CLEARLAKE, Calif. — A Clearlake Police officer has been honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving for his efforts to stop impaired driving in the city.
On Tuesday, Officer Daniel Eagle received MADD’s recognition award during the organization’s awards ceremony in Citrus Heights.
This award recognized Officer Eagle for his dedication to driving under the influence, or DUI, enforcement.
In 2022, Officer Eagle made 30 DUI arrests, officials said.
Police said the arrests helped to prevent the potential for traffic collisions and the unnecessary risk to citizens of the community and those traveling through it.
The Clearlake Police Department publicly thanked Eagle for his dedication and service to the community.
Eagle has been a valued member of the Clearlake Police Department since 2018.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — The Clearlake City Council on Thursday evening approved an agreement with the Konocti Unified School District to reestablish a school resource officer at the district.
Police Chief Tim Hobbs noted in his written report to the council that there hadn’t been a school resource officer, or SRO, assigned to the district since October 2020.
Lt. Martin Snyder, who was on hand to give the report on behalf of Hobbs, explained that the Clearlake Police Department’s staffing level now allows for assigning one officer as a full-time SRO.
Under the memorandum of understanding the council approved with Konocti Unified, the district will pay $142,956.32 to fund the cost of a full-time SRO, which includes salary, benefits, overtime, training and vehicle usage costs. The city also can recover additional overtime costs for other officers used at school events, according to Hobbs’ written report.
Konocti Unified’s superintendent, Dr. Becky Salato, told the council that, on behalf of the school district, she was grateful for the council’s consideration.
She said it has been a tough three years since the district last had an SRO in October 2020.
At the same time, she said they truly appreciate the police department. In the interim, even without an SRO, Salato said the police department responds immediately to the district.
She added that the SRO is a “super important” position for the school district.
Councilman Russ Cremer moved to approve the agreement, which was seconded by Councilwoman Joyce Overton and approved by the council 3-0. Council members David Claffey and Russell Perdock were absent.
In other business, the council awarded a $46,715 contract for traffic signal updates at the intersection of Olympic Drive and Old Highway 53 to DC Electric. The funds come from the Coronavirus Response and Relief supplemental appropriations through Caltrans.
The council also awarded a contract for guardrail installation to Midstate Barrier for $46,500.
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.
New research by scientists from NASA and Japan’s Osaka University suggests that rogue planets — worlds that drift through space untethered to a star — far outnumber planets that orbit stars.
The results imply that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by May 2027, could find a staggering 400 Earth-mass rogue worlds. Indeed, this new study has already identified one such candidate.
“We estimate that our galaxy is home to 20 times more rogue planets than stars — trillions of worlds wandering alone,” said David Bennett, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of two papers describing the results. “This is the first measurement of the number of rogue planets in the galaxy that is sensitive to planets less massive than Earth.”
The team’s findings stem from a nine-year survey called MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics), conducted at the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand.
Microlensing events occur when an object such as a star or planet comes into near-perfect alignment with an unrelated background star from our vantage point. Because anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time, light from the distant star bends around the nearer object as it passes close by.
The nearer object acts as a natural lens, creating a brief spike in the brightness of the background star’s light that gives astronomers clues about the intervening object that they can’t get any other way.
“Microlensing is the only way we can find objects like low-mass free-floating planets and even primordial black holes,” said Takahiro Sumi, a professor at Osaka University, and lead author of the paper with a new estimate of our galaxy’s rogue planets. “It’s very exciting to use gravity to discover objects we could never hope to see directly.”
The roughly Earth-mass rogue planet the team found marks the second discovery of its kind. The paper describing the finding will appear in a future issue of The Astronomical Journal. A second paper, which presents a demographic analysis that concludes that rogue planets are six times more abundant than worlds that orbit stars in our galaxy, will be published in the same journal.
Pint-size planets
In only a few decades, we've gone from wondering whether the worlds in our solar system are alone in the cosmos to discovering more than 5,300 planets outside our solar system. The vast majority of these newfound worlds are either huge, extremely close to their host star, or both. By contrast, the team’s results suggest that rogue planets tend to be on the petite side.
