and shells are purple, white, black, or brown.
The chorus from the song “Mountain in my Hand” (on the Only One Ocean CD by the Banana Slug String Band) explains it best:

“I’ve got a mountain in my hand from the rain-washed land; down by the sea now is where I stand, with this mountain in my hand trying to understand; Oh, oh, wonderful sand.”

Additional Links

• Sea Grant North Carolina

From hackerspaces to banana slugs, flying telescopes to cheese — it's been a quite a diverse year of storytelling here at QUEST. Here's a round-up of the top 10 video and audio stories and blog posts (based on page views) that you've enjoyed from the past year. Please let us know what other stories you've enjoyed in the comments section below, and if there's anything you'd like to see in the coming season!



VIDEO:

Nanotechnology Takes Off

Stem Cell Gold Rush
Science on the SPOT: Banana Slugs Unpeeled
Berkeley Lab Physicist Shares Nobel
Science on the SPOT: Open Source Creativity – Hackerspaces
Super Laser at the National Ignition Facility
The World's Most Powerful Microscope
The Science & Art of Cheese
Mt. Umunhum: Return to the Summit
The Fierce Humboldt Squid

AUDIO:

Up All Night on NASA's Flying Telescope</a>

The Lost Lagoon
Energy-Saving Windows Get Smarter
The Amazing Transformation of San Francisco's "Sludge Puddle"
Supercomputers Hit an Energy Wall
From Tunnel to Tap: Quake-Proofing Our Water Supply
"A Big, Captivating Idea": The Bay Area Ridge Trail
Architecture for the Birds
Gulls Threaten South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Work
In a Sea of Energy Data, Utilities Try to Inspire Conservation

BLOG:

Explosive hypothesis about humans' lack of genetic diversity
Diet Sodas May Not Be As Harmless As You Think
Health Officials to Consider Tightening Vaccine Exemptions
Scientists Understand Heart Disease Better, Still Give Bad Advice
The Megalodon's Descendants
Famous African American Scientists & Innovators: Part II
Swine Flu – A Virus or a Bacteria?
Cyber Wolves in (Fire)Sheep Clothing
Why Do Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears?
15 Months Later, Rediscovered San Francisco Plant Thrives

Emma Valdez, a Sapphire Energy technician, holds a petri dish with 1 million algae cells. Algae is grown and scaled up to 20-liter containers in about one week.

With more and more cars on roadways worldwide – and fossil fuel supplies running low, can renewable fuels really replace crude oil?

In Nebraska, the alternative of choice is ethanol because corn is the mainstay of our economy.  But corn, along with many other crops, takes lots of land…and huge amounts of water.  As important as it is to Nebraska, ethanol, at best, is a 10% additive, not a future fuel in its own right.

So what’s a real alternative?  Research shows one promising alternative seems the least obvious – algae (see QUEST Nebraska: Algae for Fuel).

Algae is a microscopic plant-like marine organism.  There are billions of them in our world, and they exist all around us.  Algae are found in ponds, lakes, streams – all types of bodies of water…even in your bathtub if it’s not cleaned regularly.

It’s green and a bit slimy to the touch.  For the most part, we avoid contact with algae – but it just may be the key to our energy future.  How’s that?  Companies like Sapphire Energy in San Diego, CA are working with universities, including the University of Nebraska to make microscopic algae into the fuel for the future.

Algae conjures up thoughts about Soylent Green, the 1973 sci-fi movie thriller that depicts human survival dependent upon on a green food ration made of “high protein plankton.”  Algae are a type of plankton.

SPOILER ALERT:  Do not read the next sentence if you’ve never seen this movie.   

But there was more to the content of Soylent Green.  Charlton Heston solves the riddle with a horrific warning:  Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Remember when I said algae are slimy?  There’s a reason for that.  If Charlton Heston was warning us, he’d exclaim: Algae is OIL!  Not exactly – but oil we use for our fuel today is actually made from ancient, ancient algae.

