LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has a variety of dogs waiting to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Australian shepherd, border collie, boxer, Catahoula leopard dog, Doberman pinscher, German shepherd, hound, Labrador retriever, pit bull, Queensland heeler, Rottweiler, 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.
Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, announced a resolution Friday designating the week of Feb. 26 as Eating Disorders Awareness Week, bringing attention to a serious problem affecting about 28 million Americans while underscoring the need for prevention.
“Eating disorders are serious conditions that are potentially life-threatening and have a great impact on our physical and emotional health,” Sen. Dodd said. “We must improve the public’s understanding of the causes, encourage early intervention and lay to rest the stigma of this pervasive affliction. As someone who’s had a loved one suffer from an eating disorder, I know how difficult it can be, but with support recovery is possible.”
Sen. Dodd’s resolution, Senate Concurrent Resolution 105, raises awareness of a range of significant disorders affecting people across all backgrounds. Conditions include anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating disorders, among others.
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is a collaborative effort consisting primarily of volunteers, including eating disorder professionals, health care providers, students, educators, social workers, and individuals committed to raising awareness of the dangers surrounding eating disorders and the need for early intervention and treatment access.
California Treasurer Fiona Ma is a co-sponsor of SCR 105. Supporters have included the National Eating Disorders Association, American Nurses Association-California, Cielo House and the Eating Disorders Resource Center.
“Eating disorders affect nearly one in 10 Americans from all walks of life,” Treasurer Ma said. “While common, these serious conditions don’t have to become debilitating or deadly. Let’s break the stigma around anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating so everyone living with these conditions can find the help they need to be healthy. I’m proud to join Sen. Dodd as Eating Disorders Awareness Week will raise awareness and help those affected find hope, the first step in healing.”
“The National Eating Disorders Association is grateful to Sen. Dodd for this resolution recognizing Eating Disorders Awareness Week,” said Doreen S. Marshall, chief executive officer of the National Eating Disorders Association. “Let us all take steps this week to learn more about eating disorders as complex mental health illnesses that affect people of all races, genders, ages and body types. By elevating the national dialogue about eating disorders, we can help to ensure that those impacted by eating disorders are met with compassion, resources and support.”
LAKEPORT, Calif. — On a bright Sunday in the last days of January, the students of Lake County shared their voices through the beauty and power of poetry.
The Soper-Reese Theatre resonated with dynamic recitations by the finalists of Lake County’s annual Poetry Out Loud competition, a national arts program that encourages the study of poetry and culminates in a live, juried recitation event.
The competition was created by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation and has been proudly hosted for over a decade by the Lake County Arts Council in partnership supported by a grant from the California Arts Council.
This year, four students represented the best of the best from their high schools: Madelin Muniz-Espinoza, Clear Lake High School; David Wilkes, Kelseyville High School; Jocelyn Knapp, Lower Lake High School; and Lily Morita, Middletown High School.
Each of these amazing students had already competed and won first place in the competition at their individual school levels and came to the county level finals with two full length poems memorized for performance.
They had spent weeks studying, memorizing and rehearsing each piece with adult performance coaches Tim Barnes (Clear Lake High School), John Tomlinson (Kelseyville and Lower Lake High Schools) and Michele Krueger (Middletown High School).
The students read in rounds, each presenting one poem per round.
The audience, judges and the Master of Ceremonies Laura McAndrews Sammel, treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors of the Lake County Arts Council, were often moved to tears by the depth of passion and understanding in the students’ poetic delivery.
Jordan O’Halloran was the coordinator of this year’s Poetry Out Loud competition and also had the daunting task of tallying the scores of the tight competition.
She gathered a group of local poets and educators to serve as judges: Lake County Poet Laureate Emeritus Richard Schmidt, artist, writer and teacher Diana Liebe Schmidt, poet and retired educator Pamela Bordisso, political poet and theatrical artist Beulah Vega and poet Brenda Yeager.
In between the students’ recitations, as O’Halloran was tallying the scores, the poet judges read a stunning and diverse array of their original work.
Then, the performances culminated with an exquisite reading by Georgina Marie Guardado, the current Lake County Poet Laureate, who spoke of how moved she was by the caliber of student performances. She honored the students and audience with a reading of her own original work and a poem by the current National Poet Laureate, Ada Limon.
