Submit comments and questions in writing for commission consideration by sending them to Administrative Services Director/City Clerk Melissa Swanson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Identify the subject you wish to comment on in your email’s subject line.
The commission on Tuesday will hold two public hearings.
The first is to consider a conditional use permit and categorical exemption to allow alcoholic beverage sales — on-site consumption — in an existing established restaurant, Delicias Alvarez, located at 14094 Lakeshore Drive.
The second public hearing is for a conditional use permit and categorical exemption for the development of an automobile sales operation at 14585 Olympic Drive, Suite A.
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.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has two adult cats and an older kitten waiting to be adopted this week.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The following cats at the shelter have been cleared for adoption.
This 3-year-old female domestic shorthair cat is in cat room kennel No. 44, ID No. LCAC-A-2457. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Female domestic shorthair
This 3-year-old female domestic shorthair cat has a calico coat and green eyes.
She is in cat room kennel No. 44, ID No. LCAC-A-2457.
“Chowder” is a 4-year-old female domestic shorthair cat in cat room kennel No. 15, ID No. LCAC-A-982. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. ‘Chowder’
“Chowder” is a 4-year-old female domestic shorthair cat with a calico coat.
She is in cat room kennel No. 15, ID No. LCAC-A-982.
This young male domestic shorthair is in cat room kennel No. 53d, ID No. LCAC-A-2383. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Male domestic shorthair
This young male domestic shorthair has a unique striped gray tabby coat.
He is in cat room kennel No. 53d, ID No. LCAC-A-2383.
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.
Grant Ferguson, University of Saskatchewan and Jennifer C. McIntosh, University of Arizona
Groundwater is used for irrigation and drinking water, but those wells are rarely more than one kilometre deep. A huge volume of salty water exists as much as 10 kilometres below the Earth’s surface. (Shutterstock)
Outside of the world’s oceans, groundwater is one of the largest stores of water on Earth. While it might appear that the planet is covered in vast lakes and river systems, they make up only 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s water. In fact, we now know there is 100 times as much groundwater on this planet as there is freshwater on its surface.
Groundwater is the water contained beneath the Earth’s surface. It’s stored in the tiny cracks found within rock and the spaces between soil particles. It can extend deep into the subsurface, at least as much as 10 kilometres.
As groundwater researchers, we’re interested in how governments and industries might use these extensive groundwater reservoirs, such as for storing liquid waste and carbon dioxide. But groundwater may also have environmental functions that have not yet been revealed — this body of water remains hidden, with very few windows available for us to explore it.
One of Earth’s largest stores of water
While scientists have known for at least five decades that groundwater makes up a large fraction of the world’s water, estimated volumes of groundwater had focused on the upper two kilometres of the Earth’s crust.
A recent analysis that looked 10 kilometres beneath the surface found that the true volume is likely twice as large. These new estimates mean that groundwater is the largest continental reservoir of water — even more than all the water contained in the continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, which were long thought to be the Earth’s second-largest stores of water.
The relative sizes of the Earth’s water reservoirs. Groundwater makes up about 60 per cent of the water on land.(AGU/Geophysical Research Letters), Author provided
Previous groundwater estimates arrived at lower volumes because they only considered groundwaters at shallower depths. But permeable rocks are found down to at least 10 kilometres below the Earth’s surface and can hold water in cracks and pores. While these spaces only account for a small volume of the rock mass, they add up to nearly 44 million cubic kilometres of water in the upper 10 kilometres of rock, enough to fill more than 10,000 Grand Canyons.
The circulation of this deep groundwater is controlled by the forces that drive flow, such as topography, and the permeability of the rock. For example, rainwater and snowmelt circulate more deeply in mountainous areas than flatter regions. Groundwater can flow at speeds of metres per year in sandstones and limestones, or nanometres per year in intact igneous and metamorphic rocks, due to extreme variations in the permeability of different rocks.
Environmental functions of deep groundwater
All of this has helped contribute to the treatment of deeper groundwater as being separate from shallow groundwater resources. For example, oil and gas producing regions often only protect groundwater to a certain depth, without consideration of the strength of the connections between shallow and deep groundwaters.
