Meanderings, 25 May 2024

May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields, and, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

Photo by dan carlson on Unsplash

Now

Goodness.

Adoption was not at the top of the to-do list for journalist Jim VandeHei when his son’s former soccer pal Kelvin Martinez Membreno needed a fresh start and a new home.

As VandeHei recounts to PEOPLE and in his latest book, his family had known Kelvin since Kelvin was a young boy. But they mostly lost contact after his father died — until 2018, when Kelvin “dropped into our laps.” 

He was 14, he had run away from his biological family, was flirting with a dangerous lifestyle and was asking if they would take him in. 

Four days after the VandeHeis worked it out with his relatives, Kelvin was at their door with a box that contained his papers and birth certificate and a suitcase with all of his clothes. The family adopted him in 2019.

“You have to go in with a clear eye that there's no easy fairy tale to foster care or adoption. It is hard, but it's also beautiful and highly rewarding,” VandeHei, 53, tells PEOPLE. “If I were to die tomorrow, I would say [adopting Kelvin] was the most meaningful decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

Earbuds:

Thousands of years ago, our ears were attuned to the subtle sounds of our environment: the rustle of leaves from nearby prey, the growl of an approaching predator, the rumble of a distant storm. Listening closely to these sounds helped us survive.

Today, our auditory world has changed drastically — and gotten much louder. Our lives are filled with a barrage of sound from traffic, sirens, construction, noisy restaurants and concerts.

But one of the most insidious sources of noise exposure is our technology, namely earbuds and headphones. In 2023, over half a billion pairs of headphones were sold—according to Grand View Research—nearly double the number sold a decade ago. Many of us wear earbuds for hours at a time, sometimes all day long. And all that listening is taking a toll on our hearing.

According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion young adults, ages 12 to 35, are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss due to "unsafe listening practices." By 2050, the WHO predicts that 1 in 10 of us will experience "disabling hearing loss."

"This can sound alarming," exposure scientist Rick Neitzel said in an interview with Manoush Zomorodi on NPR's Body Electric. He said he has often been asked, "I don't want to harm my hearing, is there anything I can do? The good news is, there is."

[SMcK: No surprise here, but I say, Take ‘em out and listen for the birds. That’s all.]

Bumblebees:

It’s no secret how important bees and pollinators are to our plants, foods and even our water supply. Honey bee products and services have an estimated value of $700 million in the U.S. alone, according to federal officials.

Bee populations have, however, struggled in recent years. A recent study found honey bee colonies in the Pacific Northwest are at a heightened risk of collapse due to climate change-induced warming.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved its first-ever vaccine for honeybees to protect them from a foulbrood disease that has already destroyed entire colonies.

A bumblebee species once found across roughly a dozen states could soon be listed as endangered. Should it get that listing, it would become the 10th bee species to be ruled endangered. 

One of those endangered species may be struggling more.

The rusty patched bumblebee, or Bombus affinis, looks like many other bees you’re familiar with. Their upper bodies are mostly yellow, the bottom of their thorax is black, and they have a black spot or band found between their wings that may extend to their back in a v-shape, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service explains.

Workers and males have an all-yellow first abdominal segment, and a second that sports a patch of rusty hairs on the front and yellow hairs on the back and sides. Queens are entirely yellow on their first segments, and the rest are black.

The bee was once found in more than two dozen states, according to the FWS: Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Since 2000, only 13 states have had confirmed sightings of the rusty patched bumblebee: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota (which declared it its state bee), North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In 2017, it became the first bee species to be federally listed as endangered.

Jay Watson, a conservation biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, told Nexstar that it’s unclear what caused the bumblebee’s decline but that it “may be due to a number of interacting stressors.”

“These may include pathogens and parasites, pesticides and fungicides, habitat loss and degradation, managed bees, and the effects of climate change and small population biology,” Watson explains. He noted two more bumblebees of the Bombus subgenus, the yellow-banded bumblebee and the western bumblebee, saw population declines simultaneously across their ranges.

One thing is clear, the cicadas are not in danger.

Carbon-14, archaeology, and Jerusalem.

