LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has many dogs of various breeds that are ready to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Akita, Chihuahua, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, hound, husky, Labrador retriever, pit bull, shepherd and 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.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
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.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has new dogs and other dogs waiting to be adopted this fall.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 46 adoptable dogs.
They include “Sissy,” a 2-year-old female German shepherd mix with a tan coat. She has been spayed and is up to date on vaccinations.
Another adoptable dog is “Smak,” a male German shepherd mix with a tricolor coat.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
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. — Educators, families and friends recently came together to honor the Lake County District Teachers of the Year.
It was a night of celebrating excellence in education.
During the reception, each Lake County District Teacher of the Year received a Congressional Recognition Award from Congressman Mike Thompson.
"These educators demonstrate a commitment to high-quality education. What they do, every day, impacts student achievement and success," Brock Falkenberg, Lake County Superintendent of Schools said. "Each award recipient is exemplary in their work ethic and is dedicated to supporting the school and students."
The district teachers of the Year include:
• Joni Falkenberg — Kelseyville Unified School District. • Rachel Weidner — Konocti Unified School District. • Sandi Morton — Lakeport Unified School District. • Jon Prather — Middletown Unified School District. • Anna Sabalone – Upper Lake Unified School District.
Along with receiving the Congressional Recognition, Lake County Teacher of the Year Anna Sabalone received a check from Community First Credit Union. Thank you to Community First Credit Union for their ongoing support of providing the Lake County Teacher of the Year with a $1,500 cash award.
Although the Lake County Teacher of the Year is chosen in May, the reception is held after the California Department of Education chooses its five California Teachers of the Year in late October.
This allows us to honor our Lake County Teacher of the Year if they were to be named California Teacher of the Year. Lake County's last California Teacher of the Year was Erica Boomer from Upper Lake High School in 2019.
The Lake County Teacher of the Year program is administered through the Lake County Office of Education and the California Department of Education. For more information about the Lake County District Teachers of the Year, please visit www.lakecoe.org/TOY.
Cranberries can bounce, float and pollinate themselves: The saucy science of a Thanksgiving classic
Cranberries are a staple in U.S. households at Thanksgiving – but how did this bog dweller end up on holiday tables?
Compared to many valuable plant species that were domesticated over thousands of years, cultivated cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) is a young agricultural crop, just as the U.S. is a young country and Thanksgiving is a relatively new holiday. But as a plant scientist, I’ve learned much about cranberries’ ancestry from their botany and genomics.
Wild cranberries are native to North America. They were an important food source for Native Americans, who used them in puddings, sauces, breads and a high-protein portable food called pemmican – a carnivore’s version of an energy bar, made from a mixture of dried meat and rendered animal fat and sometimes studded with dried fruits. Some tribes still make pemmican today, and even market a commercial version.
Cranberry cultivation began in 1816 in Massachusetts, where Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall found that covering cranberry bogs with sand fertilized the vines and retained water around their roots. From there, the fruit spread throughout the U.S. Northeast and Upper Midwest.
Cranberries have many interesting botanical features. Like roses, lilies and daffodils, cranberry flowers are hermaphroditic, which means they contain both male and female parts. This allows them to self-pollinate instead of relying on birds, insects or other pollinators.
A cranberry blossom has four petals that peel back when the flower blooms. This exposes the anthers, which contain the plant’s pollen. The flower’s resemblance to the beak of a bird earned the cranberry its original name, the “craneberry.”
When cranberries don’t self-pollinate, they rely on bumblebees and honeybees to transport their pollen from flower to flower. They can also be propagated sexually, by planting seeds, or asexually, through rooting vine cuttings. This is important for growers because seed-based propagation allows for higher genetic diversity, which can translate to things like increased disease resistance or more pest tolerance.
Asexual reproduction is equally important, however. This method allows growers to create clones of varieties that perform very well in their bogs and grow even more of those high-performing types.
Every cranberry contains four air pockets, which is why they float when farmers flood bogs to harvest them. The air pockets also make raw cranberries bounce when they are dropped on a hard surface – a good indicator of whether they are fresh.
These pockets serve a biological role: They enable the berries to float down rivers and streams to disperse their seeds. Many other plants disperse their seeds via animals and birds that eat their fruits and excrete the seeds as they move around. But as anyone who has tasted them raw knows, cranberries are ultra-tart, so they have limited appeal for wildlife.