After a tight competition of deeply inspiring recitations, Lily Morita of Middletown High School took first place with her soulful and insightful performances of “Listening In Deep Space,” by Diane Thiel and “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,” by Margaret Atwood. She will move on to the next level of Poetry Out Loud’s California State final competition in Sacramento.
David Wilkes of Kelseyville High School took second place and will be the backup competitor at Sacramento if Morita should find herself unable to attend.
Madelin Muniz-Espinoza of Clear Lake High School won third place and Jocelyn Knapp of Lower Lake High School was the runner up.
Congratulations and best of luck in Sacramento (and beyond!) to Lily Morita and to all of the student competitors who have moved us with their stunning performances to understand how truly poetry can help us find beauty “when we find each other.”
UC San Francisco will launch the world’s first tissue bank with samples donated by patients with long COVID.
The move follows research indicating that the virus can continue to linger throughout the body and may hold the key to understanding the cause of the debilitating disorder and lead to effective treatments.
By October 2023, an estimated 14% of Americans had or had had long COVID, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The disorder may appear as a continuation of the original COVID symptoms or manifest as new symptoms affecting any part of the body. In serious cases multiple body systems are affected, including the brain, heart, lungs, kidneys and skin.
Recent studies have shown that in patients with long COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus may not fully clear after the initial infection. Instead, the virus remains in what scientists have termed “viral reservoirs,” identified in patient tissue months or even years later.
These reservoirs are now believed to be a primary driver of long COVID, provoking the immune system to respond by prompting conditions like blood clotting disorders and inflammation and cognition dysfunction.
“Based on our work so far, we believe that long COVID is a tissue-based disease,” said Michael Peluso, MD, principal investigator of the UCSF Long COVID Tissue Program and an infectious disease physician-scientist in the UCSF School of Medicine.
“This program will allow us to comprehensively study the biological processes occurring across tissue compartments — in the blood, gut, lymph nodes, spinal fluid and bone marrow — in people living with long COVID. This will help us better understand the underlying mechanisms of long COVID,” said Peluso, who coled recent research with Timothy Hendrich, MD, a UCSF physician-scientist, that showed the virus was present in colon tissue up to 676 days following infection.
An effort to expand collaboration with HIV/AIDS, cardiology and other specialists
Tissue specimens will be acquired from existing and future participants enrolled in UCSF’s LIINC study, and shared with non-UCSF scientists conducting complementary research. The study, which was launched in April 2020 before long COVID was recognized, is open to all adults who have ever tested positive for COVID-19.
“The persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in tissue is a major target for our rapid research and clinical trials,” said Steven Deeks, MD, co-principal investigator of LIINC, professor of medicine in residence at UCSF and an internationally recognized HIV expert. Current clinical trials include a monoclonal antibody — a lab-made protein that effectively attacks viruses — and an antiviral therapy that blocks viral replication.
The UCSF Long COVID Tissue Program is supported by a $3 million grant from the Long Covid Research Consortium of the PolyBio Research Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to complex chronic conditions, which also funded the LIINC study.
“The UCSF team includes people who helped make HIV and AIDS a treatable disease,” said Amy Proal, Ph.D., president of PolyBio. “These researchers rapidly pivoted into long COVID research at the outset of the pandemic, leveraging years of experience performing similar research with patients with HIV and AIDS.”
An additional $1.7 million funding from PolyBio will also enable Henrich, and UCSF cardiologist Zian Tseng, MD, to expand their study of sudden cardiac death. Advanced technologies will be used to examine traces of SARS-CoV-2 and related immune changes in tissue samples. Findings may result in recommendations for antiviral treatments for patients who have been exposed to the COVID virus and are at risk for sudden cardiac death.
Suzanne Leigh writes for the University of California, San Francisco.
California could become the first state in the U.S. to welcome a new pair of giant pandas in the latest round of a collaborative conservation effort with China.
The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance announced that it has signed a cooperative agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association and filed a permit application with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. According to reports, two pandas could arrive by the end of the summer.