“We found that Earth-size rogues are more common than more massive ones,” Sumi said. “The difference in star-bound and free-floating planets’ average masses holds a key to understanding planetary formation mechanisms.”
World-building can be chaotic, with all of the forming celestial bodies gravitationally interacting as they settle into their orbits. Planetary lightweights aren’t tethered as strongly to their star, so some of these interactions end up flinging such worlds off into space. So begins a solitary existence, hidden amongst the shadows between stars.
In one of the early episodes of the original Star Trek series, the crew encounters one such lone planet amid a so-called star desert. They were surprised to ultimately find Gothos, the starless planet, habitable.
While such a world may be plausible, the team emphasizes that the newly detected “rogue Earth” probably doesn’t share many other characteristics with Earth beyond a similar mass.
Roman’s hunt for hidden worlds
Microlensing events that reveal solitary planets are extraordinarily rare, so one key to finding more is to cast a wider net. That’s just what Roman will do when it launches by May 2027.
“Roman will be sensitive to even lower-mass rogue planets since it will observe from space,” said Naoki Koshimoto, who led the paper announcing the detection of a candidate terrestrial-mass rogue world. Now an assistant professor at Osaka University, he conducted this research at Goddard. “The combination of Roman’s wide view and sharp vision will allow us to study the objects it finds in more detail than we can do using only ground-based telescopes, which is a thrilling prospect.”
Previous best estimates, based on planets found orbiting stars, suggested Roman would spot 50 terrestrial-mass rogue worlds. These new results suggest it could actually find about 400, though we’ll have to wait until Roman begins scanning the skies to make more certain predictions.
Scientists will couple Roman’s future data with ground-based observations from facilities such as Japan's PRIME (Prime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment) telescope, located at the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland. This 1.8-meter telescope will build on MOA’s work by conducting the first wide-area microlensing survey in near-infrared light.
It’s equipped with four detectors from Roman’s detector development program, contributed by NASA as part of an international agreement with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency).
Each microlensing event is a one-time occurrence, meaning astronomers can’t go back and repeat the observations once they’re over. But they’re not instantaneous.
“A microlensing signal from a rogue planet can take from a few hours up to about a day, so astronomers will have a chance to do simultaneous observations with Roman and PRIME,” Koshimoto said.
Seeing them from both Earth and Roman’s location a million miles away will help scientists measure the masses of rogue planets much more accurately than ever before, deepening our understanding of the worlds that grace our galaxy.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Ashley Balzer works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has a full shelter of dogs waiting to be adopted.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Anatolian shepherd, Belgian malinois, border collie, Chihuahua, German shepherd, hound, mastiff, pit bull, plott hound 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.
The following dogs 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.
German shepherd puppy
This male German shepherd puppy is 7 months old, with a short black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 2, ID No. LCAC-A-5315.
Male Great Pyrenees
This 1 and a half year old male Great Pyrenees has a white coat.
He is in kennel No. 3, ID No. LCAC-A-5469.
Female German shepherd
This 3-year-old female German shepherd has a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 4, ID No. LCAC-A-5396.
Anatolian shepherd-mastiff mix
This 3-year-old male Anatolian shepherd-mastiff mix has a short fawn coat.
He is in kennel No. 5, ID No. LCAC-A-5276.
Male Chihuahua
This 5-year-old male Chihuahua has a short tricolor coat.
He is in kennel No. 6, ID No. LCAC-A-5500.
‘Roasie’
“Roasie”is a 2-year-old female pit bull terrier with a short black and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 7, ID No. LCAC-A-5434.
Female pit bull
This 3-year-old female pit bull has a short brown coat.
She is in kennel No. 8, ID No. LCAC-A-5505.
‘Trixie’
“Trixie” is a 3-year-old female hound with a short brown coat.
She is in kennel No. 9, ID No. LCAC-A-5433.
Female pit bull terrier
This 3-year-old female pit bull terrier has a brown and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 10, ID No. LCAC-A-5400.