Reading cranberry DNA
For cranberries being such a young crop, scientists already know a lot about their genetics. The cranberry is a diploid, which means that each cell contains one set of chromosomes from the maternal parent and one set from the paternal parent. It has 24 chromosomes, and its genome size is less than one-tenth that of the human genome.
Insights like these help scientists better understand where potentially valuable genes might be located in the cranberry genome. And diploid crops tend to have fewer genes associated with a single trait, which makes breeding them to emphasize that trait much simpler.
Researchers have also described the genetics of the cultivated cranberry’s wild relative, which is known as the “small cranberry” (Vaccinium oxycoccos). Comparing the two can help scientists determine where the cultivated cranberry’s agronomically valuable traits reside in its genome, and where some of the small cranberry’s cold hardiness might come from.
Researchers are developing molecular markers – tools to determine where certain genes or sequences of interest reside within a genome – to help determine the best combinations of genes from different varieties of cranberry that can enhance desired traits. For example, a breeder might want to make the fruits larger, more firm or redder in color.
While cranberries have only been grown by humans for a short period of time, they have been evolving for much longer. They entered agriculture with a long genetic history, including things like whole genome duplication events and genetic bottlenecks, which collectively change which genes are gained or lost over time in a population.
Whole genome duplication events occur when two species’ genomes collide to form a new, larger genome, encompassing all the traits of the two parental species. Genetic bottlenecks occur when a population is greatly reduced in size, which limits the amount of genetic diversity in that species. These events are extremely common in the plant world and can lead to both gains and losses of different genes.
Analyzing the cranberry’s genome can indicate when it diverged evolutionarily from some of its relatives, such as the blueberry, lingonberry and huckleberry. Understanding how modern species evolved can teach plant scientists about how different traits are inherited, and how to effectively breed for them in the future.
Ripe at the right time
Cranberries’ close association with Thanksgiving was simply a practical matter at first. Fresh cranberries are ready to harvest from mid-September through mid-November, so Thanksgiving falls within that perfect window for eating them.
Cranberry sauce was first loosely described in accounts from the American colonies in the 1600s, and appeared in a cookbook for the first time in 1796. The berries’ tart flavor, which comes from high levels of several types of acids, makes them more than twice as acidic as most other edible fruits, so they add a welcome zing to a meal full of blander foods like turkey and potatoes.
In recent decades, the cranberry industry has branched out into juices, snacks and other products in pursuit of year-round markets. But for many people, Thanksgiving is still the time when they’re most likely to see cranberries in some form on the menu.
The family of Samuel Lawrence, one of 10 people to die in Georgia’s Fulton County Jail in 2023, is fighting for answers and accountability.
“I got to think about him every day of my life and I don’t know when the pain stops,” Lawrence’s father, Frank Richardson, told a local TV station in October 2023. “I pray to God that he touches that jail and puts people in place to help the other ones that are left behind.”
Shortly before his death, Lawrence, 34, had filed a complaint about jail conditions, alleging that he was brutally beaten and isolated, with insufficient food and water.
But Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat largely blamed the jail’s “outbreak of violence” on “the long-standing, dangerous overcrowding and the crumbling walls of the facility.”
In order to “save lives,” Labat said, his county would be requesting a “replacement jail.”
The Georgia sheriff is among many law enforcement officials to claim that people like Samuel Lawrence would be safer if communities reduced overcrowding by building new jails or enhancing existing ones.
But recent research my colleague Weiwei Chen and I published on escalating jail mortality rates nationwide calls into question that rationale.
In an article published in the June 2023 issue of Health Affairs, we examined relationships between jail conditions and jail deaths, analyzing factors such as percent of jail capacity occupied, admission and discharge rates and population demographics.
Among the variables that appeared to be most significantly related to jail mortality were turnover rate – the number of people admitted to and discharged from a facility relative to its average population – as well as the percentage of Black people in the jail population.
Data on how many people die while incarcerated is notoriously inaccessible and often unreliable. Still, available reports on jail deaths from the Bureau of Justice Statistics offer some perspective.
In 2019, overall jail death rates were below the adjusted national average of 339 per 100,000, but leading up to that year, they had steeply increased. Between 2000 and 2019, jail mortality rose by 11%, from 151 per 100,000 to 167 per 100,000.
To conduct what epidemiologist Homer Venters referred to as an “apples-to-apples comparison” of circumstances and deaths in multiple jails during a period of escalating mortality, we relied on a combination of datasets.
