BERKELEY, Calif. – Increasing the minimum wage and expanding a tax credit for low-wage workers may prevent more than 1,200 suicides each year, according to a new working paper by a team of UC Berkeley researchers.

The study, which will be published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that a 10-percent increase in the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit has a dramatic impact on the number of non-drug-related suicides among men and women without college degrees.

“A lot of the time the discussion of higher minimum wages is framed in narrow economic terms,” said Anna Godøy, a research economist with UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and a co-author of the paper. “What this study shows is that the debate is not only about jobs and wages, it is also about mental health.”

“In short,” Godøy added, “our study shows that higher minimum wages are likely to save lives.”

While other studies have suggested connections between higher minimum wages and a decline in suicides, the working paper, titled “Can Economic Policies Reduce Deaths of Despair?,” is the first to prove a direct relationship.

Using 16 years of mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control, census figures and analyses of government wage and tax policies, the research team, which included economists and public health experts, was able to show how the new policies caused a decline in suicides.

“Our models show that when states implement these policies, the suicide rate drops,” Godøy said. “This further supports our conclusion that this is a cause-and-effect relationship.”

Specifically, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage dropped suicides among men and women without college degrees aged 18 to 64 by 3.6 percent. A 10 percent increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit dropped suicides among the same group by 5.5 percent.

"Our results show that even modest increases to the incomes of low-wage workers can make a difference,” said William Dow, interim dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and a co-author of the paper. “The largest effects were on women, who are more likely to work minimum wage jobs and be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit.”

The paper found that increases to the minimum wage and tax credits had no significant effects on drug-related deaths.

The researchers also controlled for factors like expansion of Medicaid and did not see similar declines in suicides among a college-educated placebo sample.

Godøy said that while the Berkeley paper did not examine why an increase in minimum wage or tax credits lead to a drop in the number of suicides, previous research has shown that greater financial security is connected to improved mental health.

The strong link between changes to tax and wage policies should encourage policy makers to understand the “full consequences of changes to economic policies,” when debating increasing the federal minimum wage, Godøy said.

In addition to Godøy and Dow, the research team included Christopher Lowenstein, a graduate student researcher at the School of Public Health, and Michael Reich, a professor of economics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Will Kane writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.

We dine at a common table, beneficiaries of the nourishment that our planet provides. May the whole of our human family become closer to us as we explore the world together through food, the tie that deliciously binds, whether it’s grown nearby or enjoyed many miles from our door.

It’s sunny in Lake County as I write this. The skies are vacant of clouds, wildflowers explosively bloom, and a chorus of birdsong fills the air.

Our beautiful spring has arrived.

However, not so long ago, wet, gray days were strung together like pearls on a necklace, and my soul longed for a place where the sun was impossibly bright.

With its whitewashed houses perched cliffside and the sun-sparkled seas that embrace it, Greece seemed like such a spot. It called to me when overcast skies threatened to overwhelm my mood.

Thoughts of Greece fill my heart even now, and not just because of its warm beauty.

The food also calls, as Greece entices me with one of my most beloved world cuisines.

Greek culinary tradition is more than 4,000 years old and is key to the culture and history of the country. Names of foods, ingredients, and cooking methods haven’t changed much with the passing of millennia.

Greece is thrust like a hand into water at the end of the Balkan Peninsula. Thusly perched at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, its climate is characterized by wet winters and hot, dry summers, not dissimilar to ours.

These are perfect conditions for the “Mediterranean triad” of wheat, olive oil, and wine on which Greek cookery is based.

The cuisine epitomizes what has come to be known as the Mediterranean diet.

Olive oil, which gives Greek cuisine one of its most characteristic flavors, is produced from the plethora of olive trees in the area, some more than 2,000 years old, and is partly responsible for the health benefits said to come from adopting a diet common to the Mediterranean region.

Citrus trees also thrive in Greece’s toasty temperatures, and lively lemon juice adds a beautiful tang to many dishes. This bright, tongue-rousing flavor is one of my favorite reasons to enjoy Greek food.

With the longest coastline in Europe (and the 11th longest in the world), Greece is surrounded on three sides by four different seas (the Mediterranean and Cretan Seas to the south, the Aegean Sea to the east, and the Ionian Sea to the west). No more than 90 miles separates any part of the Greek mainland from the sea.

In addition, there are an astounding 6,000 plus Greek islands (of which only 227 are inhabited), so it’s no surprise that fish and seafood are an important staple of Greek cookery.

Eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, making it a land of small farms, by and large organic, and of mostly diminutive livestock.

Lamb and kid goats are popular holiday food, and using sweet spices such as cinnamon, allspice, and cloves with meat dishes is a trait of Greek cooking.

Greeks have crafted sumptuous cheeses since ancient times and they’re consumed with gusto. There are far more varieties produced in Greece than the feta prevalent in supermarkets here.

Honey is widely used in desserts, including in baklava, thin layers of phyllo dough stuffed with crushed walnuts and smothered with the honey which gives it its characteristic sweetness.

The generous use of oregano, mint, garlic, dill, bay laurel, fennel, basil, and thyme are lively on the palate, and the bright, fresh flavors that these add to the food make me feel energized when I partake of it.

Dining out is common in Greece, and small dishes known as meze include a variety of foods, among them dolmades (rice, currants, pine kernels wrapped in grape leaves), grilled octopus, lentils, olives, small fish, and feta cheese. This is popular fare in local restaurants.

Some Greek foods, such as gyros, hummus and pita bread, originated in other Mediterranean areas and spread throughout the region, including to Greece.

Gyros (pronounced YEE-ros) is meat in a cone-like shape cooked slowly on a spit, shaved while still skewered for sandwiches. It’s similar to shawarma, which is served throughout the Middle East, with both versions having roots in the Turkish doner kebab.

Interestingly, gyros is the Greek word for “turn” and shawarma means “turning” in Arabic, references to the way they’re cooked.

Based on historical information from the 13th century, hummus likely originated in ancient Egypt. Chickpeas were then, and still are, abundant in the Middle East; in fact, the word hummus means chickpea in Arabic.

Flat, pocketed pita bread may have originated with the Bedouins (the Amorites are the other contenders) and its popularity spread through Bedouin trade and travel routes.

Other dishes currently eaten in Greece can be traced back thousands of years. Skordalia (a potato and garlic spread), pastili (a dessert made with honey), and lentil soup are among those that hail from ancient times.

Retsina, a white or rose wine sealed with pine resin, is also from this era.

With good reason, Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilization. It’s the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, trial by jury, and equality under the law.

We also owe the ancient Greeks gratitude for important literary, scientific, and mathematical contributions, and we can thank them for another first – fusion cuisine going back to 350 BCE.

Their geographical position as a crossroads between Europe, Africa, and Asia contributes to much of this, but so does their history. Alexander the Greek extended the Greek Empire from Europe to India, bringing in eastern and northern culinary influences.

When Greece fell to the Romans in 146 BCE and when the Ottoman Empire fell to the Turks in 1453 CE, those cultures influenced its cuisine. (Many Greek dishes, such as tzatziki and dolmades, are still known by their Turkish names.)

Greece can boast another culinary first. Greek gourmet Archestrados wrote the first known cookbook in 330 BCE, suggesting that food has been an important part of Greek culture for quite some time.

Being welcoming to strangers is deeply rooted in Greek culture, and the country is consistently rated as being among the most hospitable to visit.

The Greek principle of hospitality, extant since ancient times, is known as philoxenia. A sacred relationship exists between host and guest, elevating the guest (even if a stranger) to a position equal to the host. The goal is to make them feel protected and taken care of.

It is said that even today if one knocks on a stranger’s door in Crete, they will be received as an honored guest.

Below are two dishes well-loved in Greece, tzatziki, a cooling cucumber-yogurt salad (also used as a dip), and hummus, the chickpea spread mentioned previously. Both are perfect fare for hot days when we just don’t want to cook.

And finally, here’s a standard Greek toast and a wish for good health: Yia Mas!

Tzatziki salad

This cool, refreshing salad is best when made with traditional Greek yogurt. I created this version for a culinary class I taught on Greek cuisine. For a variation in flavor, add chopped fresh mint or thyme rather than dill.

Tzatziki is often used as a condiment, and to create a smoother sauce for this purpose, use a food processor to make a rough cucumber puree. If this method is used, the peeled, sliced cucumber should be salted and placed in a colander to drain for 30 minutes before pureeing. Otherwise, the dip will be watery.

Ingredients:

2 medium cucumbers, peeled, seeded and thinly sliced
2 cups plain Greek yogurt
2 cloves garlic, smashed, peeled, then finely diced
Juice of half a lemon
Fresh dill (or mint or thyme) to taste
Freshly ground black pepper & salt to taste

Combine the yogurt, garlic and lemon juice in a bowl. Add cucumber to yogurt mixture. Add the fresh herb of choice to taste. (If using dill, kitchen scissors may be used to cut small pieces of the leaves into the bowl; alternatively, finely chop the dill ahead of time.) Mix and enjoy!