“California and China share deep cultural and economic ties, and we look forward to the opportunity to again welcome these iconic bears to the Golden State,” said Governor Gavin Newsom, who led a weeklong visit to China last October. “From securing a safe future for this national treasure to fighting climate change, we’re proud to continue our long history of working together towards shared goals.”
In San Francisco last November during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, Summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled that China planned to send new pandas to the United States as "envoys of friendship” between the nations.
The APEC Summit followed Gov. Newsom’s October travel to China, during which he met with President Xi and other high-level Chinese officials to discuss climate action and cooperation, promote economic development and tourism, and strengthen cultural ties.
The state hopes that this week’s announcement will lead to further exchanges and cooperation between California and China, which have a strong foundation of partnership built by governors Schwarzenegger and Brown and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as well as Gov. Newsom while serving as Mayor of San Francisco.
Is local news readily available in your town? Do reporters still cover your school board and other municipal meetings?
If you answered yes, you are likely wealthier than the average American, and you live in or near a metro area.
The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University documents the changing local news landscape across the country. Our latest report shows that where you live and how much money you make affect whether you live in a news desert or a news oasis. This divide is related to other factors affecting the health of our democracy, as analysis of our data by the nonprofit Rebuild Local News showed.
For more than a decade, I have worked in organizations that study and support local journalism, and I’m intimately familiar with both the challenges and the solutions for the local journalism landscape.
Inequity in local news
One of the most vexing problems, as our report shows, is the persistence of inequity between communities that are local journalism haves and have-nots.
The have-nots are news deserts with few, if any, journalists to do the daily newsgathering and reporting that people require to participate meaningfully in their local communities and democratic institutions.
The main challenge for news outlets in have-not communities is the migration of advertising money from the printed page – where it made up roughly 80% of news organizations’ income – to the screen, where it now makes up less than 20%. This decline in ad revenue, a trend for the last decade-plus, has forced many outlets to rely on audience funding, philanthropy, cost-cutting or some combination of the three.
In communities with little disposable income to put toward news subscriptions or donations and no local philanthropies, cost-cutting becomes the only option. This creates a self-reinforcing spiral of lower quality and declining readership and, ultimately, closure.
In 2023, the country lost more than 130 print newspapers, which continue to be the newsrooms most likely to produce original local content that other outlets circulate.
Since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost 2,900 papers.
New digital outlets are not being created fast enough to fill that huge void. The number of digital outlets has held steady at roughly 550 in recent years, with about 20 new outlets opening each year – and roughly the same number closing.
All told, 1,558 of the nation’s 3,143 counties have only one news outlet, while 203 are news deserts with zero, meaning there are likely thousands of communities that simply do not have access to local news.
For example, both Texas and Tennessee had four counties lose their only remaining newspaper last year. All eight papers were independently owned.
What it takes to thrive
Wealthier communities do better sustaining local news organizations.
Our data shows that counties with an average household income over US$80,000 can support a robust local journalism ecosystem – meaning 10 or more outlets. Those with an average household income of $54,000 or less are more likely to be news deserts. By the same token, the percentage of the population below the poverty line in news deserts averages more than 16%, versus 12% in counties with robust markets. This finding aligns with other research, including a previous study I did of local news in New Jersey.
In addition to household income, population density correlates to the number of outlets serving a local community. In our data, counties with 10 or more outlets are overwhelmingly urban or dense suburbia, while news deserts are usually rural – though news deserts also occur in low-income pockets of metro areas. Densely populated communities tend to include higher-income households and have network effects that come from the ability of businesses to reach a larger number of people in a relatively small footprint.
This phenomenon leads to the third factor related to number of outlets in a county: gross domestic product per capita. In any town, city or country, the GDP represents the amount of money netted from sales of services and merchandise, divided by population. For the news oases in our study, the average GDP per capita is $75,140. For the news deserts, it is just $8,964. This difference reflects the retail and services base, and the number of businesses that could buy advertising in their local news outlet, or create jobs that would allow residents to donate to one.
An example that highlights the importance of this factor is the newspaper Moab Sun News, which is thriving in the rural rocky highlands of Utah, thanks in part to a robust tourism industry and retail base. Though it serves a relatively small permanent population of 5,321, the Moab Sun News has built a sustainable business model through strong advertising revenue, a user-friendly website that welcomes subscriptions and donations, and creative collaborations with other community organizations in town.