“Each algae contains up to 50% oil,” says University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologist George Oyler.  Over millions of years, billions of algae die, collect, and over time are chemically altered through pressure and heat that converts algae oil into “crude oil” which we seek and drill for to energize our world.  Finding a way to convert algae into oil faster than nature would create an almost endless supply of oil.  “We want to accelerate that process into a single year.” 

In 2009, a QUEST video Algae Power, surveyed algae biofuel as a grand experiment, “not ready for prime time.”  The problem was scaling up to industrial production.  Now, Sapphire Energy is leading the way towards industrial production.  It’s no longer a survey experiment.

The process begins as Sapphire technician Emma Valdez swipes a metal loop over an algae filled petri plate (culture dish) and transfers cells to a new plate. “Algae is one of the fastest growing plant on the planet.  This plate contains millions of algae cells.  I can take this plate and make multiple copies.”  Pointing to a stack of petri dishes, she explains that these plates are added to water to make a dense culture, giving rise to 20-liter glass carboy containers.  “I can grow this to scale in a little over a week.”

The carboy containers are then added to long oval test pools in a greenhouse, creating larger concentrations of promising algae species.

Growing algae outdoors is a huge challenge.  But that’s exactly Sapphire’s goal – creating algae farms.  But algae is a wild plant.  “No one’s taken a wild plant and just grown it to scale,” says Mike Mendez, Sapphire’s former VP of Technology (now a research professor at UC-San Diego).  “Algae isn’t an industry.  It’s a commodity, like corn.  We have to think like a farmer and grow algae as a crop.” 

But plants like corn haven’t become crops overnight.  Mendez says, “It took 7,000 years to get corn where it is today.  I’m gonna have to do whatever it takes to speed up the process.”  Sapphire wants to plant, harvest and process algae oil in real time.

Algae ponds at Sapphire Energy's test farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

So, Sapphire has created a 20-acre aquatic test farm in arid Las Cruces, New Mexico.  Why here?  New Mexico has an abundance of sunlight and a rich supply of salt water beneath the dry sands that can’t be used for farming or drinking, but is perfect for growing algae.  Nonetheless, the algae has to survive stress, disease, summer heat and winter freeze.  For two years, scientists and technicians have been successful in scaling up algae from the carboys to 40-foot, then 100-foot, and finally 300-foot oval ponds.

Once the algae mature in the ponds, it’s sent to an industrial centrifuge that separates the algae from the water, creating a thick algae paste. That paste is fed into a test pilot extractor that uses eco-friendly solvents to crack open the algae cells and release oil – green crude.

Sapphire will soon open a 300-acre in 2012.  It will be the largest algae biofuel test plant in the nation.  They expect to produce 1 million gallons of algae biofuel per year – an industry record.  Once Sapphire can create even larger quantities of green crude, they believe the cost of creating an algae fuel will begin approaching the cost of oil.  Stay tuned to see if their plan creates a viable renewable fuel for our future.

Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz and his team use helmet accelerometers, known as the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) systems, to identify at-risk behavior on the football field.

In September 2011, UNC-Chapel Hill sports medicine researcher Kevin Guskiewicz was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for his work on what he calls a hidden epidemic: sports-related concussions.

The award comes with a head-spinning a $500,000 grant, a major portion of which Guskiewicz says will go towards his work:

“We have an amazing interdisciplinary research team at UNC, and the MacArthur Fellowship will help us to expand our work into developing injury prevention strategies and rehabilitation protocols for concussion that can help to preserve sports as we know it today.”

That’s right: a world-renowned concussion expert wants to save, not eliminate, contact sports.

You might assume that Guskiewicz prefers to keep his four children off the field and on the sideline, but that’s not the case at all.  It’s been reported that  “three of his four children have played football, and Guskiewicz has coached Pop Warner teams for five of the last six years.”

These days, barely a week goes by without another news report linking sports related concussions to brain trauma. Even PBS NewsHour is jumping into the rink. Guskiewicz applauds the media for bringing attention to the issue but he stops short of calling a TKO on all contact sports.

