Lenticular clouds

Lenticular clouds are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes, normally aligned perpendicular to the wind direction. Lenticular clouds can be separated into altocumulus standing lenticularis (ACSL), stratocumulus standing lenticular (SCSL), and cirrocumulus standing lenticular (CCSL).

Where stable moist air flows over a mountain or a range of mountains, a series of large-scale standing waves may form on the downwind side. If the temperature at the crest of the wave drops to or below the dewpoint, moisture in the air may condense to form lenticular clouds. As the moist air moves back down into the trough of the wave, the cloud may evaporate back into vapor. Under certain conditions, long strings of lenticular clouds can form near the crest of each successive wave, creating a formation known as a ‘wave cloud’. The wave systems cause large vertical air movements and so enough water vapor may condense to produce precipitation. The clouds have been mistaken for UFOs (or “visual cover” for UFOs) because these clouds have a characteristic lens appearance and smooth saucer-like shape. Bright colors (called Irisation) are sometimes seen along the edge of lenticular clouds.

I have seen them around Mount Rainier Washington. They are very cool to see and definitely stand out. Some people refer to them as a stack of pancakes.

If Blood Is Red, Why Are Veins Blue?

Obese People Have ‘Severe Brain Degeneration’

A new study finds obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue than normal-weight individuals. Their brains look 16 years older than the brains of lean individuals, researchers said today.

Those classified as overweight have 4 percent less brain tissue and their brains appear to have aged prematurely by 8 years.

The results, based on brain scans of 94 people in their 70s, represent “severe brain degeneration,” said Paul Thompson, senior author of the study and a UCLA professor of neurology.

“That’s a big loss of tissue and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at much greater risk of Alzheimer’s and other diseases that attack the brain,” said Thompson. “But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s, if you can eat healthily and keep your weight under control.”

The findings are detailed in the online edition of the journal Human Brain Mapping.

Obesity packs many negative health effects, including increased risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and some cancers. It’s also been shown to reduce sexual activity.

More than 300 million worldwide are now classified as obese, according to the World Health Organization. Another billion are overweight. The main cause, experts say: bad diet, including an increased reliance on highly processed foods.

Obese people had lost brain tissue in the frontal and temporal lobes, areas of the brain critical for planning and memory, and in the anterior cingulate gyrus (attention and executive functions), hippocampus (long-term memory) and basal ganglia (movement), the researchers said in a statement today. Overweight people showed brain loss in the basal ganglia, the corona radiata, white matter comprised of axons, and the parietal lobe (sensory lobe).

“The brains of obese people looked 16 years older than the brains of those who were lean, and in overweight people looked 8 years older,” Thompson said.

Obesity is measured by body mass index (BMI), defined as the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters. A BMI over 25 is defined as overweight, and a BMI of over 30 as obese.

World sets ocean temperature record

 

WASHINGTON – Steve Kramer spent an hour and a half swimming in the ocean Sunday — in Maine. The water temperature was 72 degrees — more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City‘s water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.

Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he’s ever swam so long in Maine’s coastal waters. “Usually, you’re in five minutes and you’re out,” he said.

It’s not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world’s oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.

The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. That was 1.1 degree higher than the 20th century average, and beat the previous high set in 1998 by a couple hundredths of a degree. The coolest recorded ocean temperature was 59.3 degrees in December 1909.

Meteorologists said there’s a combination of forces at work this year: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.

The Gulf of Mexico, where warm water fuels hurricanes, has temperatures dancing around 90. Most of the water in the Northern Hemisphere has been considerably warmer than normal. The Mediterranean is about three degrees warmer than normal. Higher temperatures rule in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The heat is most noticeable near the Arctic, where water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees above average. The tongues of warm water could help melt sea ice from below and even cause thawing of ice sheets on Greenland, said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.

Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.

“This warm water we’re seeing doesn’t just disappear next year; it’ll be around for a long time,” said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. It takes five times more energy to warm water than land.

The warmer water “affects weather on the land,” Weaver said. “This is another yet really important indicator of the change that’s occurring.”

Georgia Institute of Technology atmospheric science professor Judith Curry said water is warming in more places than usual, something that has not been seen in more than 50 years.

Add to that an unusual weather pattern this summer where the warmest temperatures seem to be just over oceans, while slightly cooler air is concentrated over land, said Deke Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the climate data center.

The pattern is so unusual that he suggested meteorologists may want to study that pattern to see what’s behind it.