For information about facility deaths, we turned to statistics compiled by Reuters news agency reporters, who submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain mortality data from the largest jails across the U.S.
Our data on jail conditions – such as annual admissions and releases, facility capacities and demographics – came from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ census and annual survey of jails.
Ultimately, we assessed mortality rates and conditions in approximately 450 U.S. jails between 2008 and 2019.
Some of our most robust findings about jail deaths had to do with two factors: turnover rate – the sum of weekly admissions and releases divided by average daily population – and demographics.
In the jails we examined, average turnover was 67% (slightly above the national average of 53%). Relatively high turnover rates, we found, were associated with higher death rates overall, as well as due to suicide, drugs and alcohol, and homicide.
In addition to revealing a relationship between turnover rate and mortality, our research showed that the presence of greater proportions of non-Hispanic Black people in populations of relatively large jails was associated with more deaths due to illness.
Race-based differences in illness-related deaths could be due to a variety of factors, including populationwide health disparities in the U.S.
Reliance on jails
Our findings about both turnover and racial disparities should be considered alongside the broader context of jail incarceration in the United States.
Roughly 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year, some of them multiple times. Overall, there were approximately 10.3 million admissions to more than 3,000 U.S. jails in 2019.
People in jails have been found to be “significantly poorer” than people outside of jails, and more than 30 percent of those who are detained remain incarcerated because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Research has shown that the cash bail system – a key driver of high jail turnover – “punishes the poor” by ensuring that they are more likely to be detained than their wealthier counterparts for the same crime. A reliance on cash bail also reportedly increases recidivism and undermines public safety.
Beyond incarceration
Our study suggests that ongoing initiatives geared at reducing incarceration – and by extension, jail turnover – could help achieve Sheriff Labat’s goal of saving lives.
Some communities, for example, have successfully limited the use of cash bail. Others have enhanced community-based services that address mental illness, drug use and homelessness without involving police, so jails are less likely to be sites of first resort for people with complex needs.
A year before Samuel Lawrence died, a report from the ACLU suggested that by adopting at least some of the above measures, Fulton County could “reduce its jail population significantly.”
BERKELEY, Calif. — The University of California, Berkeley, is teaming up with NASA's Ames Research Center and developer SKS Partners to create research space for companies interested in collaborating with UC Berkeley and NASA scientists and engineers to generate futuristic innovations in aviation, space exploration and how we live and work in space.
The Berkeley Space Center, announced today (Monday, Oct. 16), aims to accommodate up to 1.4 million square feet of research space on 36 acres of land at NASA Ames' Moffett Field in Mountain View, leased from NASA.
The new buildings, some of which could be ready for move-in as early as 2027, will house not only state-of-the-art research and development laboratories for companies and UC Berkeley researchers, but also classrooms for UC Berkeley students. These students will benefit from immersion in the Silicon Valley start-up culture and proximity to the nation's top aeronautical, space and AI scientists and engineers at Ames.
"We would like to create industry consortia to support research clusters focused around themes that are key to our objectives, in particular aviation of the future, resiliency in extreme environments, space bioprocess engineering, remote sensing and data science and computing," said Alexandre Bayen, a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and associate provost for Moffett Field program development.
"We're hoping to create an ecosystem where Berkeley talent can collaborate with the private sector and co-locate their research and development teams,” he added. “And since we will be close to NASA talent and technology in the heart of Silicon Valley, we hope to leverage that to form future partnerships."
Ever since Naval Air Station Moffett Field was decommissioned in 1994 and NASA Ames acquired an additional 1,200 acres, NASA has been focused on developing those acres into a world-class research hub and start-up accelerator. Initiated in 2002, NASA Research Park now has some 25 companies on site, including Google's Bay View campus.
"We believe that the research and the capabilities of a major university like Berkeley could be a significant addition to the work being done at Ames," said NASA Ames Director Eugene Tu. "In a more specific way, we would like the potential of having proximity to more students at the undergraduate and graduate level. We would also like the possibility of developing potential partnerships with faculty in the future. The NASA mission is twofold: inspiring the next generation of explorers, and dissemination of our technologies and our research for public benefit. Collaboration between NASA and university researchers fits within that mission."
UC Berkeley hopes eventually to establish housing at Moffett Field to make working at the innovation center easier for students — without a 47-mile commute each way. Bayen noted that Carnegie Mellon University already occupies a teaching building at Moffett Field. With the addition of UC Berkeley and the proximity of Stanford University, he expects the intensity of academic activities in the area, both instructional and research, to increase immensely.