Hummus spread

This is my go-to hummus recipe. It’s made often in our home because it reminds me of my first taste of hummus in a San Francisco deli in the 1980s. The recipe is from The Silver Palate Cookbook, which continues to be a favorite of mine, despite the fact that it’s decades old.

Ingredients

4 cups (about 2-1/2 cans) chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
½ cup tahini (sesame spread)
1/3 cup warm water
1/3 cup best-quality olive oil
Juice of 2 or 3 lemons, to taste
4 or more garlic cloves, to taste
1-1/2 teaspoons salt, or to taste
2 teaspoons ground cumin
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Combine the chickpeas, tahini, warm water, olive oil, and juice of 1 lemon in the bowl of a food processor. Process until smooth and creamy, pausing once or twice to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Add the garlic, salt, cumin, and pepper, and process to blend. Taste and correct the seasoning if necessary. Add more lemon juice to taste. Scrape into a storage container, cover, and refrigerate until ready to use. Makes 1 quart.

Esther Oertel is a writer and passionate home cook from a family of chefs. She grew up in a restaurant, where she began creating recipes from a young age. She’s taught culinary classes in a variety of venues in Lake County and previously wrote “The Veggie Girl” column for Lake County News. Most recently she’s taught culinary classes at Sur La Table in Santa Rosa, Calif. She lives in Middletown, Calif.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control this week has many cool dogs looking for new families.

Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of bluetick coonhound, Chihuahua, German Shepherd, Great Pyrenees, heeler, Labrador Retriever, pit bull, redbone coonhound, shepherd and wirehaired terrier.

Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.

If you're looking for a new companion, visit the shelter. There are many great pets hoping you'll choose them.

The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).

‘Rio’

“Rio” is a male bluetick coonhound-shepherd mix with a short tricolor coat.

He already has been neutered.

He’s in kennel No. 7, ID No. 11947.

‘Bear’

“Bear” is a male Labrador Retriever with an all-black coat.

He already has been neutered.

He’s in kennel No. 8, ID No. 11986.

Male pit bull terrier

This male pit bull terrier has a short brown and white coat.

He’s in kennel No. 13, ID No. 12043.

Male German Shepherd

This male German Shepherd has a medium-length black and brown coat.

He already has been neutered.

He’s in kennel No. 19, ID No. 12107.

Male pit bull terrier

This male pit bull terrier has a short black coat.

He’s in kennel No. 20, ID No. 11958.

Male Chihuahua-terrier

This male Chihuahua-terrier mix has a short black coat.

He is in kennel No. 21a, ID No. 12112.

Male wirehaired terrier

This male wirehaired terrier has a coarse black coat.

He’s in kennel No. 21b, ID No. 12113.

Male Chihuahua

This male Chihuahua has a short tricolor coat.

He’s in kennel No. 22, ID No. 12114.

‘Copper’

“Copper” is a male redbone coonhound with a short red coat.

Shelter staff said he is 7 years old. He’s good with other dogs and children, but not cats. He walks well on a leash, is mellow and doesn’t bark that much. He also loves treats.

Copper is in kennel No. 25, ID No. 11960.

‘Taya’

“Taya” is a female pit bull terrier who a short tricolor coat.

He’s in kennel No. 26, ID No. 12005.

‘Little Foot’

“Little Foot” is a white male Great Pyrenees with a long white coat and gold eyes.

Shelter staff said the right home for him will not have cats, small dogs or livestock.

He has been neutered.

Little Foot is in kennel No. 27, ID No. 11854.

Female heeler

This female heeler has a medium-length black and white coat.

She’s in kennel No. 31, ID No. 11962.

Female pit bull terrier

This female pit bull terrier has a short brown and white coat.

She’s in kennel No. 33, ID No. 11950.

Lake County Animal Care and Control is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport, next to the Hill Road Correctional Facility.

Office hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm.

For more information call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

BERKELEY, Calif. – Barnacles that hitch rides on the backs of humpback and gray whales not only record details about the whales’ yearly travels, they also retain this information after they become fossilized, helping scientists reconstruct the migrations of whale populations millions of years in the past, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.

Oxygen isotope ratios in barnacle shells change with ocean condition and allow scientists to chart the migration of the host whale, for example to warmer breeding grounds or colder feeding grounds. Now, marine paleobiologists led by UC Berkeley doctoral student Larry Taylor have discovered that barnacles retain this information even after they fall off the whale, sink to the ocean bottom, and become fossils."