Onkalo was built to house high-level radioactive waste for at least 500 years. The storage facilities are set 500 metres deep in 1.9-billion-year-old rock on the coast of Finland.(Teemu Väisänen/Wikimedia), CC BY-SA
Deep groundwaters may only be weakly connected to the rest of the hydrologic cycle but this does not mean they are unimportant to the functioning of our planet. Microbes have been found in most subsurface environments with temperatures below 80 C, typical for depths of three to four kilometres. This subsurface life likely accounts for more than 10 per cent of the Earth’s total biomass, and yet the links between deep groundwater circulation and subsurface life are largely unexplored at this time.
There’s clearly still much to learn about deep groundwater. Our windows into the deep subsurface are limited to deep mines, oil and gas wells and a handful of research sites.
New approaches are required to understand deep groundwater, its environmental functions and interactions with the rest of the hydrologic cycle over deep time, both in the past and into the future.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced the awarding of more than $11.8 million in Indian Community Development Block Grant-American Rescue Plan funds to 11 Native American tribes in California, including two in Lake County.
Part of $83 million in grants to 74 tribal communities to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the third round of Indian Community Development Block Grant-American Rescue Plan, or ICDBG-ARP awards, underscoring the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to delivering equitable COVID-19 relief to Tribal communities.
In Lake County, two tribes have received awards.
The Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians will receive $1,035,000, which will be used to construct a facility that will provide medical services to families impacted by COVID-19.
The Middletown Rancheria of Pomo Indians will receive $1,034,500 to construct a facility to provide medical services for families impacted by COVID-19 and to construct a tiny home.
Elsewhere around the region, the Pinoleville Pomo will receive $1,035,000 to purchase a modular unit to house medical services, the Round Valley Indian Housing Authority will use its $1,725,000 grant to renovate homes and to develop a food bank and the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria will receive $1,017,979 which it will use to acquire an existing apartment complex to address the housing shortage and acquire a mobile kitchen and a mobile quarantine unit.
HUD said these funds to tribes will help protect the health and safety of their communities, particularly low- and moderate-income individuals and families, by expanding access to safe housing, a suitable living environment, and economic opportunities.
“It is imperative that we continue providing Tribal communities with resources needed to protect the health and safety of their communities,” said HUD Deputy Secretary Adrianne Todman. “With the funding HUD is awarding today, we remain diligent in continuing our mission to ensure that every person has the security of a healthy home and community. HUD will continue to strengthen partnerships with Tribal communities to ensure that all communities receive equitable relief.”
The announcement follows HUD’s previous awards of $74 million in ICDBG-ARP grants to 68 Tribal communities in November and $52 million in ICDBG-ARP grants to 49 tribal communities in December.
The American Rescue Plan included a total of $280 million for the Indian Community Development Block Grant program; HUD will announce additional ICDBG-ARP awards on a rolling basis.
The Department and the Biden-Harris Administration have made delivering equitable COVID-19 relief to tribal communities a priority. The American Rescue Plan Act provides a total of $750 million in HUD resources to Indian Country to support the continued fight against COVID-19.
In 2021, HUD made a historic $450 million investment in Indian Housing Block Grants to Indian tribes across the country to respond to COVID-19. The department also invested $5 million in COVID-19 relief for Native Hawaiians.
Encounters between wild animals and humans can be dangerous for both sides. Sea lions have been stabbed, clubbed, shot and accidentally hit by cars. Roads, fences and residential development can block their movement inland. Some females and pups have adapted to commercial pine forests on private lands that could one day be cleared or developed.
As an ecologist, I study species around the world whose populations are recovering after decades or even centuries of immense human pressures and exploitation. Nations are now preparing for a landmark U.N. conference on protecting Earth’s biodiversity that will take place in China from April 25 to May 8, 2022; one important question is how humans can strike a new balance with recovering species such as sea lions, sharks and whales, and make space for these resilient creatures to thrive.
Conservation managers tag New Zealand sea lion pups playing inland and alert the neighborhood that the animals are present.
