It is important and poignant to recall the hard life of Mary Ball Washington, who struggled – mostly alone – to raise our Founding Father. Historians have left us with inaccurate and mostly unpleasant accounts of her long and laborious years. After George Washington’s death, historians canonized him and his mother, too. But unlike George’s enduring sainthood, praise for Mary was short-lived. In the late…
The delegates in Philadelphia agreed, in the summer of 1787, that the new country they were creating would not have a king but rather an elected executive. But they did not agree on how to choose that president. Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson called the problem of picking a president “in truth, one of the most difficult of all we have to decide.” Other delegates, when…
In the last three years, one third of San Diego County restaurants have had at least one major food safety violation, according to an inewsource analysis of publicly available inspection data. San Diego County is home to nearly 16,000 retail food facilities, from restaurants and caterers to schools and vending machines and boats. (Yes, boats.) The county’s Department of Environmental Health and Quality’s Food and…
It may sound like something out of a futuristic science fiction film, but scientists have managed to engineer spinach plants which are capable of sending emails, according to Marthe de Ferrer of Euronews.green. Through nanotechnology, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to…
Little doubt a great many among our younger generations are unaware that the one-time world’s largest astronomical telescope is located on nearby Palomar Mountain, which is less than an hour’s drive from the North San Diego County communities of Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos or Escondido. With a $6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, astronomer George Ellery Hale orchestrated the planning, design and construction of the…
This just in from the something you always wanted to have but didn’t know you wanted to have it department. Beer made with purified water from units attached to jet bridges at San Diego Airport. It was announced Monday that San Diego International Airport (SAN) and The East Village Brewing Co. have released two beers made with purified condensate collected through the airport’s water stewardship program. Hoppy Travels…
A recent analysis of census data as part of the County Comprehensive Broadband Plan showed that approximately 37,000 households in the unincorporated area of San Diego don’t have a broadband internet subscription. This places them at a disadvantage when it comes to things such as online education, healthcare services or emergency notifications. The report is the latest effort by the County to address inadequate broadband…
As the movie Nomadland revealed to the world, ever since the 2008 financial collapse, people have moved into vehicles as a way of surviving the high cost of living. The pandemic also fuelled an increase in the nomadic lifestyle. In 2020, my co-researcher Scott Rankin and I looked at how people who live in vehicles balance work and life. In doing so, we discovered that…
Psychological trauma from extreme weather and climate events, such as wildfires, can have long-term impacts on survivors’ brains and cognitive functioning, especially how they process distractions, my team’s new research shows. Climate change is increasingly affecting people around the world, including through extreme heat, storm damage and life-threatening events like wildfires. In previous research, colleagues and I showed that in the aftermath of the 2018…
Fourteen students in a biotechnology course at Cal State San Marcos traveled to Tokyo this month to visit impressive laboratories, attend insightful lectures and interact with professionals from widely successful industries. The trip featured students in the class BIOT675: Bioscience Beyond the Borders, within the Professional Science Master’s (PSM) in Biotechnology program. It was led by Betsy Read, program director and a biological sciences professor;…