The final factor that contributes to a community being a journalism have or have-not is access to high-quality broadband. Emerging metrics show that this near-necessity of contemporary life is not yet reliably available to rural Americans.
What’s working
Despite these seemingly intractable problems, solutions to local journalism inequality are becoming clearer.
One is collaboration. For example, in Colorado, the national nonprofit news outlet The Daily Yonder has hired a reporter based in a rural community to write stories about life there and share them out with both local and national organizations.
Another is philanthropy. The new Press Forward initiative has begun local chapters across the country, with at least one planning to serve rural communities. Organizations like the National Trust for Local News have been buying outlets that would likely otherwise be sold to hedge funds, and turning them into nonprofits that will continue to serve their communities.
Public policy should also play a role. At the state level, policies to support local news have seen success in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, and more bills are working their way through state legislatures. People seem to be realizing that having quality local news is just as vital as having public education and access to health care. With any luck, every community will have the opportunity to be a journalism “have.”
Within the next few decades, NASA aims to land humans on the Moon, set up a lunar colony and use the lessons learned to send people to Mars as part of its Artemis program.
While researchers know that space travel can stress space crew members both physically and mentally and test their ability to work together in close quarters, missions to Mars will amplify these challenges. Mars is far away – millions of miles from Earth – and a mission to the red planet will take two to two and a half years, between travel time and the Mars surface exploration itself.
Given the great distance to Mars, two-way communication between crew members and Earth will take about 25 minutes round trip. This delayed contact with home won’t just hurt crew member morale. It will likely mean space crews won’t get as much real-time help from Mission Control during onboard emergencies.
Because these communications travel at the speed of light and can’t go any faster, experts are coming up with ways to improve communication efficiency under time-delayed conditions. These solutions might include texting, periodically summarizing topics and encouraging participants to ask questions at the end of each message, which the responder can answer during the next message.
Autonomous conditions
Space crew members won’t be able to communicate with Mission Control in real time to plan their schedules and activities, so they’ll need to conduct their work more autonomously than astronauts working on orbit on the International Space Station.
Although studies during space simulations on Earth have suggested that crew members can still accomplish mission goals under highly autonomous conditions, researchers need to learn more about how these conditions affect crew member interactions and their relationship with Mission Control.
For example, Mission Control personnel usually advise crew members on how to deal with problems or emergencies in real time. That won’t be an option during a Mars mission.
To study this challenge back on Earth, scientists could run a series of simulations where crew members have varying degrees of contact with Mission Control. They could then see what happens to the interactions between crew members and their ability to get along and conduct their duties productively.
In my research team’s studies of on-orbit crews, we found that when experiencing interpersonal stress in space, crew members might displace this tension by blaming Mission Control for scheduling problems or not offering enough support. This can lead to crew-ground misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
One way to deal with interpersonal tension on board would be to schedule time each week for the crew members to discuss interpersonal conflicts during planned “bull sessions.” We have found that commanders who are supportive can improve crew cohesion. A supportive commander, or someone trained in anger management, could facilitate these sessions to help crew members understand their interpersonal conflicts before their feelings fester and harm the mission.
Time away from home
Spending long periods of time away from home can weigh on crew members’ morale in space. Astronauts miss their families and report being concerned about the well-being of their family members back on Earth, especially when someone is sick or in a crisis.
Mission duration can also affect astronauts. A Mars mission will have three phases: the outbound trip, the stay on the Martian surface and the return home. Each of these phases may affect crew members differently. For example, the excitement of being on Mars might boost morale, while boredom during the return may sink it.
Having telescopes on board that will allow the crew members to see Earth as a beautiful ball in space, or giving them access to virtual reality images of trees, lakes and family members, could help mitigate any disappearing-Earth effects. But these countermeasures could just as easily lead to deeper depression as the crew members reflect on what they’re missing.
Planning for a Mars mission
Researchers studied some of these issues during the Mars500 program, a collaboration between the Russian and other space agencies. During Mars500, six men were isolated for 520 days in a space simulator in Moscow. They underwent periods of delayed communication and autonomy, and they simulated a landing on Mars.