Female Chihuahua
This 9-year-old female Chihauhua has a short brown and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 11, ID No. LCAC-A-5511.
Female German shepherd
This 2-year-old female German shepherd has a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 12, ID No. LCAC-A-5488.
Male shepherd
This 2 and a half year old male shepherd has a short black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 14, ID No. LCAC-A-5479.
Female border collie
This 2-year-old female border collie has a black and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 15, ID No. LCAC-A-5513.
‘Zeta’
“Zeta” is a 1-year-old female pit bull terrier with a black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 16, ID No. LCAC-A-5427.
Male plott hound
This 2-year-old male plott hound has a short brown coat.
He is in kennel No. 18, ID No. LCAC-A-5143.
Male Chihuahua-terrier mix
This 2-year-old male Chihuahua-terrier mix has a short white coat.
She is in kennel No. 20, ID No. LCAC-A-5381.
Female Chihuahua
This 2-year-old female Chihuahua has a short brown and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 21, ID No. LCAC-A-5379.
Male shepherd
This 2-year-old male shepherd has a black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 22, ID No. LCAC-A-5423.
Male pit bull
This 3-year-old male American pit bull has a short gray and white coat.
He is in kennel No. 23, ID No. LCAC-A-5499.
Female pit bull terrier
This 6-year-old female pit bull terrier has a short tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 24, ID No. LCAC-A-5410.
Male pit bull terrier
This 4-year-old male pit bull terrier has a short gray coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 25, ID No. LCAC-A-5446.
Male shepherd
This 1 and a half year old male shepherd has a short tricolor coat.
He is in kennel No. 26, ID No. LCAC-A-5424.
Female shepherd
This 2-year-old female shepherd has a short yellow and white coat.
She is in kennel No. 27, ID No. LCAC-A-5369.
Male pit bull puppy
This 5-month-old male pit bull puppy has a white coat.
He is in kennel No. 29, ID No. LCAC-A-5325.
Male Belgian malinois
This 1 and a half year old male Belgian malinois has a tan and black coat.
He is in kennel No. 30, ID No. LCAC-A-5409.
Male shepherd
This 2-year-old male shepherd has a short tan coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 31, ID No. LCAC-A-5344.
Male shepherd mix puppy
This 6-month-old male shepherd mix puppy has a black coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 32, ID No. LCAC-A-5408.
Female shepherd mix
This 2-year-old female shepherd mix has a short yellow coat.
She is in kennel No. 33, ID No. LCAC-A-5277.
Female shepherd
This 10-month-old female shepherd has a tricolor coat.
She is in kennel No. 34, ID No. LCAC-A-5323.
‘Jojo’
“Jojo” is a one and a half year old female pit bull terrier with a short tricolor coat.
She is in kennel foster care, ID No. LCAC-A-5312.
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.
Camp Smokey’s interagency team will present a new wildland firefighter memorial to the exhibit at the 2023 California State Fair at Cal Expo.
An official ceremony will take place Thursday, July 27, at 2:15 p.m., at the Camp Smokey Incident Command post at the Cal Expo grounds in Sacramento.
The memorial was designed in remembrance of all wildland firefighters who have made the ultimate sacrifice and will be a place where everyone can pay respects to fallen firefighters across this great nation.
Fire management leaders and guest speakers will be on hand to share the journey of this memorial from its concept and design to creation and installation.
Camp Smokey’s participating agencies would like to remind everyone to be careful while engaged in any activity that can cause a spark or fire — indoors or out. Remember, only you can prevent wildfires.
The 2023 California State Fair in Sacramento opened on Friday July 14. Every year through a coordinated interagency collaboration the U.S. Forest Service, Cal Fire, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Firefighters Burn Institute bring visitors of all ages a fun, educational and interactive fire safety and prevention exhibit called Camp Smokey.
This event will be open to the public inside the California State Fair.
For more information on Camp Smokey, please visit the Camp Smokey Facebook page.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — A decade after a landslide began destroying homes in the Lakeside Heights subdivision and impacting Hill Road, the county of Lake is preparing to begin purchasing properties necessary to make repairs to the slide area.