Below is an edited version of an UNC-TV interview with with Kevin Guskiewicz after he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship:

UNC-TV: Let's break this down into very simple terms. What is a concussion?

Guskiewicz:  The word “concuss” means to shake violently. It's a shaking of the head. The brain rebounds off of the undersurface of the skull and can be damaged.  Most often, fortunately, it's considered a mild traumatic brain injury because it's temporary in nature in terms of the signs and symptoms that [athletes] experience.

Kevin Guskiewicz utilizes balance and orientation tests to determine the severity of sports-related head injuries.

UNC-TV: What does the public think of a concussion? Do we under or overplay it?

Guskiewicz: I think there certainly has been a culture shift in the right direction, meaning we're taking it more seriously.  The media has done a great job of creating awareness about the dangers of playing while still experiencing symptoms from a concussion, and we're trying to educate athletes, coaches, parents about those signs and symptoms and to take the right precautions in terms of staying out of play and not returning to play until the symptoms have resolved and being cleared by a physician or a clinician with training in concussion management.

UNC-TV: In which sports are athletes most prone to suffering a concussion?

Guskiewicz:  [With] any collision sport there's a higher incidence of concussion. So football, lacrosse, hockey, wrestling, gymnastics.  Those tend to sit at the higher end of the incidence rates in terms of concussion.

UNC-TV: How do you know you’ve suffered a concussion?

Guskiewicz: Common signs and symptoms are headache, dizziness, blurred vision, feeling as though you're in a fog or having concentration problems.

Later that day or that evening could be difficulty sleeping or loss of appetite, things of that nature.  Memory impairment, loss of consciousness.  Those are two parameters we used to weigh very heavily when diagnosing a concussion and saying this truly is a “concussion.”

If you go back 15, 20 years ago, it used to be, “Johnny hasn't lost consciousness, so he hasn't sustained a concussion.”  Less than 10% of concussions involve loss of consciousness.  So it's admitting you don't feel quite right.

It's been described as a hidden epidemic. Unlike an ankle sprain, we can't see this injury.  X-rays can't be used to identify the injury.

UNC-TV: In the everyday world, are concussions a big deal?  If you get a couple in high school playing football, should you worry about it when you grow up and go about your daily life?

Guskiewicz: At UNC, we house the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes. We've been studying retired NFL football players for the last 11 ½ years. Those with a history of three or more concussions are at an increased risk for depression or a precursor to Alzheimer's. We do need to be concerned that once a young child or a high-schooler has had two or three concussions, we begin to ask the question, what does that mean for that individual at age 35, 45, 55?  And so the late in life consequences must be considered in managing these acute injuries.

Kevin Guskiewicz, Ph.D., ATC  is the Kenan Distinguished Professor and chair of the department of exercise and sport science in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

To see a recent QUEST Northern California video about concussions, watch our Sidelined: Sports Concussions video story.

Archivist Stacey Peeples displays a hand-written text with a recipe for 'stomach pills.' (Photo: Todd Vachon/WHYY)

The nation's first hospital culled its archives to create a collection of medical and botanical texts from the 18th and early 19th century.

The exhibit, “Flower to Pharmacy,” is housed at the Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collections in Philadelphia. The illustrations are beautiful, the hand-written lecture notes from medical students are fun to decipher, but maybe most striking is the physicians' focus on body fluids.

Phlegm was a big deal in Colonial times.

“They really believed that these systems were out of whack and you had to do something to bring it back into order,” said curator and archivist Stacey Peeples.

Doctors practiced “humoral medicine,” an ancient idea that health comes from a balance of the body's four humors–phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. In addition to bloodletting, physicians relied on sweating and purging and needed the right mix of flowers, roots and herbs to make that happen.

A view of the library inside the historic Pennsylvania Hospital (Photo: Todd Vachon/WHYY)

The exhibit is a compendium of plants used for medicine as well as prescriptions for pills and poultices. Long lists detail the healing properties of blue flag and yellow-button tansy as well as familiar kitchen herbs such as ginger, rosemary and thyme.