Scientists learned a lot from that simulation. But many features of a real Mars mission, such as microgravity, and some dangers of space – meteoroid impacts, the disappearing-Earth phenomenon – aren’t easy to simulate.
Planned missions under the Artemis program will allow researchers to learn more about the pressures astronauts will face during the journey to Mars.
For example, NASA is planning a space station called Gateway, which will orbit the Moon and serve as a relay station for lunar landings and a mission to Mars. Researchers could simulate the outbound and return phases of a Mars mission by sending astronauts to Gateway for six-month periods, where they could introduce Mars-like delayed communication, autonomy and views of a receding Earth.
Researchers could simulate a Mars exploration on the Moon by having astronauts conduct tasks similar to those anticipated for Mars. This way, crew members could better prepare for the psychological and interpersonal pressures that come with a real Mars mission. These simulations could improve the chances of a successful mission and contribute to astronaut well-being as they venture into space.
But when someone experiences arsenic poisoning, it’s usually not the direct result of a diabolical plot – in fact, it usually isn’t. So how do you figure out how the arsenic got into someone’s bloodstream?
That’s the question a team of fellow chemical engineers and I tackled more than 20 years ago after an abrupt jump in the number of U.S. cases of arsenic poisoning. We later published a peer-reviewed study documenting the investigation.
Finding the source of arsenic poisonings is not always easy, but it’s extremely important for public health. Scientists often need to combine science and detective work, which led us to conclude that landfills could be a significant source of contamination.
Arsenic is a chemical element that occurs naturally in the environment. In its organic form, with a carbon molecule attached, it is harmless. But it is highly toxic in its inorganic form, without carbon. Inorganic arsenic is present in high levels in groundwater in 70 countries, including Chile, China, India, Mexico and the United States.
Prolonged exposure to inorganic arsenic, mainly through drinking water and food, can lead to chronic poisoning, the most characteristic effects of which are skin lesions and skin cancer.
In 2002, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona studying anaerobic processes in nature – or those that occur without oxygen. My colleagues and I were focused on how anaerobic bacteria can change the number of electrons in arsenic, affecting its solubility. This is important because when arsenic is soluble, meaning it can dissolve in water or other liquids, it can become mobile.
Based on that data, we set ourselves the goal of finding out where the arsenic may have come from and exploring what possible human-related activities were involved. To do so, we used the scientific method, which can be summarized in three stages: observation of a phenomenon, establishment of an explanatory hypothesis and validation with experimental results.
After observing the rise in arsenic cases in the data and considering a few possibilities, we hypothesized that arsenic might be escaping from city landfills and entering the American food supply via groundwater.
Arsenic is found in many household and industrial products, from pesticides and food additives to semiconductor chips and pharmaceuticals. And when disposed of, the arsenic in the products can leach from the landfill into the soil.
Investigating a hypothesis
To validate our hypothesis, we designed an experiment that used three biological reactors to simulate the chemical process of how an improperly maintained landfill could leach arsenic into the groundwater. Two of the reactors contained various mixtures of insoluble arsenic and organic and inorganic material, as well as anaerobic bacteria, while the third was used as a control without the bacteria.
About 250 days after our experiment began, we found that anaerobic bacteria and organic matter had transformed the insoluble arsenic, which wasn’t able to travel through water, into its soluble form, which could travel through water. This allowed it to move through the ground as contaminated water, or leachate, and eventually end up in groundwater. From there, the arsenic can find its way to humans via drinking water or the food chain, such as in rice crops or chicken eggs.
To determine what else might be going on here, we teamed up with the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arizona. With their help, we detected the presence of cacodylic acid in the leachate. This compound exponentially multiplies the toxic effects of the leachate stream, such as by promoting tumors.
The European Commission seems to be trying to take more aggressive action against illegal landfills, which are less likely to use appropriate safeguards, and recently announced it was referring Spain to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to ensure that its landfills – namely, 195 illegal ones – don’t endanger human health or harm the environment.
As our research suggests, the only ways to solve the problem of arsenic leaching into the food supply is by proper landfill design and management, which necessarily involves monitoring and treatment of the leachates they generate.
Moreover, I believe the implementation of a circular economy strategy – in which reuse and recycling are maximized – in the management of cities and in the individual behaviors of citizens would lead to a minimization of waste and also greatly reduce the potential release of toxic heavy metals such as arsenic from landfills.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has dozens of dogs needing new homes this week.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 57 adoptable dogs.