As a result, the travels of fossilized barnacles can serve as a proxy for the peregrinations of whales in the distant past, like GPS trackers from the Pleistocene.

“One of the more exciting things about the paper, in my mind, is that we find evidence for migration in all of these ancient populations, from three different sites and time periods, but also from both humpback and gray whale lineages, indicating that these animals, which lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, were all undertaking migrations similar in extent to those of modern-day whales,” Taylor said.

One surprise finding is that the coast of Panama has been a meeting ground for different subpopulations of humpback whales for at least 270,000 years and still is today. Whales visit Panama from as far away as Antarctica and the Gulf of Alaska.

This information about ancient migration will help scientists understand how migration patterns may have affected the evolution of whales over the past 3 to 5 million years, how these patterns changed with changing climate and help predict how today’s whales will adapt to the rapid climate change happening today.

“We want to understand how malleable migratory behavior has been through time, how rapidly whales have adapted to previous climate changes, and see if this can give us some clues as to how they might respond to the current changes in Earth's climate,” he said. “How will whales cope with that, how will the food base shift, how will the whales themselves respond?”

Taylor and his colleagues, senior author Seth Finnegan, a UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology, Aaron O’Dea of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Timothy Bralower of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, will publish their findings this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Riding the whales

Barnacles are crustaceans, like crabs, lobsters and shrimp, that remain stuck in one place their whole lives, encased in a protective hard shell and sticking out their legs to snatch passing food.

Most glue themselves to rocks, boats or pilings, but whale barnacles attach to a whale’s skin by boring down into it. Some whales have been estimated to carry up to 1,000 pounds of barnacles, which are visible when they breech. Clusters of barnacles are used to identify individual whales.

“This gives the barnacle several advantages: a safe surface to live on, a free ride to some of the richest waters in the world and a chance to meet up with other (barnacles) when the whales get together to mate,” O’Dea said.

Taylor’s technique works because different species of whale barnacle hitch rides on different species of whale, so paleontologists can know, when they find a fossilized barnacle, which species it rode with.

Normally, the barnacles stay with a whale between one and three years, until they fall or are brushed off, often at whale breeding grounds. At least 24 fossil assemblages of whale barnacles have been found around the world, Taylor said.

The new discovery means that the fossilized barnacles recovered at these sites can tell about ancient migrations of humpbacks, gray whales and perhaps other baleen whales (toothed whales, such as sperm whales, do not host many barnacles), potentially turning up previously unsuspected feeding and breeding areas.

The technique is based on measuring the oxygen isotopes in the calcium carbonate, or calcite, shell of the barnacle. The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 goes up as the temperature drops. Since barnacles lengthen their shells by a few millimeters a month as they try to stay attached to whales in the face of the mammals’ shedding skin, the composition of the new shell reflects the ocean temperature and general isotopic composition where it formed.

Taylor built on previous work showing that barnacles attached to living gray whales record a chemical signature of their migrations. He confirmed that the isotopic composition of the humpback whale barnacle (Coronula diadema) also tracks its environment today during the whales’ yearly migration, showing monthly changes. He then demonstrated that fossilized barnacles from Panama and from the California coast could be analyzed similarly, and that they showed isotopic changes similar to that of today’s whales.

This technique will be particularly valuable for studying prehistoric humpback populations, Taylor said, because the humpback was and is more cosmopolitan than the California gray whale, cruising widely through the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Scientists theorize that whale migration began as food sources became more scattered as the climate changed five million years ago. Modern Pacific whales migrate tens of thousands of miles annually, visiting several known feeding areas and returning to warm waters off Central and South America or Hawaii to breed.

“We plan to push this approach further back in time and across different whale populations,” Finnegan said. “We hope that by analyzing other aspects of the geochemistry of the barnacles shells we might ultimately be able to figure out what areas different ancient whale populations were migrating to.”

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National System of Investigators in Panama, the Paleontological Society, the Geological Society of America, Sigma Xi and the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.

COBB, Calif. – A 3.2-magnitude earthquake was reported in south Lake County early Saturday.

The quake was reported at 5:33 a.m. Saturday, 3 miles west northwest of Cobb and 11.9 miles southwest of Clearlake, at a depth of six-tenths of a miles, according to the US Geological Survey.