On Tuesday, Public Works Director Scott De Leon requested, and received, the approval from the Board of Supervisors to establish just compensation for properties to be purchased for the Hill Road Slide Repair and Restoration Project.
Early in 2013, a landslide developed at the 29-home Lakeside Heights subdivision, which sits above Hill Road and across from the Sutter Lakeside Hospital campus.
Ultimately, the slide would destroy six homes and lead to repeated wintertime closures of Hill Road when rain would cause the slide to move across the roadway.
Those closures of Hill Road have been a particular concern. “Hill Road is our primary route to Sutter Hospital from the Northshore communities so it's a very important road for us to keep open,” De Leon said.
In 2014, the homeowners filed suit against the county, alleging that its water system was to blame. The county settled with the homeowners for $4.5 million in 2017.
The work to plan and design the project has been underway for years. De Leon said numerous issues led to the project delays, including the lawsuit.
However, now the repair project has finally been designed and De Leon said his staff is in the process of acquiring the right of way necessary to complete the project.
De Leon said the item he took to the board on Tuesday was meant to accomplish a few things, including meeting the requirements of federal and state codes.
Because federal funds are being used for the project, De Leon said the board needed to establish just compensation for the properties that the county wants to acquire in order to be in accordance with federal code requirements. That compensation cannot be less than the approved appraisal of the fair market value of the property.
De Leon’s report included a document that listed nine properties that the county wants to purchase for the project, as well as the fair market value of each, determined by an appraisal by the county’s consultant, Bender Rosenthal Inc., and formally reviewed and certified by Sierra West Valuation in accordance with federal code requirements.
A review of a Lake County GIS map shows that the properties in question are vacant lots, primarily located at the edge of the Lakeside Heights subdivision and overlooking Hill Road.
The properties proposed for purchase and their base market value are as follows:
De Leon said state code says that a legislative body of a local agency has to grant authority to a negotiator regarding the price and terms of payment before a purchase, sale or exchange, and also has to identify its negotiators, the people with whom they can negotiate and the real property that is the subject of the negotiations.
He said he and Bender Rosenthal representatives will be negotiators on behalf of the county with the property owners.
Any subsequent negotiations will be held in closed session with proper notice, said De Leon.
He said he staff recommended that the board determine that the just compensation for the properties listed is not less than the fair market values.
Supervisor Bruno Sabatier asked about the timeline for the project’s completion, explaining that he had issues with liability with property that may be sliding onto vehicles and pedestrians. “We do continue to see that each winter.”
Sabatier said the process was done correctly and he agreed with the quotes and appraisals presented. “What liability are we taking on if this is a 10-year project versus if it’s going to happen within the next foreseeable future?”
“We have some funding deadlines for construction. We need to get this project built,” said De Leon.
He said there won’t be a 10-year delay between acquisition of properties and construction.
While he doesn’t think it will be built this year, if the process goes smoothly, at the latest it would be constructed by next summer.
Sabatier said he felt that timeline was doable.
De Leon said all of the property acquisitions are going to be incorporated into the repair project’s design.
Supervisor Michael Green, in whose district the project is located, questioned what the board would be negotiating in closed session if they can’t go below the minimum prices or above fair market value.
He said he wasn’t going to ask De Leon for the reasoning behind the item, but added, “It’s going to box us in during the closed session.”
“Let’s just wait and have that conversation,” said Board Chair Jessica Pyska.
Green moved to approve the item, with Sabatier seconding and the board voting 4-0. Supervisor Moke Simon was absent for the discussion.
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.
Despite misconceptions and stereotypes – ranging from what librarians Gretchen Keer and Andrew Carlos have described as the “middle-aged, bun-wearing, comfortably shod, shushing librarian” to the “sexy librarian … and the hipster or tattooed librarian” – library professionals are more than book jockeys, and they do more than read at story time.
They are experts in classification, pedagogy, data science, social media, disinformation, health sciences, music, art, media literacy and, yes, storytelling.
But these battles are not new; book banning can be traced back to 1637 in the U.S., when the Puritans banned a book by Massachusetts Bay colonist William Pynchon they saw as heretical.