This week’s dogs include “Emily,” a 1-year-old female Doberman pinscher with a red and copper coat. She has been spayed.
There also is “Turbo,” a male Belgian malinois mix with a black and brown coat. He has been neutered.
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.
By definition, the middle of nowhere is hard to find, but Susan P. Harrison defines it as the “triple junction of Napa, Lake and Yolo counties” and the center of a wealth of research possibilities.
“If you drew a line from the northern tip of Lake Berryessa to the southern tip of Clear Lake, it’d be right in the center of that line,” Harrison said, describing UC Davis’ McLaughlin Natural Reserve, a research site “very rich in natural diversity.”
Harrison ’83, M.S. ’86, is a professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Science & Policy.
In a 15-year study at the reserve, Harrison analyzed how a loss of plant species richness, particularly of native wildflowers, is tied to drier winters such as those experienced during drought.
She reported on her work in a paper titled “Climate-Driven Diversity Loss in a Grassland Community,”published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, before being inducted into the academy in 2018.
“There's interesting soil variation, which gives rise to lots of plant community variation,” Harrison explained, referring to McLaughlin as “this incredible place for all kinds of ecological research.”
Harrison grew up in Sonoma County with five siblings and a nature-enthusiast father. But it wasn’t until her undergraduate years at UC Davis that she became “aware” of science. She received a bachelor’s in zoology before earning a master’s in ecology. After earning her doctorate in biology at Stanford, Harrison returned to UC Davis as a faculty member in 1991.
For Harrison, it “never made all that much sense to go study someplace a thousand miles away when there's all this cool, incredible natural diversity right here in lovely Northern California.”
Pioneering work
Harrison is most proud of supporting the development of the UC Natural Reserve System, describing the network as the product of “a grassroots movement of environmental scientists.”
The need for the reserves began when researchers in Southern California encountered difficulties studying reptiles and plants, with many of their favorite research sites “getting developed and paved over,” according to Harrison. As a master’s student, she joined the campus advisory committee for the reserve system to help some reserves find better financial footing.
“I started doing my research on these reserves almost 40 years ago, and I still do,” Harrison explained, noting today the nearly 40 UC reserves across California. “There's nothing like it and it’s an amazing resource. Not only is there this beautiful piece of land that protects some special part of the natural heritage, but over time it develops this kind of knowledge base.”
Looking ahead
The future of Harrison’s work focuses on the effects of climate change and its impacts across the state, including “potentially a lot of change in forests” due to increased temperature, lack of water and fires.
From the research opportunities in the “middle of nowhere” at McLaughlin reserve to her roles on campus, Harrison has found her place and values at Davis.
“I heard somebody say once: ‘We don't hire stars, we make them,’” Harrison said. “Davis is a really wonderful place. Despite all the challenges we face, I hope that we can stay that way. I really want people to understand how important that is.”
José Vadi is a writer for Dateline UC Davis. Reprinted with permission.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT, astronomers have characterized a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind, but also the most luminous object ever observed.
Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies and they are powered by supermassive black holes. The black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing in mass by the equivalent of one Sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date.
The black holes powering quasars collect matter from their surroundings in a process so energetic that it emits vast amounts of light. So much so that quasars are some of the brightest objects in our sky, meaning even distant ones are visible from Earth. As a general rule, the most luminous quasars indicate the fastest-growing supermassive black holes.
“We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion Suns, and eats just over a Sun per day. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe,” said Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University, or ANU, and lead author of the study published today in Nature Astronomy. The quasar, called J0529-4351, is so far away from Earth that its light took over 12 billion years to reach us.
The matter being pulled in toward this black hole, in the form of a disc, emits so much energy that J0529-4351 is over 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun.
“All this light comes from a hot accretion disc that measures seven light-years in diameter — this must be the largest accretion disc in the Universe," said ANU PhD student and co-author Samuel Lai. Seven light-years is about 15 000 times the distance from the Sun to the orbit of Neptune.
And, remarkably, this record-breaking quasar was hiding in plain sight. “It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now,” said co-author Christopher Onken, an astronomer at ANU. He added that this object showed up in images from the European Southern Observatory Schmidt Southern Sky Survey dating back to 1980, but it was not recognised as a quasar until decades later.