Making way for sea lions
Like many other creatures valued for their meat or fur, New Zealand sea lions were historically hunted to near-extinction. For the past 150 years, remnant populations could only be found on New Zealand’s undeveloped subantarctic islands, more than 300 miles from the nation’s mainland. Today, their population is estimated at 12,000.
These animals typically return to and breed at the original location where they were born, but in 1993, a female sea lion gave birth on the mainland for the first time in centuries. Since then, her offspring have bred for five generations. Other females have followed, and some 20 pups are now born on the mainland each year.
When wild species recolonize areas or shift their ranges in this way, scientists can make predictive models to help determine where the animals could settle in the future and take steps to protect them. But traditional versions of these models can’t account for when and where the recovering species may interact with humans, because these encounters are new developments and may occur under conditions that differ from the past.
In a study published in November 2021, my team and I addressed this issue by creating an integrated species distribution model database, which pairs algorithmic models with expert knowledge to highlight suitable habitats and flag areas for concern. Through it, we found and mapped 395 potential breeding grounds for sea lions all over the New Zealand mainland. We also identified human-related challenges for the animals, such as roads and fences that could block their inland movement.
Our research can help wildlife managers and local officials search for sea lions, post sea lion crossing signs on roads, verify or restore breeding sites and determine where to work with landowners and spread awareness. This kind of tool can help inform similar efforts for other species that are recovering or moving into new habitats and regions in response to climate change.
Welcoming whales back
Of course, humans are happier to make space for some wild species than for others.
I did research in the Falkland Islands from 2015 to 2016 and found that residents welcomed the return of sei, fin, minke, southern right and blue whales to local waters. All of these species were intensively hunted beginning in the 1800s but started making noticeable comebacks after nations adopted the 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling.
Finding that Falkland residents enjoyed seeing whales offshore suggested to us that they would support processes like marine spatial planning to help protect them. Marine spatial planning is a public process for organizing human uses of the ocean, such as shipping, tourism, oil exploration and commercial fishing, in ways that balance them with environmental protection.
Doctoral student Veronica Frans works with a Falkland Islands resident to detail and map the recovery of sei whales.Veronica Frans, CC BY-ND
When predators rebound
Coexisting with some recovering species can be more controversial and delicate to manage, especially if they are perceived as threats to public safety or property.
Along the northeast U.S. coast and up into Canada, white sharks once were severely overfished but are now rebounding in response to climate change, protection efforts and growing populations of seals, their preferred prey. As top predators, sharks help control other ocean species and increase ocean carbon storage. They also are one of the few shark species known to attack humans.
The return of white sharks to Cape Cod has led to beach closures and alarms, but has also boosted tourism in some towns.AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Know who’s moving in
Scientists widely agree that the Earth is losing species at a rapid rate, potentially representing the sixth mass extinction in its history. Against that background, these ongoing stories of species recovery take on new urgency, especially when conflicts arise.
Science can help. Predictive models and maps highlight where species may appear in the future. Monitoring species on the move can reveal how numerous they are, how they behave, what habitats they prefer and where they may interact with humans.
When wild species enter new areas, they inevitably will have to adapt, and often will have new kinds of interactions with humans. These encounters won’t always be easy to manage, but I believe that when communities understand the changes and are involved in planning for them, they can prepare for the unexpected, with coexistence in mind.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has just three dogs ready for new homes this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Akita, shepherd and pit bull.
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.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control website not listed are still “on hold”).
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
“Chapo” is a 7-year-old male pit bull in kennel No. 19, ID No. LCAC-A-2458. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. ‘Chapo’
“Chapo” is a 7-year-old male pit bull with a tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 19, ID No. LCAC-A-2458.
“Nioki” is a 1-year-old female shepherd in kennel No. 21, ID No. LCAC-A-2442. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. ‘Nioki’
“Nioki” is a 1-year-old female shepherd with a black coat.
She is in kennel No. 21, ID No. LCAC-A-2442.
This 1-year-old female Akita-shepherd mix is in kennel No. 33, ID No. LCAC-A-2438. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Female Akita-shepherd mix
This 1-year-old female Akita-shepherd mix has a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 33, ID No. LCAC-A-2438.