The USGS said it received 13 shake reports from around Lake County, the Bay Area and as far away as Tustin.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

The first type of molecule that ever formed in the universe has been detected in space for the first time, after decades of searching.

Scientists discovered its signature in our own galaxy using the world’s largest airborne observatory, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, as the aircraft flew high above the Earth’s surface and pointed its sensitive instruments out into the cosmos.

When the universe was still very young, only a few kinds of atoms existed. Scientists believe that around 100,000 years after the big bang, helium and hydrogen combined to make a molecule called helium hydride for the first time.

Helium hydride should be present in some parts of the modern universe, but it has never been detected in space – until now.

SOFIA found modern helium hydride in a planetary nebula, a remnant of what was once a Sun-like star.

Located 3,000 light-years away near the constellation Cygnus, this planetary nebula, called NGC 7027, has conditions that allow this mystery molecule to form.

The discovery serves as proof that helium hydride can, in fact, exist in space. This confirms a key part of our basic understanding of the chemistry of the early universe and how it evolved over billions of years into the complex chemistry of today. The results are published in a recent issue of Nature.

“This molecule was lurking out there, but we needed the right instruments making observations in the right position – and SOFIA was able to do that perfectly,” said Harold Yorke, director of the SOFIA Science Center, in California’s Silicon Valley.

Today, the universe is filled with large, complex structures such as planets, stars and galaxies. But more than 13 billion years ago, following the big bang, the early universe was hot, and all that existed were a few types of atoms, mostly helium and hydrogen.

As atoms combined to form the first molecules, the universe was finally able to cool and began to take shape. Scientists have inferred that helium hydride was this first, primordial molecule.

Once cooling began, hydrogen atoms could interact with helium hydride, leading to the creation of molecular hydrogen – the molecule primarily responsible for the formation of the first stars. Stars went on to forge all the elements that make up our rich, chemical cosmos of today.

The problem, though, is that scientists could not find helium hydride in space. This first step in the birth of chemistry was unproven, until now.

“The lack of evidence of the very existence of helium hydride in interstellar space was a dilemma for astronomy for decades,” said Rolf Guesten of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany, and lead author of the paper.

Helium hydride is a finicky molecule. Helium itself is a noble gas making it very unlikely to combine with any other kind of atom. But in 1925, scientists were able to create the molecule in a laboratory by coaxing the helium to share one of its electrons with a hydrogen ion.

Then, in the late 1970s, scientists studying the planetary nebula called NGC 7027 thought that this environment might be just right to form helium hydride. Ultraviolet radiation and heat from the aging star create conditions suitable for helium hydride to form. But their observations were inconclusive.

Subsequent efforts hinted it could be there, but the mystery molecule continued to elude detection. The space telescopes used did not have the specific technology to pick out the signal of helium hydride from the medley of other molecules in the nebula.

In 2016, scientists turned to SOFIA for help. Flying up to 45,000 feet, SOFIA makes observations above the interfering layers of Earth’s atmosphere. But it has a benefit space telescopes don't – it returns after every flight.

“We’re able to change instruments and install the latest technology,” said Naseem Rangwala SOFIA deputy project scientist. “This flexibility allows us to improve observations and respond to the most pressing questions that scientists want answered.”

A recent upgrade to one of SOFIA’s instruments called the German Receiver at Terahertz Frequencies, or GREAT, added the specific channel for helium hydride that previous telescopes did not have. The instrument works like a radio receiver.

Scientists tune to the frequency of the molecule they’re searching for, similar to tuning an FM radio to the right station. When SOFIA took to the night skies, eager scientists were onboard reading the data from the instrument in real time. Helium hydride’s signal finally came through loud and clear.

“It was so exciting to be there, seeing helium hydride for the first time in the data,” said Guesten. “This brings a long search to a happy ending and eliminates doubts about our understanding of the underlying chemistry of the early universe.

SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is a Boeing 747SP jetliner modified to carry a 106-inch diameter telescope. It is a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, DLR.

NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley manages the SOFIA program, science and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) at the University of Stuttgart.

The aircraft is maintained and operated from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703, in Palmdale, California.

Kassandra Bell and Alison Hawkes work for NASA.

KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Cal Fire is soon to reopen the lookout tower on Mount Konocti for the season, again staffed by local volunteers.

The devastating wildfires in Lake, Sonoma and Mendocino counties make the fire lookout of great importance.

A tower training day is soon to be scheduled for new volunteers and as a refresher for those from previous years.

Once under way, volunteers will be able to schedule online for either eight- or five-hour shifts. They drive their own vehicle to the tower to begin their shift.