"We have major facilities here at Ames — the world's largest wind tunnel, NASA's only plasma wind tunnel to test entry systems and thermal protection systems, the agency's supercomputers — and the university will likely build facilities here that that we might leverage as well. So, I look at that as a triad of students, faculty and facilities," Tu added. "Then the fourth piece, which is equally important: If the project is approved to move forward, the university will likely bring in partners, will bring in industry, will bring in startups, will bring in incubators that could be relevant to NASA's interest in advancing aeronautics, science and space exploration."
"What they're doing at NASA Ames is transformational, but in order to make it heroic, in order to make it even larger than what is now possible, they have to use the combined resources of the number one public university in the world, private industry and the most innovative place on the planet, which is Silicon Valley," said Darek DeFreece, the project’s founder and executive director at UC Berkeley.
Automated aviation
Bayen emphasized that many academic institutions are now becoming global universities: New York University has demonstrated the ability to operate independent campuses on different continents — the Middle East and Asia — while Cornell has successfully opened a second campus in Manhattan, five hours from Ithaca. In the same vein, UC Berkeley is innovating by launching this research hub that, over the decades to come, could evolve into a campus as instructional and research and development activities grow.
“This expansion of Berkeley’s physical footprint and academic reach represents a fantastic and unprecedented opportunity for our students, faculty and the public we serve,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. “Enabling our world-class research enterprise to explore potential collaborations with NASA and the private sector will speed the translation of discoveries across a wide range of disciplines into the inventions, technologies and services that will advance the greater good. We are thrilled. This is a prime location and a prime time for this public university.”
Claire Tomlin, now professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, conducted her first research on automated collision avoidance systems for drones at Moffett Field, and foresees similar opportunities there for UC Berkeley students, especially those enrolled in the College of Engineering’s year-old aerospace engineering program.
"With our new aerospace engineering major, it is the right time to get started at Moffett Field. It offers an outdoor testbed for research on how to integrate drones or other unpiloted aerial vehicles, which are being used increasingly for aerial inspection or delivery of medical supplies, into our air traffic control system," she said. "I anticipate great collaborations on topics such as new algorithms in control theory, new methods in AI, new electronics and new materials."
Tomlin envisions research on networks of vertiports to support operations of electric autonomous helicopters or e-VTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles), much like UC Berkeley's pioneering research in the 1990s on self-driving cars; collaborative work on how to grow plants in space or on other planets to produce food, building materials and pharmaceuticals, similar to the ongoing work in UC Berkeley's Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES); and collaborations on artificial intelligence with top AI experts in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab (BAIR).
"This is the decade of electric automated aviation, and the Berkeley Space Center should be a pioneer of it, not just by research, but also by experimentation and deployment," Tomlin said. "We're interested in, for example, how one would go about designing networks of vertiports that are economically viable, that are compatible with the urban landscape, that are prone to public acceptance and have an economic reality."
"Advanced air mobility and revolutionizing the use of the airspace and how we use drones and unpiloted vehicles for future air taxis or to fight wildfires or to deliver cargo are other areas of potential collaboration," Tu added.
Hannah Nabavi is one UC Berkeley student eager to see this proposed collaboration with NASA Ames and industry around Silicon Valley, even though she will have graduated by the time it comes to fruition. A senior majoring in engineering physics, she is the leader of a campus club called SpaceForm that is currently tapping NASA Ames scientists for research tips on projects such as how materials are affected by the harsh environment on the moon.
"I think one of the primary advantages to UC Berkeley of having this connection is it allows students to obtain a perspective on what's happening in the real world. What are the real-world problems? What are the goals? How are things getting done?" said Nabavi, who plans to attend graduate school on a path to a career in the commercial space industry. "It also helps students figure out what they want to focus on by providing an early understanding of the research and industrial areas in aerospace."
But beyond the practical benefits, she said, "I think that seeing all of these scientists and engineers tackling issues and questions at the forefront of aerospace can serve as a huge inspiration to students."
AI and machine learning
In addition, data science and AI/machine learning are rapidly disrupting the aviation and space industry landscape as it evolves toward automation and human-machine interaction and as ever bigger datasets are being produced. The workforce needs retraining in these rapidly evolving fields, and UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) is well positioned to provide executive and professional education to meet these needs.
