McGill University: Mapping the genetic history of French Canadians through space and time. “A new McGill University-led study is now providing insight into the complex relationship between human migration and genetic variation, using a unique genealogical dataset of over five million records spanning 400 years to unravel the genetic structure of French Canadian populations.”
NARA: National Archives Awards $6.5 Million in Grants for Historical Records Projects . “Grants went to 17 edition projects to publish the papers of key American figures such as Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams, as well as cross-cutting projects such as the Chinese American WWII Veterans Online Resource and Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery.”
USGS: New Online Maps for Exploring Groundwater Levels in Arizona. “New interactive maps that can address different questions about groundwater availability in Arizona were released today by the U.S. Geological Survey. Called the Arizona Groundwater Explorer, or AGEx, the maps provide water managers, decision-makers, and the public, information on historical, current, and change in groundwater levels in Arizona to help sustainably manage this shared resource.”
Virginian-Pilot: NASA releases exposure tracker tool for War on Terror veterans. “A new tool, called Source-Differentiated Air Quality System, will help researchers who can then help clinicians in treatment, according to NASA and researchers. It can create charts and files of air pollution concentration at 1,200 bases in Southwest Asia since 2002 for each month. The tool can also provide data about type, severity and length of exposure veterans to pollutants faced by veterans with their exact deployment history.”
University of Saskatchewan: Medieval monks’ moon-watching sheds light on volcanoes and climate change. “An international research team including the University of Saskatchewan (USask) has used meticulous medieval-era records scribed by monks about the colour of lunar eclipses to develop a new, deeper understanding of volcanoes and climate change.”
The Conversation: How Records of Life’s Milestones Help Solve Cold Cases, Pinpoint Health Risks and Allocate Public Resources. “As a family demographer, I use information from these vital records to understand how childbirth, marriage and divorce are changing in the United States over time. The scope and quality of these records reflect remarkable administrative coordination from the local to the national level, but examples from other countries illustrate how much more the records could yet tell us.”
Irish Examiner: Limerick historian ‘blown away’ by discovery of documents. “‘Utterly breathtaking’ historical documents dating as far back as 1695 may have been lost forever if not for a man who rescued the collection 30 years ago from a skip.”
NOAA Fisheries: The CALFISH database: A century of California’s non-confidential fisheries landings and participation data. “We reviewed the 58 landings reports published from 1929 to 2020 and extracted and carefully curated 13 datasets with long time series and wide public interest. These datasets include: (1) annual landings in pounds and value by port and species from 1941 to 2019; (2) annual number of commercial fishing vessels by length class from 1934 to 2020; (3) annual number of licensed commercial fishers by area of residence from 1916 to 2020; and (4) annual number of party boat (CPFV) vessels, anglers, and their total catch by species from 1936 to 2020.”
Google Blog: Using new technology and old books to combat disease. “Hundreds of millions of people are affected by insect-borne diseases every year, and climate change is only making the problem worse. Increases in temperature and rainfall have expanded the range of insects, including ticks and mosquitos, contributing to outbreaks of diseases such as dengue fever, lyme disease and malaria. Where can humanity find answers to the newest challenges? One idea: old books.”
Texas A&M Today: Using Historical Weather Data To Optimize Power Grid. “Weather information has been used in electric grid planning and operations since the 1880s. However, no one has yet introduced the idea of incorporating this information into the power flow, or load flow, of the grid, which is a system used to determine how the power flows from the generators through the transmission system to the distribution system (which is then used by consumers).”
EurekAlert: Citizen scientist leads discovery of 34 ultracool dwarf binaries using archive at NSF’s NOIRLab. “A citizen scientist has searched NSF’s NOIRLab’s catalog of 4 billion celestial objects, known as NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2, to reveal brown dwarfs with companions. His intensive investigation led to the discovery of 34 ultracool dwarf binary systems, nearly doubling previously known samples.”
Inside Climate News: Rediscovered Reports From 19th-Century Environmental Volunteers Advance the Research of Today’s Citizen Scientists in New York. “After unearthing 200-year-old seasonal observations from across New York, a team of researchers found a window into the past of the state’s natural landscapes, and a key to understanding its future.”
Wilson Center: Canada, a Country Without a History?. “Stacks of archival records from the Cold War remain inaccessible at Library and Archives Canada. Take, as just one example, this run of folders on the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states, starting with the first one in 1955. Open the tabs in the online catalogue and there’s a list of 32s. In other words, even though it’s been 67 years since the first conference, we still can’t see Canadian assessments regarding how and why this gathering might have mattered from Ottawa’s vantage point. By the time we are into records from the 1970s and 1980s, the situation is far worse.”
Phys .org: On the edge between science and art: Historical biodiversity data from Japanese ‘gyotaku’. “Historical biodiversity data is being obtained from museum specimens, literature, classic monographs and old photographs, yet those sources can be damaged, lost or not completely adequate. That brings us to the need of finding additional, even if non-traditional, sources….In Japan many recreational fishers have recorded their memorable catches as ‘gyotaku’, which means fish impression or fish rubbing in English. ‘Gyotaku’ is made directly from the fish specimen and usually includes information such as sampling date and locality, the name of the fisherman, its witnesses, the fish species (frequently its local name), and fishing tackle used.”
SF Gate: Old journals shed light on climate change. “n the 1940s and 1950s, the hunting guide L.S. Quackenbush lived in a cabin in remote Oxbow, Maine. He rented cabins to hunters, cut, stacked and split wood and used his daily walks to keep detailed notes on the spring arrivals of songbirds and the first appearances of flowers and tree leaves. His journals meticulously documenting the changing seasons grew and grew, eventually totaling more than 5,000 pages. Now they are filling gaps on how trees and migratory birds are responding to a changing climate in northern Maine, where historical data is sparse.”
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