If smoke from fire is observed, a report is made via radio contact directly to Cal Fire dispatch.

Determining and communicating the location of the fire is a skill that comes from training and experience.

Those interested in volunteering to serve at least one day a month are encouraged to call tower leader Ric Abrams, 707-245-4171, or Chairman Jim Adams, 707-245-3771.

Chuck Sturges is a Mount Konocti fire lookout volunteer.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit fire crews from Konocti Conservation Camp and Delta Conservation Camp will hold their annual Fire Crew Readiness Exercises in Lake County on April 30 and May 1.
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The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, in conjunction with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation operates 39 conservation camps with approximately 200 fire crews throughout California.

This partnership of state agencies provides a large force of trained crews for all types of emergency incident mitigation and resource conservation projects.

The Fire Crew Readiness Exercises provide an opportunity for the nine fire crews from the two conservation camps to be evaluated on their physical conditioning, firefighting knowledge, fire safety and personal protective equipment.

The exercise is an important part of preparing for fires in California. The crew members are educated and trained to work under extreme fire conditions, many times in triple-digit heat.

Under competitive pressure, the fire crews will construct fire lines utilizing chainsaws and hand tools, hike a set distance with varying terrain into a pre-designated site, deploy fire shelters, as well as expand their knowledge in fire, bulldozer and helicopter safety.

Proctors will remind them of the importance of communication, their personal protective gear and proper hydration.

It is an outstanding opportunity to put the year’s training to the test and to gear-up both physically and mentally for the ensuing fire season.

Personnel from Cal Fire and the CDCR will participate throughout all elements of the exercises.

For more information about preparing for wildfire, visit www.readyforwildfire.org.

California's black bears are waking up hungry from their winter downtime.

To help minimize unwanted bear foraging behavior, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is reminding those living in or visiting bear country to store food and dispose of garbage properly.

Black bears typically prefer remote mountainous areas. However, as more people frequent or live in natural bear habitat, the abundance of food and garbage associated with human activities is a temptation hungry bears find hard to resist.

"Over the years, we have seen bear behavior change significantly in areas where more people live and recreate in bear habitat," said Vicky Monroe, CDFW's Conflict Programs coordinator. "Beginning with spring and into late fall, we receive a steady stream of calls from the public reporting anything from bears breaking into cabins and tents to bears stealing food off picnic tables."

Black bears, like other bear species, have a highly specialized sense of smell, which can sometimes lead them to towns and recreation areas where they may quickly find an overflowing garbage can or someone's leftover hamburger and French fries.

The public can help bears stay out of human settlements and stick to their natural diet by properly disposing of leftover food and garbage. Additional suggestions include:

– Residents and vacationers should remove any food attractants from around their home or rental. Pet food, barbecue grills and bird feeders are also attractants. Store trash in bear-resistant storage sheds until trash pickup day.

– Use sensory deterrents (such as ammonia), electric mats and bear-resistant fencing to exclude hungry and curious bears from gaining access to attractants.

– Visitors to towns and tourist areas should not pile trash in a trash can or bin that is already overflowing - take trash to a proper receptacle or another location if necessary.

– Keep campsites and other recreation areas clean. Use bear-resistant coolers and store all food in bear lockers.

– Never feed wildlife.

Additional information can be found on CDFW's Web site, including tips on how to keep California black bears wild, information about bear proof containers and information about black bear biology.

 

As devastating images of the 2019 Midwest floods fade from view, an insidious and longer-term problem is emerging across its vast plains: The loss of topsoil that much of the nation’s food supply relies on.

Today, Midwest farmers are facing millions of bushels of damaged crops such as soybean and corn. This spring’s heavy rains have already caused record flooding, which could continue into May and June, and some government officials have said it could take farmers years to recover.

Long after the rains stop, floodwaters continue to impact soil’s physical, chemical and biological properties that all plants rely on for proper growth. Just as very wet soils would prevent a homeowner from tending his or her garden, large amounts of rainfall prevent farmers from entering a wet field with machinery. Flooding can also drain nutrients out of the soil that are necessary for plant growth as well as reduce oxygen needed for plant roots to breathe, and gather water and nutrients.

As scientists who have a combined 80 years of experience studying soil processes, we see clearly that many long-term problems farmers face from floodwaters are steeped in the soil. This leads us to conclude that farmers may need to take far more active measures to manage soil health in the future as weather changes occur more drastically due to climate change and other factors.