Library professionals maintain that books are what education scholar Rudine Sims Bishop called the “mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors” that allow readers to learn about themselves and others and gain empathy for those who are different from them.
The drive to challenge, ban or censor books has not only changed the lives of librarians across the nation. It’s also changing the way librarians are now educated to enter the profession. As a library school educator, I hear the anecdotes, questions and concerns from library workers who are on the front lines of the current fight and are not sure how to react or respond.
What once, and still is, a curriculum that includes book selection, program planning and serving diverse communities in the classroom, my faculty colleagues and I are now expanding to include discussions and resources on how students, once they become professional librarians, can physically, legally and financially protect themselves and their organizations.
More than shelving books
Degreed librarians are professionals with master’s degrees from nationally accredited academic programs. I have personally gone through such a program and now teach in one.
In fact, many librarians who work on college and university campuses have subject masters and doctorates, and K-12 librarians must have a valid teaching license or a state endorsement to work in a school library or media center. They know how to select appropriate materials for communities.
Librarians adhere to core values, standards and professional ethics. They see it as their duty to create and maintain a collection that reflects the diverse needs and interests of the entire community, not just for a select, vocal part of the community. The Freedom to Read statement of the American Library Association tells us: “It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians, as guardians of the people’s freedom to read, to contest encroachments upon that freedom by individuals or groups seeking to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large; and by the government whenever it seeks to reduce or deny public access to public information.”
Books are challenged and banned for many reasons, including profanity, depictions of sex, LGBTQIA+ content, depictions of sexual abuse, equity, diversity and inclusion content, depictions of drug use and alcoholism, anti-police rhetoric and providing sex education. Reasons for challenges can be personally subjective, and claims that books present divisive topics that should be excluded from collections are increasing.
George Johnson, author of the frequently banned book “All Boys aren’t Blue,” has said that he believes books are challenged to eliminate narratives that elucidate the truths of marginalized groups and depict the everyday diversity of their lives. Johnson believes the stories of the LGBTQIA+ and minoritized communities are specifically under attack.
Johnson is a complainant in a recently filed federal lawsuit against Florida’s Escambia County School District and School Board, which unanimously voted to remove Johnson’s book from their school libraries because of passages that describe a sexual experience.
But with the current controversies about racially diverse and LGBTQIA+ books, policies are no longer enough to demonstrate the integrity of professionally curated library collections.
The current threats to librarians and the books they circulate are necessitating a shift in the content of graduate library education. Librarians obviously need to know the content of books. But educators like me now know we need to provide graduate students with information about how to physically and legally protect themselves and their organizations.
When we teach intellectual freedom, we also teach students how to prepare for protesters and contentious board meetings. When we teach information professionals how to select materials for their libraries, we emphasize their need to know how to articulate, in writing, the reasons for having a particular book, film or material item in their collection.
I believe that our students now need to consider getting professional liability insurance in case they are sued for buying a contested book. And when we teach story-time planning, we can pair that with strategies to devise a safety plan in case they are threatened or receive a bomb threat because of their work.
Librarians and the future librarians we teach have always loved books and reading. While our work has changed in this era of increasing censorship, in one sense it has not: We’re still devoted to the idea that we serve our communities by providing them with books that open the world to them and give them the opportunity to learn about themselves and others.
Erika Garcia, University of Southern California; Md Mostafijur Rahman, University of Southern California, and Rob Scot McConnell, University of Southern California
Heat waves and air pollution from wildfire smoke and other sources are each problematic for human health, particularly for vulnerable populations such as older adults. But what happens when they hit at the same time?
We examined over 1.5 million deaths from 2014 to 2020 registered in California – a state prone to summer heat waves and air pollution from wildfires – to find out.
Deaths spike when both risks are high
The number of deaths rose both on hot days and on days with high levels of fine particulate air pollution, known as PM2.5. But on days when an area was hit with a double whammy of both high heat and high air pollution, the effects were much higher than for each condition alone.
The risk of death on those extra-hot and polluted days was about three times greater than the effect of either high heat or high air pollution alone.
