Good morning.

Whitewater will see a foggy morning, followed by a cloudy day, with a high of forty-seven today.

On this day in 1908, Pres. Roosevelt makes the Grand Canyon a national monument:

On this day in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt places the Grand Canyon under public protection, declaring it a national monument. In a statement made during a visit to the Grand Canyon in 1903, Roosevelt indicated his intention to preserve one of America’s most unique natural sites. He urged Americans to “let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”

Miners had discovered valuable mineral resources in the Grand Canyon in the 1800s, yet extraction was a dangerous and expensive task. At the beginning of the 20th century, mining claims waned while tourism increased. Photographers, writers and painters captured the Grand Canyon’s dramatic beauty in their works and, with improvements in transportation, the Grand Canyon became a popular tourist destination.

1887 – Aldo Leopold Born
On this date Aldo Leopold, a major player in the modern environmental movement,  was born. A conservationist, professor, and author, Leopold graduated from Yale University and worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Southwest. He rose to the rank of chief of operations. In 1924 he became associate director of the Forest Products Laboratory at Madison. In 1933 he was appointed chair of game management at the University of Wisconsin. In 1943, Leopold was instrumental in establishing the first U.S. soil conservation demonstration area, in Coon Valley in 1934. As a member of the state Conservation Commission, he was influential in the acquisition of natural areas by the state. His reflections on nature and conservation appear in A Sand County Almanac (1949). [Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, p.227]

Google-a-Day has a sports question: “The basis of modern Fantasy Football was developed by Wilfred Winkenbach in 1962, laying the blueprint for a League that was known by what acronym?”

Good morning.

Our forecast for Thursday calls for a high of forty-one, with an even chance of rain in the afternoon.

What happens when a deer bursts through a window and runs around a classroom? This:

On this day in 1946, the United Nations General Assembly first convened. Here’s how James Reston of the New York Times began his account of that opening session:

London, Jan. 10 — The fifty-one nations of the greatest war-time coalition in history, representing four-fifths of the people in the world, started today another chapter in man’s melancholy search for peace and security.

One hundred and forty-seven days after the close of the war that cost more than 20,000,000 casualties and left countless millions homeless, and on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the ratification of the ill-fated League of Nations Covenant, the nations met this afternoon in the blue and gold auditorium of the Central Hall of Westminster for the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

Google-a-Day offers quite the history question: “Who ran for the office of VP on the ticket with the candidate who lost the first time to the man honored at 200 Southeast 4th Street, Abilene, Kansas?”

Good morning.

It’s a sunny Wednesday for the Whippet City, with a high of forty-one, and west winds at 10 to 15 mph. We’ll have 9h 14m of sunlight, 10h 18m of daylight, and tomorrow will be one minute longer.

Discovery takes more than one form, and comes from more than one place. Consider the Ars Technica story, 15 potential planets in habitable zones found by citizen scientists:

It’s distinctly possible that the first truly Earth-like planet in another star system will be discovered by a non-scientist.

Well, that’s not quite true: the process of discovery is more complicated than that. However, volunteers working with exoplanet data from NASA’s Kepler telescope recently identified 42 planet candidates orbiting relatively nearby stars. Of those, 20 potentially lie within the habitable zone of their systems, meaning the basic conditions could be right for liquid surface water. One of these worlds, known as PH2 b, is definitely a Jupiter-sized planet clearly within its star’s habitable zone. While the planet itself is unlikely to harbor conditions suitable for life, perhaps it has moons that would.

These volunteers were from Planet Hunters, part of the Zooniverse family of citizen science projects. Several Zooniverse efforts have yielded a number of scientific papers, proving that real science can arise from crowdsourcing. The latest Planet Hunter paper, which will be published in the highly ranked Astrophysical Journal, credited more than 40 citizen scientists, a collaboration that does credit both to them and to the professional scientists they worked with.

On this day in 1493, a misidentification:

…Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, sees three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and describes them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” Six months earlier, Columbus (1451-1506) set off from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, hoping to find a western trade route to Asia. Instead, his voyage, the first of four he would make, led him to the Americas, or “New World.”

From Google-a-Day, a question about Madison Square Garden: “The first fight ever held in the Madison Square Garden ring was lost by what former and future champ?”