Here are some of the perils with flooded farmland that can affect the nation’s food supply.

Suffocating soil

When soil is saturated by excessive flooding, soil pores are completely filled with water and have little to no oxygen present. Much like humans, plants need oxygen to survive, with the gas taken into plants via leaves and roots. Also identical to humans, plants – such as farm crops – can’t breathe underwater.

Essentially, excess and prolonged flooding kills plant roots because they can’t breathe. Dead plant roots in turn lead to death of aboveground plant, or crop, growth.

Another impact of flooding is compacted soil. This often occurs when heavy machinery is run over wet or saturated farmland. When soils become compacted, future root growth and oxygen supply are limited. Thus, severe flooding can delay or even prevent planting for the entire growing season, causing significant financial loss to farmers.

Loss of soil nutrients

When flooding events occur, such as overwatering your garden or as with the 2019 Midwest flooding, excess water can flush nutrients out of the soil. This happens by water running offsite, leaching into and draining through the ground, or even through the conversion of nutrients from a form that plants can utilize to a gaseous form that is lost from the soil to the atmosphere.

Regardless of whether you are a backyard gardener or large-scale farmer, these conditions can lead to delays in crop planting, reduced crop yields, lower nutritive value in crops and increased costs in terms of extra fertilizers used. There is also the increased stress within the farming community – or for you, the backyard gardener who couldn’t plant over the weekend due to excess rainfall. This ultimately increases the risk of not producing ample food over time.

Small microbial changes have big effects

Flooding on grand scales causes soils to become water-saturated for longer than normal periods of time. This, in turn, affects soil microorganisms that are beneficial for nutrient cycling.

Flooded soils may encounter problems caused by the loss of a specific soil microorganism, arbuscular mycorrhizae fungi. These fungi colonize root systems in about 90% to 95% of all plants on Earth in a mutually beneficial relationship.

The fungi receive energy in the form of carbon from the plant. As the fungi extend thread-like tendrils into the soil to scavenge for nutrients, they create a zone where nutrients can be taken up more easily by the plant. This, in turn, benefits nutrient uptake and nutritive value of crops.

When microbial activity is interrupted, nutrients don’t ebb and flow within soils in the way that is needed for proper crop growth. Crops grown in previously flooded fields may be affected due to the absence of a microbial community that is essential for maintaining proper plant growth.

The current Midwest flooding has far-reaching effects on soil health that may last many years. Recovering from these types of extreme events will likely require active management of soil to counteract the negative long-term effects of flooding. This may include the adoption of conservation systems that include the use of cover crops, no-till or reduced-till systems, and the use of perennials grasses, to name few. These types of systems may allow for better soil drainage and thus lessen flooding severity in soils.

Farmers have the ability to perform these management practices, but only if they can afford to convert over to these new systems; not all farmers are that fortunate. Until improvements in management practices are resolved, future flooding will likely continue to leave large numbers of Midwest fields vulnerable to producing lower crop yields or no crop at all.

Jim Ippolito, Associate Professor of Environmental Soil Quality/Health, Colorado State University and Mahdi Al-Kaisi, Professor of Soil Management and Environment, Iowa State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

BERKELEY, Calif. – Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system – an enveloping cloud of comets, dwarf planets in weird orbits and, if it truly exists, a possible Planet Nine far from the sun – have been linked to the close approach of another star in our system’s infancy flung things helter-skelter.

But are stellar flybys really capable of knocking planets, comets and asteroids askew, reshaping entire planetary systems?

UC Berkeley and Stanford University astronomers think they have now found a smoking gun.

A planet orbiting a young binary star may have been perturbed by another pair of stars that skated too close to the system between 2 and 3 million years ago, soon after the planet formed from a swirling disk of dust and gas.

If confirmed, this bolsters arguments that close stellar misses help sculpt planetary systems and may determine whether or not they harbor planets with stable orbits.

“One of the mysteries arising from the study of exoplanets is that we see systems where the planets are misaligned, even though they are born in a flat, circular disk,” said Paul Kalas, a UC Berkeley adjunct professor of astronomy. “Maybe a cosmic tsunami hit these systems and rearranged everything about them, but we haven't had proof. Our paper gives rare observational evidence for one of these flybys gently influencing one of the planetary systems in the galaxy.”

Astronomers are already searching for a stellar flyby in our solar system’s past, but since that likely happened 4.6 billion years ago, most of the evidence has gone cold.

The star system that the astronomers studied, identified only by the number HD 106906 and located about 300 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Crux, is very young, only about 15 million years old.