The more extreme the temperatures and pollution, the higher the risk. During the top 10% of hottest and most polluted days, the risk of death increased by 4% compared to days without extremes. During the top 1%, it increased by 21%; and among older adults over age 75, the risk of death increased by more than a third on those days.
Why risks are higher when both hit at once
There are several ways the combined exposure to extreme heat and particulate air pollution can harm human health.
Oxidative stress is the most common biological pathway linked with particulate air pollution and heat exposure. Oxidative stress is an imbalance between production of highly reactive molecules known as reactive oxygen species, or ROS, and the body’s ability to remove them. It’s been linked with lung diseases, among other illnesses.
Antioxidants help clean up these molecules, but particulate air pollution and heat disrupt this balance through excessive metabolic ROS production and lowered antioxidant activity.
Older adults may be more susceptible to effects of extreme heat and air pollution exposure, in part because this stress comes on top of age-related chronic health conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic lung disease. Impaired body temperature regulation in response to heat can also occur with aging. And older adults may be less mobile and therefore less able to get to cooling centers or to medical care and be less able to afford air conditioning.
A future of high temperatures and air pollution
This isn’t just a California problem. Climate change will increase exposure to high heat and air pollution in many parts of the country.
Yearly average temperatures in the U.S. are already more than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) warmer than at the beginning of the 1900s. By the end of this century, global temperatures are on pace to be nearly 5 F (2.7 C) warmer. Dangerous extreme heat waves, currently rare, will become more common.
Further research is needed to better understand these effects, such as the full impact of wildfire smoke exposure. However, enough is known that people should take measures to reduce their risk of harm during periods of extreme heat or air pollution.
That means staying well hydrated and keeping cool. Shopping malls and other air-conditioned public spaces can provide a refuge from heat. Home air conditioning, especially during nighttime, can reduce mortality. A portable air filter in the bedroom can markedly reduce particle pollution levels.
People with symptoms of heat stress, such as headache, nausea, dizziness or confusion, especially the elderly, should seek medical care.
Many county and state health departments already provide alerts about extreme heat and extreme air pollution. Developing a special category of alert during co-occurring extremes may be beneficial to public health.
Governments also need to take steps now to avoid the worst future climate change scenarios. Some best practices for cities include creating cooling shade cover and green space that will also reduce particle pollution.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — With the National Weather Service’s Eureka office forecasting fire weather conditions in Lake County on Friday afternoon, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services, in conjunction with local fire districts, is urging residents and visitors to exercise particular caution.
“Fire weather” is a term used when hot temperatures combine with low relative humidity and gusty winds to increase the risk of fire starts and rapid spread, OES said.
The National Weather Service also has issued a heat advisory from 11 a.m. Friday to 11 p.m. Saturday due to high temperatures up to 107 degrees throughout Lake County.
OES and fire officials are asking people to follow simple tips to avoid starting a fire.
Those tips include:
• Do not drive onto tall vegetation; • Do not participate in any spark producing activities including, but not limited to, outdoor welding or grinding and mowing. • When towing, ensure chains are not dragging. • Do not conduct outdoor cooking, such as barbecues, near dry vegetation. Always have a fire extinguisher nearby.
Beyond Friday, daytime temperatures also are expected to top the century mark on Saturday before dropping into the high 90s on Sunday and the lower 90s early next week. Conditions at night are anticipated to be in the low to mid 60s.
While the temperatures remain high, officials remind community members to drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room and out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors.
Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside, rescheduling strenuous activities to early morning or evening.
Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, and wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing when possible.
Lake County OES’ website has additional preparedness information including how-to pack a go-bag on a reduced budget video, children’s activities and links to other agency websites.
Follow Lake County OES, Lake County Sheriff and fire districts on social media for ongoing information.
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.
BERKELEY, Calif. — Scientists have devised a new technique for finding and vetting possible radio signals from other civilizations in our galaxy — a major advance in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, that will significantly boost confidence in any future detection of alien life.