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.
Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up.
The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis.
A decade ago this small galaxy set off debate among astronomers as to whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes proportional to the supermassive behemoths found in the hearts of larger galaxies. This new discovery has little Henize 2-10, containing only one-tenth the number of stars found in our Milky Way, poised to play a big part in solving the mystery of where supermassive black holes came from in the first place.
"Ten years ago, as a graduate student thinking I would spend my career on star formation, I looked at the data from Henize 2-10 and everything changed," said Amy Reines, who published the first evidence for a black hole in the galaxy in 2011 and is the principal investigator on the new Hubble observations, published in the January 19 issue of Nature.
"From the beginning I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole," Reines said.
That connection is an outflow of gas stretching across space like an umbilical cord to a bright stellar nursery. The region was already home to a dense cocoon of gas when the low-velocity outflow arrived.
Hubble spectroscopy shows the outflow was moving about 1 million miles per hour, slamming into the dense gas like a garden hose hitting a pile of dirt and spreading out. Newborn star clusters dot the path of the outflow's spread, their ages also calculated by Hubble.
This is the opposite effect of what's seen in larger galaxies, where material falling toward the black hole is whisked away by surrounding magnetic fields, forming blazing jets of plasma moving at close to the speed of light.
Gas clouds caught in the jets' path would be heated far beyond their ability to cool back down and form stars. But with the less-massive black hole in Henize 2-10, and its gentler outflow, gas was compressed just enough to precipitate new star formation.
"At only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2-10 is close enough that Hubble was able to capture both images and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow very clearly. The additional surprise was that, rather than suppressing star formation, the outflow was triggering the birth of new stars," said Zachary Schutte, Reines' graduate student and lead author of the new study.
Ever since her first discovery of distinctive radio and X-ray emissions in Henize 2-10, Reines has thought they likely came from a massive black hole, but not as supermassive as those seen in larger galaxies.
Other astronomers, however, thought that the radiation was more likely being emitted by a supernova remnant, which would be a familiar occurrence in a galaxy that is rapidly pumping out massive stars that quickly explode.
"Hubble's amazing resolution clearly shows a corkscrew-like pattern in the velocities of the gas, which we can fit to the model of a precessing, or wobbling, outflow from a black hole. A supernova remnant would not have that pattern, and so it is effectively our smoking-gun proof that this is a black hole," Reines said.
Reines expects that even more research will be directed at dwarf galaxy black holes in the future, with the aim of using them as clues to the mystery of how supermassive black holes came to be in the early universe. It's a persistent puzzle for astronomers.
The relationship between the mass of the galaxy and its black hole can provide clues. The black hole in Henize 2-10 is around 1 million solar masses. In larger galaxies, black holes can be more than 1 billion times our Sun's mass. The more massive the host galaxy, the more massive the central black hole.
Current theories on the origin of supermassive black holes break down into three categories: 1) they formed just like smaller stellar-mass black holes, from the implosion of stars, and somehow gathered enough material to grow supermassive, 2) special conditions in the early universe allowed for the formation of supermassive stars, which collapsed to form massive black hole "seeds" right off the bat, or 3) the seeds of future supermassive black holes were born in dense star clusters, where the cluster's overall mass would have been enough to somehow create them from gravitational collapse.
So far, none of these black hole seeding theories has taken the lead. Dwarf galaxies like Henize 2-10 offer promising potential clues, because they have remained small over cosmic time, rather than undergoing the growth and mergers of large galaxies like the Milky Way. Astronomers think that dwarf galaxy black holes could serve as an analog for black holes in the early universe, when they were just beginning to form and grow.
"The era of the first black holes is not something that we have been able to see, so it really has become the big question: where did they come from? Dwarf galaxies may retain some memory of the black hole seeding scenario that has otherwise been lost to time and space," Reines said.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
Photo caption, from left to right, The Guy Fieri Foundation Executive Director Brian Daly, Kelseyville High School culinary teacher and grant program manager Tami Cramer, Kelseyville High School Principal Mike Jones and Kelseyville Unified School District Superintendent Dave McQueen. Courtesy photo. KELSEYVILLE, Calif. — A $7,270 grant from the Guy Fieri Foundation has paved the way for Kelseyville High School culinary arts students to fully participate in a newly formed local chapter of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, a national career and technical student organization.