In “The American Practice of Medicine,” Connecticut-born Wooster Beach writes that peppermint is “agreeable and penetrating, slightly bitter, followed by a sensation of cold in the mouth” and good for settling the stomach.

You can also look up ways to fight flatulence, hysteria, dropsy (inflammation), piles (hemorrhoids) and cardialgia (heartburn).

One of the oldest texts is a 1633 edition of John Gerard's “Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes.” The English herbalist includes detailed line drawings and warnings against the most poisonous plants.

“For them to say something will kill you immediately, probably means it was pretty harsh,” Peeples said. “Given the amount of enemas and purgatives these people were taking. It had to be really bad. We like to call it “heroic medicine,” that idea that the physician will go to any means to cure you, even if meant killing you.”

Most of the books were part of the hospital's active lending library and are amazingly preserved, especially Mark Catesby's “Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.” It's a picture book of plants and insects illustrated on deeply saturated color plates – and lovely for art’s sake alone.

Wendy Grube is a nurse practitioner and registered herbalist who teaches a course on alternative therapies at the University of Pennsylvania. She collects her own historical volumes on plant medicine and has done research in the Pennsylvania Hospital archives.

“Flower to Pharmacy” includes some of the first “materia medica” produced for an American audience, and Grube says the meticulous anthologies are fascinating for modern day herbalists.

Early colonial doctors had a very different conception of disease and hadn’t discovered viruses or bacteria, but Grube says that didn’t keep them from hitting on the true medicinal value of plants.

Sage, for instance, is antimicrobial and thyme has anti-viral properties.

Physicians made connections from careful observation over time, Grube says. Doctors likely didn’t understand that an herb was killing off microbes, but it was clear that certain plants helped for cold and cough, she said.

“Flower to Pharmacy” collects the texts used by white, male physicians at Pennsylvania Hospital in the 1700s, but Grube says their records include knowledge learned from Native Americans and traced back to ancient Egypt and Greece.

Curator Stacey Peeples said some of the information in the library collection was surely common knowledge among Colonial women who kept their own recipe books.

“Today if you have a headache, you don't run to the hospital,” Peeples said. “The first thing do, is you take an aspirin. It was similar at that time. The woman was entrusted with the care of the family.”

“Why did these traditions happen? They happened because they were effective. I don't think people really waste their time on things that aren't effective,” Grube said.

Every day our lives are affected by the work of chemical engineers who specialize in solving problems through the use of polymers. Simply put, polymers are long “macro-molecules”, formed by combining carbon or silicon atoms with other elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The combinations form long chains of repeating chemical structures, each with a unique set of chemical properties and characteristics. Depending on the atoms used and their arrangement, engineers and chemists use polymers to create almost anything from a soft toothbrush bristle to a tough bullet-proof vest.

Some polymers occur in nature, like cellulose, amber, shellac, and natural rubber. Other polymers are manufactured by chemists and engineers, and are referred to as synthetic polymers. In an ongoing quest for better and more useful materials, these scientists aim to make substances tough enough to work in the bitter cold of Antarctica or under the immense pressures encountered thousands of feet below an ocean’s surface.

Becki Ramsay, Chemical Engineer at Parker- Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio.

As a part of the “Great Job!” series that highlights exciting careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), a production crew with WVIZ/PBS ideastream®, in Cleveland, Ohio, spent a day with Becki Ramsay. Becki is a chemical engineer with the Hose Products Division of Parker-Hannifin Corporation. She and her team create hoses from synthetic polymers to meet the design specifications they get from mechanical engineers.

During our interview, Becki expressed to us why she decided early on to become an engineer.

Eventually, Becki decided that she was interested in polymers so she continued her studies to eventually become a chemical engineer.

As a result of her work with Parker, Becki and her team create hoses that remain flexible and convey power through hydraulic fluids while operating under the most extreme environmental conditions, whether it’s sub-zero temperatures or in an application that will pulse it millions of times. These hoses are absolutely critical in the operation of machinery used in industries such as construction, mining, forestry, transportation, and more.