Most of today's SETI searches are conducted by Earth-based radio telescopes, which means that any ground or satellite radio interference — ranging from Starlink satellites to cellphones, microwaves and even car engines — can produce a radio blip that mimics a technosignature of a civilization outside our solar system. Such false alarms have raised and then dashed hopes since the first dedicated SETI program began in 1960.
Currently, researchers vet these signals by pointing the telescope in a different place in the sky, then return a few times to the spot where the signal was originally detected to confirm it wasn't a one-off. Even then, the signal could be something weird produced on Earth.
The new technique, developed by researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project at the University of California, Berkeley, checks for evidence that the signal has actually passed through interstellar space, eliminating the possibility that the signal is mere radio interference from Earth.
Breakthrough Listen, the most comprehensive SETI search anywhere, monitors the northern and southern skies with radio telescopes in search of technosignatures. It also targets thousands of individual stars in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is the likely direction a civilization would beam a signal, with a particular focus on the center of the galaxy.
“I think it's one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, or BSRC, which operates the world's longest running SETI program. “It's the first time where we have a technique that, if we just have one signal, potentially could allow us to intrinsically differentiate it from radio frequency interference. That's pretty amazing, because if you consider something like the Wow! signal, these are often a one-off.”
Siemion was referring to a famed 72-second narrowband signal observed in 1977 by a radio telescope in Ohio. The astronomer who discovered the signal, which looked like nothing produced by normal astrophysical processes, wrote “Wow!” in red ink on the data printout. The signal has not been observed since.
“The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal,” Siemion said. “And if a signal doesn't repeat, there's not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! Signal. Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.”
The technique is described in a paper appearing today in The Astrophysical Journal by UC Berkeley graduate student Bryan Brzycki; Siemion; Brzycki's thesis adviser Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of astronomy; and colleagues at Cornell University and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
Siemion noted that, in the future, Breakthrough Listen will be employing the so-called scintillation technique, along with sky location, during its SETI observations, including with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia — the world’s largest steerable radio telescope — and the MeerKAT array in South Africa.
Distinguishing a signal from ET
For more than 60 years, SETI researchers have scanned the skies in search of signals that look different from the typical radio emissions of stars and cataclysmic events, such as supernovas.
One key distinction is that natural cosmic sources of radio waves produce a broad range of wavelengths — that is, broadband radio waves — whereas technical civilizations, like our own, produce narrowband radio signals. Think radio static versus a tuned-in FM station.
Because of the huge background of narrowband radio bursts from human activity on Earth, finding a signal from outer space is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
So far, no narrowband radio signals from outside our solar system have been confirmed, though Breakthrough Listen found one interesting candidate — dubbed BLC1 — in 2020. Later analysis determined that it was almost certainly due to radio interference, Siemion said.
Siemion and his colleagues realized, however, that real signals from extraterrestrial civilizations should exhibit features caused by passage through the ISM that could help discriminate between Earth- and space-based radio signals.
Thanks to past research describing how the cold plasma in the interstellar medium, primarily free electrons, affect signals from radio sources such as pulsars, astronomers now have a good idea how the ISM affects narrowband radio signals.
Such signals tend to rise and fall in amplitude over time — that is, they scintillate.
This is because the signals are slightly refracted, or bent, by the intervening cold plasma, so that when the radio waves eventually reach Earth by different paths, the waves interfere, both positively and negatively.
Our atmosphere produces a similar scintillation, or twinkle, that affects the pinprick of optical light from a star. Planets, which are not point sources of light, do not twinkle.
Brzycki developed a computer algorithm, available as a Python script, that analyzes the scintillation of narrowband signals and plucks out those that dim and brighten over periods of less than a minute, indicating they've passed through the ISM.
“This implies that we could use a suitably tuned pipeline to unambiguously identify artificial emission from distant sources vis-à-vis terrestrial interference,” de Pater said. “Further, even if we didn’t use this technique to find a signal, this technique could, in certain cases, confirm a signal originating from a distant source, rather than locally. This work represents the first new method of signal confirmation beyond the spatial reobservation filter in the history of radio SETI.”