Kalas and Robert De Rosa, a former UC Berkeley postdoc who is now a research scientist at Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, describe their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and now available online.

Rogue stars

Kalas, who studies young, newly formed planetary systems to try to understand what happened in the early years of our own solar system, first focused on HD 106906 in 2015 after it was found to have a massive planet in a highly unusual orbit.

The planet, dubbed HD 106906 b, has a mass of about 11 Jupiters, and it orbits HD 106906 — recently revealed to be a binary star – in an orbit tipped about 21 degrees from the plane of the disk that contains all the other material around the star.

Its current location is at least 738 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, or about 18 times farther from its star than Pluto is from the sun.

Kalas used both the Gemini Planet Imager on the Gemini Telescope in the Chilean Andes and the Hubble Space Telescope to look more closely at HD 106906 and discovered that the star has a lopsided comet belt, as well.

The planet’s strange orbit and the fact that the dust disk itself is asymmetrical indicated that something had disrupted the young system.

Kalas and his colleagues, including De Rosa, proposed that the planet had been kicked out of its solar system by interactions with another as-yet-unseen planet in the system or by a passing star.

Kalas and De Rosa now believe that both happened: The planet was kicked into an eccentric orbit when it came dangerously close to the central binary star, a scenario proposed in 2017 by theorist Laetitia Rodet and her collaborators from the Grenoble Observatory in France.

Repeated gravitational kicks from the binary would have quickly ejected the planet into interstellar space, but the passing stars rescued the planet by nudging its orbit to a safer distance from the binary.

The Gaia space observatory gave them the data they needed to test their hypothesis. Gaia, launched in 2012 by the European Space Agency, collects precise measurements of distance, position and motion for 1.3 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, a catalog 10,000 times larger than Gaia’s predecessor, Hipparcos.

Kalas and De Rosa gathered Gaia information on 461 stars in the same cluster as HD 106906 and calculated their positions backward in time—reversed the cosmic clock, so to speak—and discovered that another binary star system may have approached close enough 3 million years ago to alter the planetary system.

“What we have done here is actually find the stars that could have given HD 106906 b the extra gravitational kick, a second kick so that it became long-lived, just like a hypothetical Planet Nine would be in our solar system,” Kalas said.

They also found also that the binary star came in on a trajectory that was within about 5 degrees of the system’s disk, making it even more likely that the encounter had a strong and lasting impact on HD 106906.

Such double kicks may be important to stabilizing planets, asteroids and comets around stars, Kalas said.

“Studying the HD 106906 planetary system is like going back in time to watch the Oort cloud of comets forming around our young sun,” he said. “Our own giant planets gravitationally kicked countless comets outward to large distances. Many were ejected completely, becoming interstellar objects like ʻOumuamua, but others were influenced by passing stars. That second kick by a stellar flyby can detach a comet’s orbit from any further encounters with the planets, saving it from the prospect of ejection. This chain of events preserved the most primitive solar system material in a deep freeze far from the sun for billions of years.”

Kalas hopes that future observations, such as an updated catalog of Gaia measurements, will clarify the significance of the flyby on HD 106906.

“We started with 461 suspects and discovered two that were at the scene of the crime,” he said. “Their exact role will be revealed as we gather more evidence.”

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation (AST-1518332), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NNX15AC89G) and Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), a research coordination network sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (NNX15AD95G).

Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Following a 10-month investigation, Cal Fire has concluded that target shooting was the cause of the 2018 Pawnee fire, which burned thousands of acres and destroyed nearly two dozen structures near Clearlake Oaks.

Cal Fire said Friday that its law enforcement officers who conducted the investigation reached the conclusion on the Pawnee fire’s cause and origin.

The fire, which began on June 23 on Pawnee and New Long Valley roads in the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision northeast of Clearlake Oaks, burned 15,185 acres and destroyed 22 structures. It was fully contained on July 8.

It led to a local emergency proclamation by Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin, which the Board of Supervisors most recently voted to continue on Tuesday.

Then-Gov. Jerry Brown followed up on Sheriff Martin’s original proclamation last year by declaring a state of emergency in Lake County because of the Pawnee fire.

Cal Fire said its investigators were dispatched as part of the initial fire response and immediately began working to determine the blaze’s origin and cause.

The ensuing investigation uncovered evidence that target shooting sparked the fire, Cal Fire said.

Cal Fire was assisted during the course of the investigation by the Lake County Sheriff's Office, Lake County District Attorney's Office, Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.