Out on assignment yesterday we found ourselves on the stretch of New Mexico Highway 60 that crosses the Plains of San Agustin, out by the Very Large Array, I got to thinking about long straight roads. Between Magdalena and Datil, 60 runs 23 miles of absolute straight, not a single bend or deviation: It’s …
From this morning’s paper, a visit to Work Case 82B (sub/ad req) at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology, where they keep that which has gone extinct: The Carolina parakeet on the top shelf of Work Case 82B, green with a dingy red head, looks little different from the other 30,000 stuffed …
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Peter Fawcett has a terrific paper in Nature this week on southwestern megadrought. I’ve been “upstream” (as the science journos like to say) for a while, having been along when Peter and others did some of their very first field work in the Valle Grande in Northern New Mexico back in 2003, and I’ve been …
No obvious explanation comes to mind for this remarkable correlation in Google Ngrams of “New Mexico” and “Arizona”. I checked a bunch of other neighboring states in various combinations, and nothing comes close. Anyone?
I had the distinct privilege yesterday of sitting down with my ABQJournal Washington bureau colleague Mike Coleman (the sitting was virtual – Coleman was in DC) and penning a quick look at Jeff Bingaman’s remarkable career (sub/ad req) on the occasion of his announcement that he will not run for a sixth term in the …
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I love our winter color palatte. This is one of the main ditches at the Bosque del Apache, a bird refuge on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque. Taken in December a few years back.
From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req): [I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees …
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We’ve been remarkably cold here in New Mexico this week. Yesterday, it turned into a major infrastructure problem, which forced me to very quickly get up to speed on how our state’s natural gas infrastructure works, on account of because a bunch of people had theirs turned off. From the morning paper (sub/ad req): The …
Struck by the numbers on dairy industry groundwater contamination in New Mexico, I’ve been poking around in the regulatory issues involved. Here’s a bit of what I found (sub/ad req): Dairies are found throughout New Mexico, but are especially concentrated in the southeastern part of the state, where growth of industrial dairy operations has made …
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From the newspaper this week, a look at the bargain that was struck to win support for the New START nuke deal with the Russians (sub/ad req), which includes money for a new plutonium lab at Los Alamos to replace its aging CMR building – despite dramatic cost increases and schedule delays since the project …
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