Brzycki is now conducting radio observations at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to show that the technique can quickly weed out Earth-based radio signals and perhaps even detect scintillation in a narrowband signal — a technosignature candidate.
“Maybe we can identify this effect within individual observations and see that attenuation and brightening and actually say that the signal is undergoing that effect,” he said. “It's another tool that we have available now.”
The technique will be useful only for signals that originate more than about 10,000 light years from Earth, since a signal must travel through enough of the ISM to exhibit detectable scintillation.
Anything originating nearby — the BLC-1 signal, for example, seemed to be coming from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri — would not exhibit this effect.
Other co-authors of the paper are James Cordes of Cornell, Brian Lacki of BSRC and Vishal Gajjar and Sofia Sheikh of both BSRC and the SETI Institute. Breakthrough Listen is managed by the Breakthrough Initiatives, a program sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
A private professional fiduciary (a licensed and bonded representative) can play a necessary and key representative role in administering a person’s estate plan.
They can assist in a wide variety of ways, including the following: To settle a deceased person’s trust or probate estate; to administer a special needs trust; to administer a support trust; to administer a disabled person’s household finances; to make personal care decisions and arrangements as an agent for a disabled person; and to advocate, as a representative, for a disabled person’s government benefits.
When there is neither a suitable family member nor a close trusted friend to act in a representative capacity (e.g., as a successor trustee or as an agent under a power of attorney or health care directive), then nominating a professional fiduciary merits consideration.
Also a private fiduciary can be nominated as a backup alternative trustee or agent, behind one or more family members.
Having an alternative may mean avoiding otherwise unnecessary court proceedings, including even a conservatorship, when the time arises for administration.
Even when there are family or friends who would be willing to serve, difficult or complex situations may make a professional fiduciary better suited to serve.
In a family where conflict amongst the children is expected over the administration of a parents’ estate, having a neutral private fiduciary instead of one of the conflicted family members may alleviate and facilitate the proper and more amicable administration of the estate.
Another reason why professional fiduciaries are desirable is the fact that they are professionals. In California, the Department of Consumer Affairs – Professional Fiduciaries Bureau (“PFD”), oversees the licensing and, where necessary, disciplining of professional fiduciaries.
To become licensed, a fiduciary must pass an examination, meet thirty hours of approved education courses, have experience (or training) relevant to being a fiduciary, such as working as a bank or trust company officer, attorney, accountant or social worker.
In addition, professional fiduciaries must pass a background check and be bonded.
A fiduciary’s bond is an important additional assurance to whomever the fiduciary serves. A bond pays, up to its coverage limits, for damages caused by the negligence or misconduct of a fiduciary.
For example, if a private fiduciary were to embezzle (steal) money, then the persons directly harmed by the embezzlement would be able to claim against the bond. Unfortunately, this does happen from time to time.
Professional fiduciaries vary significantly in their skills and competencies. When selecting a professional fiduciary due diligence is needed.
That is, check the PFB’s website both to verify the fiduciary is licensed and to see if their record shows any disciplinary action; ask the fiduciary for references; go to the Professional Fiduciary Association of California (www.pfac.org) for a directory of member fiduciaries doing business in your location; and do a search on google using the fiduciary’s name to read any reviews that exist online.
A private fiduciary is typically compensated on an hourly basis, which varies mostly based on the fiduciary’s experience and geographic location. The cost is an important factor in deciding whether to hire a private fiduciary. Of course, there is also a cost with not having a trust, estate or personal care needs properly administered.
The foregoing discussion is neither exhaustive nor legal advice regarding how to proceed when considering a professional fiduciary. Discuss the possible benefits, risks and expenses associated with having a professional fiduciary with your estate planning attorney.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has nearly three dozen dogs waiting to be adopted into new families.
The Clearlake Animal Control website continues to list 34 dogs for adoption.
This week’s dogs include “Emma,” a female Rottweiler mix with a black and tan coat.
“Henry” is a male pit bull terrier mix with a red and white coat.
“Clyde” is a male Great Pyrenees mix with a fluffy black and white 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. or visit Clearlake Animal Control 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.