Inside this Burst Test Chamber, hoses are filled with water and pressurized until they explode.

Every day, Becki works with chemists and other engineers to create and test the quality of new materials. On the day of our shoot, we visited the Burst Test Chamber. The chamber is made of armor-plated steel and bullet-proof glass. Inside the chamber, hoses are filled with water and pressurized until they explode. Many of the hoses have bursting points in excess of 14,000 pounds per square inch. That would be like getting hit by an explosion with more than 15 million pounds of force, or having to lift three space shuttles! During one of the tests, the hose exploded at nearly 16,000 pounds per square inch!

It was a fascinating day for us. Sometimes we take so much for granted that we don’t think about the interesting careers and interesting people who change our world with their inventions every day. Look around your house. If you look closely enough and think deeply enough, you’ll be amazed, too, by the number of everyday conveniences we have because of the ingenuity of chemical engineers like Becki Ramsay and the many other polymer scientists just like her.

Dickcissel - a grassland bird. Photo Credit: Amy Larson

In an effort to improve the sustainability and health of their land, farmers are increasingly interested in taking a systems approach to farmland management. A systems approach acknowledges the key connections between ecological, economic, and social components. Given the ensuing complexity, measuring the health of a farm system requires good diagnostic tools. In addition, these tools need to be clear and straightforward.

Our current effort at the University of Nebraska Lincoln to develop a set of such indicators for farmers, the Healthy Farm Index, focuses on biodiversity and ecosystem services at the farm scale. One indicator in the index is the presences of a given set of birds on the farm. Birds are a popular indicator because they are sensitive to change in farm practices, found broadly in the environment, and are easy to detect by sight and sound.

The ability to detect birds by sound has spurred our research group to develop resources to aid farmers and other people interested in the songs and calls of farmland birds. As researchers, we use auditory detections of birds as one of our primary monitoring tools. With acoustic recorders, we have recorded the songs and calls of our local bird communities. Back in the lab, we use software to identify and isolate the best songs and calls. These vocalizations have been posted to our website, Farmland Birds of Nebraska, and distributed back to farmers and others interested on CDs. With the acoustic recordings, farmers can select a group of indicator species suitable for their area, learn its call, and listen for the bird while working in the field. This information can be used by the farmer in assessing their own farm or can be shared more broadly with researchers.

The recordings also allow farmers to share with consumers (many of whom are birders) an added environmental benefit of their farm. This spring we were able to take these recorded vocalizations back to one of our participating farms. In partnership with Common Good Farm, we hosted a “Birding on the Farm” tour. Local residents and other farmers spent the morning listening for and identifying the community of birds at the farm. New and experienced birders alike were surprised at the diversity found on the single farm.

In the coming months, we are expanding our network of recorders. This winter we will be monitoring winter bird communities on participating farms and testing the influences that road noise may have on bird vocalization and communication.

Nestled among the trees, streams and undeveloped land in Northern Wisconsin rests an environmental, societal and political challenge. The pristine area, with its proximity to Lake Superior, the largest fresh-water lake in the world, is why its residents choose to live there, but the area is also home to 25 percent of the country’s iron ore reserves, a commercial value of $200 billion.

Pete Rasmussen and Jamey Francis embody the conflict residents in the area face. Both are from the area. Both went away for college. Both moved back to enjoy what the area had to offer. However, the former doesn’t want to risk the change an iron ore mine could bring, the latter feels the mine would staunch the change that’s already occurred.

The four and a half mile stretch of land in question straddles Ashland and Iron Counties in an area colloquially called Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Since 1965, Iron County, an area where a history of mining is celebrated through streets signs and family history, has seen its population decline by 80 percent. Some, like Francis, see the proposed mine and the thousands of jobs it offers either directly or indirectly as a chance to save the county with the one of the highest unemployment rates (8.6% in September) in the state.