The grant will be used to incorporate Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, or FCCLA, into the KHS Culinary Arts Program.
KHS Culinary Teacher Tami Cramer explained, “FCCLA is to culinary arts as FFA is to agricultural sciences.”
According to its website, FCCLA helps students develop real-world skills, explore career pathways and become college- and career-ready through participation in competitive events, becoming involved in community service opportunities, student leadership, and attending leadership conferences.”
In 2018, Kelseyville Unified used Career Technical Education funds to help in the Culinary Arts program including upgrades to facilities such as a new demonstration kitchen, new stoves, commercial refrigerator and freezer, three compartment sinks, an ice machine, a dishwasher, a bar refrigerator, new countertops, electrical and plumbing work, and the refacing of all culinary cabinets.
These upgrades also included a handicap-accessible kitchen and technology that allows all students equal access to learning.
In 2019, Cramer worked with a FCCLA program adviser to research and develop a program at KHS. Students were registered, officers were selected, and members attended a regional conference. Then COVID-19 put a halt in their efforts to expand on the work they started.
“Without being fully established, it was hard to expand and grow during online learning,” Cramer said.
When Cramer learned of the grant opportunity to support KHS’s participation in FCCLA through the Guy Fieri Foundation, she quickly received encouragement from KHS Career Tech Coordinator Donelle McCallister and KHS Principal Mike Jones to apply.
Jones said, “Membership in this leadership organization provides students the opportunity to develop both leadership and culinary skills.”
Without the grant, it would have been difficult for KHS to afford FCCLA registration fees, the red blazers required for students to attend FCCLA meetings and conventions, and travel expenses for students to attend events out-of-town competitions and leadership conferences, including the California State FCCLA Leadership Conference scheduled for April 23 to 26 in Riverside.
“The Guy Fieri grant enables our students to have opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise,” McCallister said.
The Guy Fieri Foundation is a nonprofit charity based in Petaluma with a mission to help local culinary arts programs in the middle schools, high schools, and community colleges. The Guy Fieri Foundation is committed to helping youth through nutrition education, exploring careers in hospitality, and encouraging goals for their future.
“I am thrilled Guy has given support to our culinary students and future community leaders. I’m ready to put this grant to good use,” said Cramer.
At San Bernardino National Forest, Gov. Gavin Newsom joins Vice President Kamala Harris to highlight state-federal action to build wildfire resilience on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. Photo courtesy of the Governor’s Office. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday joined Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on a visit to the San Bernardino National Forest to highlight new federal funding for wildfire recovery and mitigation efforts and discuss state-federal collaboration to tackle the wildfire crisis, complementing California’s bold investments and ongoing work to build wildfire resilience statewide.
The California Blueprint proposes an additional $1.2 billion as part of a total $2.7 billion multiyear package to step up forest management and other projects to decrease catastrophic wildfire risk amid the extreme climate impacts across the West.
“California is on the front lines of the climate crisis, experiencing record-breaking heat waves, wildfire seasons, and droughts. We’re fortunate to have the Biden-Harris Administration’s partnership in meeting this existential challenge head-on,” said Gov. Newsom. “Our state is leading the nation with transformative investments and innovative strategies to protect Californians and the environment. We look forward to our continued collaboration with the federal government to scale up this vital work, and I thank Vice President Harris for her leadership in this space.”
Vice President Harris announced $1.3 billion in federal funding for post-wildfire and hurricane recovery in states across the country, including $600 million to support California communities hit hard by recent wildfires with cleanup efforts, reforestation, watershed restoration and infrastructure repairs.
In addition, the vice president announced more than $48 million in funding for Joint Chief’s Landscape Restoration Partnership projects — including four in California — that mitigate catastrophic wildfire risk and help create climate-resilient landscapes, protect water quality and enhance wildlife habitat.