Finding quasars requires precise observational data from large areas of the sky. The resulting datasets are so large, researchers often use machine-learning models to analyse them and tell quasars apart from other celestial objects.
However, these models are trained on existing data, which limits the potential candidates to objects similar to those already known. If a new quasar is more luminous than any other previously observed, the programme might reject it and classify it instead as a star not too distant from Earth.
An automated analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite passed over J0529-4351 for being too bright to be a quasar, suggesting it to be a star instead. The researchers identified it as a distant quasar last year using observations from the ANU 2.3-metre telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
Discovering that it was the most luminous quasar ever observed, however, required a larger telescope and measurements from a more precise instrument. The X-shooter spectrograph on ESO’s VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert provided the crucial data.
The fastest-growing black hole ever observed will also be a perfect target for the GRAVITY+ upgrade on ESO’s VLT Interferometer, or VLTI, which is designed to accurately measure the mass of black holes, including those far away from Earth.
Additionally, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT, a 39-meter telescope under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert, will make identifying and characterizing such elusive objects even more feasible.
Finding and studying distant supermassive black holes could shed light on some of the mysteries of the early Universe, including how they and their host galaxies formed and evolved. But that’s not the only reason why Wolf searches for them.
“Personally, I simply like the chase,” he said. “For a few minutes a day, I get to feel like a child again, playing treasure hunt, and now I bring everything to the table that I have learned since.”
California is taking advantage of this year’s storms to expand water supplies, building off of last year's actions to capture stormwater.
Last year, the Newsom Administration said its actions resulted in three times more groundwater recharge capacity than would have otherwise occurred.
Since 2019, the governor has allocated $1.6 billion for flood preparedness and response, part of the historic $7.3 billion investment package and to strengthen California’s water resilience.
Here’s what the state is doing this year to capture water:
45 BILLION GALLONS: That's how much water California has either permitted or is working to permit for groundwater recharge, enough for 1.3 million Californians’ yearly usage – all during this wet season alone.
CAPTURING 95% OF STORMWATER RUNOFF: The state-funded Santa Anita Dam captured 95% of the stormwater runoff to groundwater recharge facilities in the San Gabriel River Watershed.
NEARLY $1 BILLION TO CAPTURE MORE WATER: California has distributed nearly $1 billion to support 13 recharge, recycled water, and other stormwater capture projects that will add more than 28 billion gallons to the state’s water supplies every year.
BETTER STORMWATER CAPTURE: California has invested more than $160 million to capture, store, and reuse stormwater runoff – helping local governments like Los Angeles County bolster their stormwater infrastructure. Here’s what we did last year to boost California’s ability to capture water:
EXPANDING SUPPLY & STORAGE BY 358 BILLION GALLONS: California bolstered supply and storage through groundwater recharge and other projects, enough for 2.2 million households’ yearly usage.
EXECUTIVE ORDERS & LEGISLATION TO CAPTURE & STORE MORE WATER: During last year’s storms, Governor Newsom signed executive orders and legislation to accelerate stormwater capture to boost groundwater recharge and other conservation measures.
MORE GROUNDWATER RECHARGE & STORMWATER CAPTURE: The state is expanding groundwater recharge by 180 billion gallons in potential capacity — streamlining permits and $1 billion for groundwater recharge projects.
But more water storage is needed — if the Delta Conveyance Project was in effect, this year alone it could have captured 148 billion gallons of water; the Sites Reservoir could hold enough water to serve 7.5 million people for an entire year.
These winter’s storms are another example of California’s changing climate and shifts from one extreme to another.
California has gone from a historic three-year drought to historic snowpack last year, to a series of very intense, warmer, wetter storms that are bringing more rain than snow.
As of Friday morning, the statewide snowpack is 86% of average for this date, and 70% of its April 1 average, which is considered the peak snowpack for the season.
As outlined in Gov. Newsom’s Water Supply Strategy, these kinds of extremes are why we need to continue to invest and be ready with water management strategies like stormwater capture, groundwater recharge, and recycled water to ensure that our water supply remains safe and reliable in a changing climate.