The Burn Of Volcanic Beauty This week, Mount Aso, a volcano in Japan, erupted-spewing clouds of ash and smoke, but fortunately bringing no reported injuries. DIY Halloween Hacks Trying to liven up your ghosts and goblins this Halloween? In this archival segment from 2013, Windell Oskay, cofounder of Evil Mad Scientist, shares homemade hack ideas for a festive fright fest, from LED jack-o'-lanterns, to 3D printed candy, to spine-chilling specimen jars. Ira chats with Fairfax and KUNC's Water in the West reporter Alex Hager about how beavers are creating wetland oases that are surviving the West's new megafires. Across the West, she's seen beaver-created wetlands survive wildfires. Fairfax researches how beavers re-shape the landscapes where they live. Dams allow the water to pool, and the channels spread it out over a wide swath of valley floor.
QUEEN OF DARKNESS THE FIRST MOON ENGLISH PATCH PATCH
Their work saturates the ground, creating an abnormally wet patch in the middle of an otherwise dry area. And then between all those ponds is just an absolute spiderweb of canals, many of which are too small for me to see until I'm here on the ground." The very infrastructure that gives beavers safety from predators also helps shield them from wildfire. There's at least 10 ponds up here that are large enough to see in satellite images. "Oh my gosh, I can't even count them," she said. On a recent visit to that patch of preserved land in Poudre Canyon, ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax emphasized the size of the beavers' canal network. Beavers are clumsy on land, but talented swimmers so the web of pools and canals lets them find safety anywhere within the meadow. The mammals, quite famously, dam up streams to make ponds and a sprawling network of channels. This wetland was spared thanks to the work of beavers. Apart from a few scorched branches on the periphery, it's hard to tell that this particular spot was in the middle of Colorado's largest-ever wildfire just a year ago. Beavers Build Ecosystems Of Resilience Deep in the Cameron Peak burn scar, nestled among charred hills, there's an oasis of green-an idyllic patch of trickling streams that wind through a lush grass field. However, traces of genes from Denisovans and Neanderthals can be found scattered throughout the genome-including strong Neanderthal genetic signals in parts of the genome dealing with the immune system.Ed Green, a professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz and one of the authors of that paper, joins SciFri's Charles Bergquist to talk about the study, and what can be learned by this approach to studying our genetic code. Many of the genes thought to be strictly connected to modern humans appear to relate to neural processes. In a paper published recently in the journal Science Advances, researchers estimate the uniquely human portion of the genome as being under two percent.