“There’s not going to be any opportunity that I can see in the near future other than this mine,” said Francis, an apparel salesman and city councilman in the town of Hurley. “This is an economic game changer.”

The company proposing to develop the mine, Gogebic Taconite (GTAC), has sponsored community events for most of the last year and held open houses throughout the region in an effort to drum up support. GTAC has also lobbied Wisconsin lawmakers to change state law to treat ferrous mining separately from sulfide mining as Michigan and Minnesota do. Iron ore mining uses water and magnets to extract the iron while sulfide mining uses chemicals to remove the deposits.

Among the legislative changes the company wants is a finite time line for the Department of Natural Resources to approve or deny a permit request. GTAC is also interested in being granted the ability to mitigate damages to currently protected wetlands by creating 1 ½ acres of wetland for every acre damaged in the process.

Critics fear the legislation is code for simply ramming through a strip mine without concern to the environment.

“The possibility of poisoning the water for future generations isn’t worth it to me,” said Rasmussen, a freelance photographer, web developer and carpenter in the area. “We’ve known it would be a struggle up here to get by, and it is for a lot of folks and they have to maybe take a couple of jobs. But it’s worth it. It’s part of the price you pay to live in such a beautiful place. And we’re here to protect that.”

The Republican-led legislature is moving forward with legislation to change Wisconsin’s mining laws in order to “get people back to work.” The head of the State Assembly, Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald (R), says there’s “no more important an issue” facing lawmakers in the next few months.

Photo Credit: Kimberli Miller, USGS National Wildlife Health Center.

Standing in the entrance of a Vermont cave in March 2008, it was clear from the dead bats in the snow, another flying in the frigid cold and one clinging to an icicle that something was wrong.

I’m a Wildlife Disease Specialist for the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.  The Center’s mission is to safeguard wildlife and ecosystem health through dynamic partnerships and exceptional science.  I was at the cave with two Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department biologists to learn more about white-nose syndrome (WNS), a new disease that was killing bats in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut by the thousands.

Bats are fascinating creatures that have evolved very specialized survival skills.  One of these is their ability to hibernate to conserve energy by reducing their heart rate, temperature and other body functions to very low levels for extended periods.  This allows bats to survive long winters using their stored body fat when their insect food source is unavailable.  Although bats may briefly rouse out of hibernation to drink water or move to a different part of the cave, they typically stay deep in their hibernaculum or winter “roost site” until spring.

So it was odd in winter 2007 when New York residents reported seeing bats flying during the day and finding them dead in the snow in their yards.  Biologists following up on the reports were surprised to find a nearby cave littered with dead bats and a fuzzy white growth on the nose and wings of some of the live bats.  The following winter, sick and dead bats were reported in multiple locations in New York as well as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.  The disease has now spread as far west as Kentucky, as far south as North Carolina, and to four Canadian provinces.  It is estimated that over a million bats have died since 2007, making this the largest disease outbreak among mammals in modern times.  WNS has spread very rapidly, by bats themselves, and likely also by people moving between affected and unaffected sites.

WNS Occurrence by County. Map courtesy of Cal Butchkoski, Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Navigating the icy rocks into the Vermont cave, dead bats were so numerous; stepping on them was sometimes unavoidable.  A live little brown bat clinging to the rocks overhead didn’t have white nose fuzz but did have wing damage, which we now know, is one of the components of WNS.

Photo Credit: Kimberli Miller, USGS Nation Wildlife Health Center

Nationwide, scientists are collaborating to quickly learn as much as possible about this disease.  One of my Center’s laboratories first isolated a cold-loving fungus from sick bats that they later named Geomyces destructans.  Additional studies determined that it is the cause of WNS.  Other scientists studied the wing damage caused by the fungus and how the injury affects body temperature and hydration during hibernation.  The caving community has helped efforts to prevent the accidental spread of the fungus to new areas on equipment and supplies.  All involved hope to one-day find ways to slow or halt the spread of the disease and reduce bat deaths before WNS causes some bat species to become extinct.