“Berkeley Space Center offers the possibility for CDSS students to work on these new challenges, particularly in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics, planetary science and quantum science and technology,” said Sandrine Dudoit, associate dean at CDSS, professor of statistics and of public health and a member of the Moffett Field Faculty Steering Committee.
DeFreece noted that there are NASA collaborations already happening on the UC Berkeley campus. Many leverage the mission management and instrument-building skills at the Space Sciences Laboratory, which is responsible for the day-to-day operation of several NASA satellites and is building instruments for spacecraft that NASA will land on the moon or launch to monitor Earth and the sun.
UC Berkeley researchers are already investigating how to print 3D objects in space, how to create materials to sustain astronauts on Mars, how to test for life-based molecules on other planets and moons, and whether squishy robots could operate on other planets. UC Berkeley spin-offs are developing ways to monitor health in space and provide low-cost insertion of satellites into orbit.
"The Berkeley Space Center could be a place where half of the day students are collaborating with center neighbors, and the other half of the day they might be taking classes and seeing their mentors who are supervising class projects on the satellite that is hovering over their heads at that very moment," Bayen said. "Experiences like these just don't exist anywhere else at the present time."
UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and Berkeley Law are also working on issues surrounding the commercial exploitation of space, including asteroids and other planets, and the laws that should govern business in space.
"Space law and policy are also areas where I think there's some tremendous opportunities to collaborate with the university," Tu said. "What are we going to do when we find resources on the moon, and other countries do as well, and companies want to make money from that?"
A focus on sustainability
In return for its investment and partnership, UC Berkeley will receive a portion of the revenues that the real estate development is projected to generate. While market-based returns are always subject to change, the joint venture conservatively estimates that the research hub will receive revenues more than sufficient to ensure that Berkeley Space Center is self-sustaining, as well as provide new financial support to the core campus, its departments and colleges, and faculty and students.
UC Berkeley also expects significant additional revenue from other, project-related sources, including new research grants, industry participation and partnerships, and the incubation and commercialization of emerging companies born from translational research and technologies created at the site.
SKS Partners, a San Francisco-based investor and developer of commercial real estate properties in the western U.S., will lead the venture. The planning team for the Berkeley Space Center will pursue LEED certification for its buildings — a mark of sustainability — by using solar power, blackwater and stormwater treatment and reuse, and emphasizing non-polluting transportation.
While construction is tentatively scheduled to begin in 2026, subject to environmental approvals, UC Berkeley is already creating connections between Silicon Valley companies on the NASA Ames property, including executive education programs.
"In the next couple of years, we could conceivably have a semester rotation program, where UC Berkeley students spend one semester at Berkeley Space Center, take three classes taught there, do their research there, are temporarily housed there for a semester, just like they would do a semester abroad in Paris," Bayen said. "Ultimately, we hope to build experiences that currently do not exist for students, staff and faculty and create an innovation ecosystem where breakthroughs that require public-private partnerships are enabled.”
The development team includes as co-master planners HOK, an architecture, engineering and planning firm, and Field Operations, an interdisciplinary urban design and landscape architecture firm.
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
A $400,000 federal grant will help the California Highway Patrol Native-Tribal Traffic Education Program build and strengthen the Department’s relationship with Northern California’s Native American communities.
The grant will support the Tribal Traffic Education Program, or TTEP — the CHP’s first grant-funded safety program specifically focused on reaching Native American communities — with funding for traffic safety education to drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists on and near California’s tribal lands.
With a population of nearly 720,000, California is home to more Native Americans/Alaskan Natives than any other state.
There are 109 federally recognized tribes, each with its own unique culture, history and practices.
The program strives to improve service and public trust in tribal communities by implementing many of the lifesaving traffic safety programs the CHP has to offer.
“We are excited to extend our traffic safety initiatives to tribes and Native American residents within our communities,” said CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee. “The program’s primary goal is to save lives through education, while proactively building and maintaining relationships with California’s diverse tribal communities.”
CHP personnel involved in TTEP serve as resources to Native American/Alaska Native communities and tribes by sharing traffic safety information, conducting traffic safety presentations, and participating in community outreach and tribal cultural events.
The CHP has set a goal of conducting 125 tribal traffic safety presentations and other community outreach activities within the CHP’s Northern, Golden Gate, and Valley Divisions each grant cycle, with the intent of expanding the program statewide.