Friday’s announcements build on the Biden-Harris Administration’s recently-released 10-year strategy that aligns with the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan.
The strategy calls for the U.S. Forest Service to significantly expand fuels and forest health treatments, prioritizing high-risk areas including the Sierra Nevada Range in California. Joint state-federal management is crucial to California’s overall forest health and wildfire resilience, as the federal government owns 57% of California’s forestlands while the state owns 3 percent.
Following an aerial tour of fire scars from the 2020 El Dorado Fire and Apple Fire, the governor, vice president and Secretary Vilsack joined officials including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) at the USFS Del Rosa Fire Station for a briefing by state and federal fire officials.
USFS Chief Randy Moore, USFS Regional Forester Jennifer Eberlien, California Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot and Cal Fire Acting Director Michael Richwine provided an overview of this year’s fire outlook, current drought impacts and the extreme weather conditions that are driving catastrophic wildfires in the Western U.S.
Building on the governor’s previous budget investments in emergency management and executive actions to help combat catastrophic wildfires, the California Blueprint proposes an additional $1.2 billion as part of a total $2.7 billion multiyear investment to step up forest management and other projects to decrease catastrophic wildfire risk.
The blueprint also includes $648 million for firefighters and firefighting equipment, including new fire hawks and helitankers.
In addition, a proposed $175.2 million, as part of a planned $1.1 billion investment over the next five years, will fund major capital outlay projects that include replacing fire stations and making improvements to accommodate Cal Fire’s new helicopter and aircraft fleet.
In 2020, the Newsom Administration and the U.S. Forest Service announced a shared stewardship agreement under which they are working to treat one million acres of forest and wildland annually to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
The governor last year launched an expanded and refocused Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force with federal, local and tribal leaders to deliver on key commitments in his Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan.
Additional information on the California Blueprint’s proposals to advance the state’s climate leadership and protect communities from wildfire, drought, extreme heat and carbon pollution can be found here.
At left, Vice President Kamala Harris met with Gov. Gavin Newsom at San Bernardino National Forest on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. Photo courtesy of the Governor’s Office.
Paul Shafer, Boston University and Katherine Gutierrez, University of New Mexico
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
The discontinuation of the Biden administration’s monthly payments of the child tax credit could leave millions of American families without enough food on the table, according to our new study in JAMA Network Open. The first missed payment on Jan. 15, 2022, left families that had come to rely on them wondering how they would make ends meet, according to many news reports.
The American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in March 2021, made significant changes to the existing child tax credit. It increased the size of the credit by 50% or more, depending on a child’s age, to either $3,000 or $3,600 per year. It also made more low-income families eligible and paid half of this money out as a monthly “advance” payment.
Nearly 60 million families with children received the first payment, which was sent out in July 2021. The payments were widely credited with bringing about huge declines in poverty and malnutrition. Our study found that the introduction of these advance payments was associated with a 26% drop in the share of American households with children without enough food.
We used nationally representative data from over 585,000 responses to the Census Household Pulse Survey from January through August 2021 to assess how the introduction of the child tax credit advance payments affected food insufficiency in the weeks following the first payment on July 15, 2021. Food insufficiency is a measure of whether a household has enough food to eat. It is a much narrower measure than food insecurity, which is a more comprehensive measure based on 18 questions used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Importantly, we were able to separate the effect of these payments from other types of support, like the use of food pantries, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment benefits and COVID-19 stimulus payments.
Why it matters
Food insufficiency spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among families with children: It rose from 3% among all households in December 2019 to 18% in December 2020. Even after many, if not most, U.S. families received pandemic stimulus checks and other benefits, food insufficiency still hovered around 14% in June 2021. But following the first advance payment, from July 23 to August 2, 2021, food insufficiency among households with children fell drastically, to 10%.
All these factors are leading to lower income and, where school is virtual once again, creating the need for more meals at home. Other analyses of the Census Household Pulse Survey have found that most families were using the child tax credit advance payments for food and other necessities, such as housing and utilities.
What’s next
We are going to look further into how the advance payments affected low-income families through the rest of 2021, analyzing which groups of Americans saw the most benefit and what happened once the advance payments expired in 2022.