Archaeological insights are usually gleaned from small items revealed through painstaking excavations, research and analysis, each a small piece of a greater puzzle.

This approach was taken to the extreme in a recently published article making waves in the archaeology world in which an interdisciplinary team of Israeli experts employed microarchaeology methodology to gain new insights into Jerusalem’s size — larger than previously thought — and chronology during the Iron Age, which spans roughly the years 1200 to 586 BCE.

Through their vast sampling of securely anchored and scientifically excavated minuscule organic remains, the researchers seem to have solved a longstanding issue around accurate radiocarbon dating during the period — a breakthrough that could have implications for the archaeology field as a whole.

“The resolution of C-14 [radiocarbon dating] was very, very bad… With the work that we have done in the City of David, we succeeded to reach a resolution [that is] less than 10 years, which is really something that is very new and dramatic,” said the Weizmann Institute’s Prof. Elisabetta Boaretto, one of the article’s authors.

The long-term research project was slowly and painstakingly accomplished through precise excavation of minute matter in securely dated strata.

“This was done with little bits of charred seeds,” said Dr. Joe Uziel of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), one of the authors of the paper, during a recent phone call with The Times of Israel. “This research is basically the endpoint of about 10 years of intensive study. This was a long, long research project.”

The paper, “Radiocarbon chronology of Iron Age Jerusalem reveals calibration offsets and architectural developments,” was published in April in PNAS, the peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences. It was written by a research team from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University.

On the Thwaites Glacier, yikes:

Ocean water is pushing miles beneath Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier,” making it more vulnerable to melting than previously thought, according to new research which used radar data from space to perform an X-ray of the crucial glacier.

As the salty, relatively warm ocean water meets the ice, it’s causing “vigorous melting” underneath the glacier and could mean global sea level rise projections are being underestimated, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier” because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise — is the world’s widest glacier and roughly the size of Florida. It’s also Antarctica’s most vulnerable and unstable glacier, in large part because the land on which it sits slopes downward, allowing ocean waters to eat away at its ice.

Thwaites, which already contributes 4% to global sea level rise, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 2 feet. But because it also acts as a natural dam to the surrounding ice in West Antarctica, scientists have estimated its complete collapse could ultimately lead to around 10 feet of sea level rise — a catastrophe for the world’s coastal communities.

Many studies have pointed to the immense vulnerabilities of Thwaites. Global warming, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, has left it hanging on “by its fingernails,” according to a 2022 study.

This latest research adds a new and alarming factor into projections of its fate.

Premium fruit, yikes:

Imagine you have $400 to spend on a luxury dining experience. You might treat yourself to a tin of premium caviar, a bottle or two of very fine wine or a multi-course meal at a high-end restaurant.

Or you could blow it all on a single pineapple.

The Rubyglow pineapple –— bred for its distinctive red exterior and its sweetness — costs $395.99 at Melissa’s Produce, a California-based seller of specialty fruit and veggies. It took Del Monte, a wholesaler which sells a variety of produce but specializes in pineapple, a decade and a half to develop the red-hued fruit. A limited crop was first available in China early this year. Recently, Del Monte decided to see how the item would fare in the United States, and Melissa’s starting selling it at the astronomical price.

It may not seem like the best time to market a (very, very) expensive piece of fruit in America. It wasn’t that long ago that soaring grocery prices made headline news, stressing out consumers and stretching their budgets thin. Still nervous about inflation and worried about unemployment, many Americans are now spending less.

And yet, there’s interest in premium fruit — enough to convince Del Monte to bring the Rubyglow, which is grown in Costa Rica, stateside.

“Consumers are willing to pay for something that’s special,” said Cindy van Rijswick, fresh produce strategist for Rabobank’s global research team. When it comes to specialty produce, “there’s always a small market for higher-end restaurants, or foodies, or certain online channels,” she said.

Americans have become interested in particular for new fruit varieties in recent years, paying a premium for Honeycrisp apples, Cotton Candy grapes, Sumo Citrus and vertically-grown Japanese strawberries. Now, they are hungry for different types of fruit, and are ready to shell out for exciting new options.

But a $400 pineapple? That’s a bit rich.