Program topics will include seat belt safety, proper use of child safety seats, dangers of driving under the influence, pedestrian and bicycle education, defensive driving techniques, distracted driving, teen/parent driving safety, driver license requirements, and other educational subjects.
Traffic safety presentations will be conducted at schools, public health fairs, tribal events, and other activities.
Funding for this program was provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
On Thursday, the Department of Veterans Affairs released the National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, the largest national analysis of veteran suicides through 2021, the latest year for which there is data.
The report shows that 6,392 veterans died by suicide in 2021, which is 114 more than in 2020.
The number of non-veteran suicides also increased to 40,020 deaths in 2021, which is 2,000 more than in 2020.
Officials said that 2021 was the first full year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to greater financial strain, housing instability, anxiety and depression levels, and barriers to health care — all of which are known to be associated with increased risk of suicide for veterans and non-veterans alike.
There was also an increase in firearm availability in 2021, which is proven to increase both the risk of suicide and the risk of dying during a suicide attempt.
Ending veteran suicide is VA’s top clinical priority and a key part of President Biden’s Unity Agenda.
Since 2021, VA has worked aggressively to expand support for veterans in crisis, including offering no-cost health care to veterans in suicidal crisis at VA or non-VA facilities; launching the 988 (then press 1) to help veterans connect more quickly with caring, qualified responders through the Veterans Crisis Line; partnering with community-based suicide prevention organizations to provide veterans with on-the-ground support; expanding firearm suicide prevention efforts; and encouraging veterans to reach out for help through a national Veteran suicide prevention awareness campaign.
These steps have led to more than 33,000 veterans getting free emergency health care, a 12.1% increase in use of the Veterans Crisis Line, more than 3.5 million visits to VA’s support website, and more.
Moving forward, VA and the Biden-Harris Administration will continue to work urgently to end Veteran suicide through a public health approach that combines both community-based and clinically based strategies to save lives.
“There is nothing more important to VA than preventing veteran suicide — nothing,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough. “One veteran suicide will always be too many, and we at VA will use every tool to our disposal to prevent these tragedies and save veterans’ lives.”
“We will do everything in our power to learn from this report and use its findings to help us save lives,” said VA undersecretary for Health Shereef Elnahal, M.D. “It will take all of us — working together — to end veteran suicide, and we will not rest until that goal becomes a reality.”
Before 2021, veteran suicide had decreased two years in a row — from 6,718 veteran suicides in 2018 to 6,278 in 2020. Learn more information about VA’s comprehensive, nationwide efforts to prevent veteran suicide.
This report is based on verified data from the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Defense, and it meets the quality standards of a peer-reviewed publication.
In the interest of full transparency, VA releases yearly reports detailing how we come to the conclusions in the Annual Suicide Prevention Report.
For more detailed information about veteran suicide in 2021, view the full report. For additional veteran suicide mortality data, see the report’s accompanying state data sheets.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — It started with a love for science.
Lake County Office of Education's Learning Support Specialist Jennifer Kelly has taken science "out-of-this-world" for Lake County students with her lessons and field trips.
Kelly provides STEAM lessons through classroom visits and field trips to the Taylor Observatory.
STEAM education is an approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics as a starting point to guide student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.
STEAM projects include the solar system, robotics, Clear Lake topography and water analysis, sound, engineering and so much more.
“When you look at the three dimensions of science learning, I believe the Taylor Observatory and the science lessons help build connections across disciplines and engage students with technical and engineering practices,” said Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg.
Kelly works with students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. As the students learn the lesson, so do the teachers.
During the 2022-2023 school year, Kelly visited 78 Lake County classrooms and hosted 65 field trips to the Taylor Observatory.
Sixty-five educators from 18 Lake County schools participated in various STEAM activities.
This includes two new activities, Arduino Robotics and the Health of Clearlake.
Arduino Robotics, sponsored by the Reynolds System Inc., is taught in four to six lessons by their engineers and allows students to build robots and control them with Arduino microcontrollers.
The Health of Clear Lake includes up to nine lessons and a field trip to collect and analyze water samples from the lake.
Kelly has her Masters of Education in STEAM. She was also named California Teacher of the Year in 2011 and the Lake County Teacher of the Year in 2010 while teaching at the Middletown Unified School District.
Taylor Observatory / Norton Planetarium / STEAM Center is a facility owned by the Lake County Office of Education, located beneath the dark skies of Lake County, in Kelseyville, California.