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The full impact of the expansion of the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year has not yet been seen either. Eligible families will get the rest of that money, equal to all six monthly payments combined, when they file their 2021 tax returns this year.
This image shows the Highfield drill hole made by NASA’s Curiosity rover as it was collecting a sample on Vera Rubin Ridge in Gale crater on Mars. Drill powder from this hole was enriched in carbon 12. The image was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on the 2,247th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credits: NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS. After analyzing powdered rock samples collected from the surface of Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have announced that several of the samples are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is associated with biological processes.
While the finding is intriguing, it doesn’t necessarily point to ancient life on Mars, as scientists have not yet found conclusive supporting evidence of ancient or current biology there, such as sedimentary rock formations produced by ancient bacteria, or a diversity of complex organic molecules formed by life.
“We’re finding things on Mars that are tantalizingly interesting, but we would really need more evidence to say we’ve identified life,” said Paul Mahaffy, who served as the principal investigator of the Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, chemistry lab aboard Curiosity until retiring from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in December 2021. “So we’re looking at what else could have caused the carbon signature we’re seeing, if not life.”
In a report of their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Jan. 18, Curiosity scientists offer several explanations for the unusual carbon signals they detected.
Their hypotheses are drawn partly from carbon signatures on Earth, but scientists warn the two planets are so different they can’t make definitive conclusions based on Earth examples.
“The hardest thing is letting go of Earth and letting go of that bias that we have and really trying to get into the fundamentals of the chemistry, physics and environmental processes on Mars,” said Goddard astrobiologist Jennifer L. Eigenbrode, who participated in the carbon study. Previously, Eigenbrode led an international team of Curiosity scientists in the detection of myriad organic molecules — ones that contain carbon — on the Martian surface.
“We need to open our minds and think outside the box,” Eigenbrode said, “and that’s what this paper does.”
The biological explanation Curiosity scientists present in their paper is inspired by Earth life. It involves ancient bacteria in the surface that would have produced a unique carbon signature as they released methane into the atmosphere where ultraviolet light would have converted that gas into larger, more complex molecules. These new molecules would have rained down to the surface and now could be preserved with their distinct carbon signature in Martian rocks.
Two other hypotheses offer nonbiological explanations. One suggests the carbon signature could have resulted from the interaction of ultraviolet light with carbon dioxide gas in the Martian atmosphere, producing new carbon-containing molecules that would have settled to the surface.
And the other speculates that the carbon could have been left behind from a rare event hundreds of millions of years ago when the solar system passed through a giant molecular cloud rich in the type of carbon detected.
“All three explanations fit the data,” said Christopher House, a Curiosity scientist based at Penn State who led the carbon study. “We simply need more data to rule them in or out.”
To analyze carbon in the Martian surface, House’s team used the Tunable Laser Spectrometer, or TLS, instrument inside the SAM lab.
SAM heated 24 samples from geologically diverse locations in the planet’s Gale crater to about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, or 850 degrees Celsius, to release the gases inside. Then the TLS measured the isotopes from some of the reduced carbon that was set free in the heating process.
Isotopes are atoms of an element with different masses due to their distinct number of neutrons, and they are instrumental in understanding the chemical and biological evolution of planets.
Carbon is particularly important since this element is found in all life on Earth; it flows continuously through the air, water, and ground in a cycle that’s well understood thanks to isotope measurements.
For instance, living creatures on Earth use the smaller, lighter carbon 12 atom to metabolize food or for photosynthesis versus the heavier carbon 13 atom. Thus, significantly more carbon 12 than carbon 13 in ancient rocks, along with other evidence, suggests to scientists they’re looking at signatures of life-related chemistry.
Looking at the ratio of these two carbon isotopes helps Earth scientists tell what type of life they’re looking at and the environment it lived in.
NASA’s Curiosity rover captured these clouds just after sunset on March 19, 2021, the 3,063rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission. The image is made up of 21 individual images stitched together and color-corrected so that the scene appears as it would to the human eye. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
On Mars, Curiosity researchers found that nearly half of their samples had surprisingly large amounts of carbon 12 compared to what scientists have measured in the Martian atmosphere and meteorites.