The facility features a 36 seat classroom, a 16 inch research grade telescope under a dome, a 32 seat planetarium with a 6.2 meter (20 feet) domed ceiling and an Epsilon Model Digitarium Star Projector System.
Although the Crab Nebula is one of the best-studied supernova remnants, questions about its progenitor, the nature of the explosion that created it still remain unanswered.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is on the case as it sleuths for any clues that remain within the supernova remnant.
Webb’s infrared sensitivity and spatial resolution are offering astronomers a more comprehensive understanding of the still-expanding scene
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has gazed at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
Since this energetic event was recorded in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers, the Crab Nebula has continued to draw attention and additional study as scientists seek to understand the conditions, behavior and after-effects of supernovae by carefully studying this relatively close example.
With Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), the game is afoot as new details are uncovered — including the first complete map of dust distribution — in the search for answers about the Crab Nebula’s origins.
At first glance the general shape of the nebula is reminiscent of the 2005 optical wavelength image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
In Webb’s infrared observation, a crisp, cage-like structure of fluffy gaseous filaments are shown in red and orange. However, in the central regions, emission from dust grains (yellow-white and green) is mapped out by Webb for the first time. The Hubble and Webb images of this object can be contrasted here.
Additional aspects of the inner workings of the Crab Nebula become more prominent and are seen in greater detail in the infrared light captured by Webb.
In particular, Webb highlights what is known as synchrotron radiation: emission produced from charged particles, like electrons, moving around magnetic field lines at relativistic speeds.
The radiation appears here as milky smoke-like material throughout the majority of the Crab Nebula’s interior.
This feature is a product of the nebula’s pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star. The pulsar’s strong magnetic fields accelerate particles to extremely high speeds and cause them to emit radiation as they wind around magnetic field lines. Though emitted across the electromagnetic spectrum, the synchrotron radiation becomes particularly vibrant in the infrared with Webb's NIRCam instrument.
To locate the Crab Nebula’s pulsar heart, trace the wisps that follow a circular ripple-like pattern in the middle to the bright white dot in the center. Further out from the core, follow the thin white ribbons of the radiation. The curvy wisps are closely grouped together, outlining the structure of the pulsar’s magnetic fields, which sculpt and shape the nebula.
At center left and right, the white material curves sharply inward from the filamentary dust cage’s edges and goes toward the neutron star’s location, as if the waist of the nebula is pinched. This abrupt slimming may be caused by the confinement of the supernova wind’s expansion by a belt of dense gas.
The wind produced by the pulsar heart continues to push the shell of gas and dust outward at a rapid pace. Notice how the filaments tend to be longer toward the upper right side of the nebula, in the same direction the pulsar is moving – not restricted by the belt of gas. Among the remnant’s interior, yellow-white and green mottled filaments form large-scale loop-like structures, which represent areas where dust grains reside.
The search for answers about the Crab Nebula’s past continues as astronomers further analyse the Webb data and consult previous observations of the nebula taken by other telescopes. Scientists will have newer Hubble data to review within the next year or so from the telescope’s reimaging of the supernova remnant. This will mark Hubble’s first look at the Crab Nebula in over 20 years, and will enable astronomers to more accurately compare Webb and Hubble’s findings.
Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle.
Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.
Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.
Motorcycle-involved crashes continue to be a major concern for the California Highway Patrol.
The CHP has implemented a yearlong, federally funded program, Get Educated and Ride Safe VI, or GEARS, with the goal of increasing motorcycle safety and awareness throughout the state.
The GEARS VI goals are designed to reduce the number of motorcycle-involved crashes and crash victims.
Based on provisional data, there were 7,639 motorcycle-involved crashes, resulting in 381 deaths and 6,969 injuries, within CHP jurisdiction in federal fiscal year 2021-22 — an 8% increase from the previous year.
“Motorcycle riders are statistically more likely to be injured or killed when involved in a crash,” said CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee. “The GEARS VI grant will support the Department’s efforts to improve safety for motorcycle riders and other road users through focused education and enforcement.”
During the grant period, the CHP will increase motorcycle safety activities in regions with a high number of motorcycle incidents and participate in traffic safety education campaigns.
The campaign will promote the use of U.S. Department of Transportation-compliant helmets for all riders and raise driver awareness of sharing the road with motorcyclists.
The CHP will also increase enforcement in areas with a high number of motorcycle-involved crashes, which resulted from speed, improper turns, and driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.
Funding for this program was provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.