These samples came from five distinct locations in Gale crater, the researchers report, which may be related in that all the locations have well-preserved, ancient surfaces.
“On Earth, processes that would produce the carbon signal we’re detecting on Mars are biological,” House said. “We have to understand whether the same explanation works for Mars, or if there are other explanations, because Mars is very different.”
Mars is unique because it may have started off with a different mix of carbon isotopes than Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Mars is smaller, cooler, has weaker gravity, and different gases in its atmosphere. Additionally, the carbon on Mars could be cycling without any life involved.
“There’s a huge chunk of the carbon cycle on Earth that involves life, and because of life, there is a chunk of the carbon cycle on Earth we can’t understand, because everywhere we look there is life,” said Andrew Steele, a Curiosity scientist based at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C
Steele noted that scientists are in the early stages of understanding how carbon cycles on Mars and, thus, how to interpret isotopic ratios and the nonbiological activities that could lead to those ratios.
Curiosity, which arrived on the Red Planet in 2012, is the first rover with tools to study carbon isotopes in the surface. Other missions have collected information about isotopic signatures in the atmosphere, and scientists have measured ratios of Martian meteorites that have been collected on Earth.
“Defining the carbon cycle on Mars is absolutely key to trying to understand how life could fit into that cycle,” Steele said. “We have done that really successfully on Earth, but we are just beginning to define that cycle for Mars.”
Curiosity scientists will continue to measure carbon isotopes to see if they get a similar signature when the rover visits other sites suspected to have well-preserved ancient surfaces.
To further test the biological hypothesis involving methane-producing microorganisms, the Curiosity team would like to analyze the carbon content of a methane plume released from the surface.
The rover unexpectedly encountered such a plume in 2019 but there’s no way to predict whether that will happen again. Otherwise, researchers point out that this study provides guidance to the team behind NASA’s Perseverance rover on the best types of samples to collect to confirm the carbon signature and determine definitively whether it’s coming from life or not. Perseverance is collecting samples from the Martian surface for possible future return to Earth.
Curiosity’s mission is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; JPL is managed by Caltech.
Lonnie Shekhtman works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
This mosaic was made from images taken by the Mast Camera aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover on the 2,729th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. It shows the landscape of the Stimson sandstone formation in Gale crater. In this general location, Curiosity drilled the Edinburgh drill hole, a sample from which was enriched in carbon 12. Credits: NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS.
Nova Maye Deperno, 26, of Occidental, California, was arrested on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2022, for the murder of Ron Meluso of Lucerne, California. Lake County Jail photo. LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — An Occidental man has been arrested for the killing of a Lucerne resident this past summer.
The Lake County Sheriff’s Office said it has officially arrested Nova Maye Deperno, 26, for the murder of Ronald Meluso.
Deperno was arrested on Thursday afternoon and booked into the Lake County Jail. Jail records show he is being held on $1 million bail.
Authorities so far have not suggested a motive in the case.
Meluso, 63, was last heard from on Aug. 18. He was reported as missing to the sheriff’s office on Aug. 22.
In December, the sheriff’s office determined Meluso was the victim of foul play and that Deperno was a person of interest.
Authorities were seeking Deperno for assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism and brandishing a firearm, and on Jan. 13, Deperno was taken into custody in Sonoma County, as Lake County News has reported.
After the Jan. 13 arrest, detectives from Lake County Sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit were able to interview Deperno regarding Meluso’s disappearance.
Deperno provided statements linking him to the disappearance and subsequent murder of Meluso, authorities said.
The sheriff’s office said that on Jan. 14, Deperno assisted detectives in locating human remains in a rural area off Bartlett Springs Road in northern Lake County.
The remains are strongly believed to be those of Meluso, and detectives are in contact with Meluso’s family, the sheriff’s office said.
The sheriff’s office said arrangements are being made to confirm positive identification.
Jail records show Deperno is due to appear in Lake County Superior Court on Tuesday.
Anyone with information related to this case is asked to contact Detective Jeff Mora at 707-262-4224 or by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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.
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