The effects of that warm water are already being seen in coral reefs, said C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s coral reef watch. Long-term excessive heat bleaches colorful coral reefs white and sometimes kills them.

Bleaching has started to crop up in the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — much earlier than usual. Typically, bleaching occurs after weeks or months of prolonged high water temperatures. That usually means September or October in the Caribbean, said Eakin. He found bleaching in Guam Wednesday. It’s too early to know if the coral will recover or die. Experts are “bracing for another bad year,” he said.

The problems caused by the El Nino pattern are likely to get worse, the scientists say.

An El Nino occurs when part of the central Pacific warms up, which in turn changes weather patterns worldwide for many months. El Nino and its cooling flip side, La Nina, happen every few years.

During an El Nino, temperatures on water and land tend to rise in many places, leading to an increase in the overall global average temperature. An El Nino has other effects, too, including dampening Atlantic hurricane formation and increasing rainfall and mudslides in Southern California.

Warm water is a required fuel for hurricanes. What’s happening in the oceans “will add extra juice to the hurricanes,” Curry said.

Hurricane activity has been quiet for much of the summer, but that may change soon, she said. Hurricane Bill quickly became a major storm and the National Hurricane Center warned that warm waters are along the path of the hurricane for the next few days.

Hurricanes need specific air conditions, so warmer water alone does not necessarily mean more or bigger storms, said James Franklin, chief hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami

Welcome

I’m just getting started here and I appreciate your interest after having imported my Yahoo 360* blogs..Tarzan

Global warming has already changed oceans

WASHINGTON — In Washington state , oysters in some areas haven’t reproduced for four years, and preliminary evidence suggests that the increasing acidity of the ocean could be the cause. In the Gulf of Mexico , falling oxygen levels in the water have forced shrimp to migrate elsewhere.

Though two marine-derived drugs, one for treating cancer and the other for pain control, are on the market and 25 others are under development, the fungus growing on seaweed, bacteria in deep sea mud and sea fans that could produce life-saving medicines are under assault from changing the ocean conditions.

Researchers, scientists and Jacques Cousteau’s granddaughter painted a bleak picture Tuesday of the future of oceans and the “blue economy” of the nation’s coastal states.

The hearing before the oceans subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee was expected to focus on how the degradation of the oceans was affecting marine businesses and coastal communities. Instead, much of the testimony focused on how the waters that cover 70 percent of the planet are already changing because of global warming.

Ocean acidification or diseases that thrive in acidified, oxygen-depleted seawater could be responsible for oysters not reproducing in Washington state , said Brad Warren , who oversees the ocean health and acidification program of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership in Seattle . A federal study found that two-thirds of larval blue crabs died when exposed to acidity levels like those currently measured off the West Coast , he said.

Federal studies also found acidity levels in the North Pacific and off Alaska are unusually high compared to other ocean regions. The high acidity is already taking a toll of such tiny species as pteropods, which are an important food for salmon and other fish.

As greenhouse gas emissions increase, billions of tons of carbon dioxide from smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes are absorbed by the oceans. The result is carbonic acid, which dilutes the “rich soup” of calcium carbonate in the seawater that many species, especially on the low end of the food chain, thrive in, Warren said.

“If we lose it, it is gone forever,” Warren said of the oceans’ delicate chemical balance.

In the Gulf of Mexico , Alexandra Cousteau said, the runoff down the Mississippi River from farms in the Midwest has created a dead zone the size of New Jersey where few species can survive. Wetlands in Louisiana are disappearing at the rate of 33 football fields a day as hurricanes grow in strength and frequency because of climate change, she said.

“We must start to realize that there can be no standalone policies, especially as they relate to our water resources,” Cousteau said. “Energy, transportation, climate change, infrastructure, agriculture, urban development: this is where our ocean policy must begin. It is all interconnected.”

Others testified that the economic toll eventually could be enormous for fishing and other ocean-related industries and for the nation’s coastal communities. Taken together, the ocean and coastal economies, including the Great Lakes , provide more than 50 million jobs and make up nearly 60 percent of the nation’s economy.

“Significant environmental changes, such as sea level and sea temperature rise, oxygen depletion and ocean acidification, will dramatically change the landscape, restructuring an array of natural and physical assets as well as cultural and economic,” said Judith Kidlow of the National Ocean Economics Program. “Over the next 30 years, the nation will see the most significant changes in the ocean and coastal economies since the arrival of industrialization and urbanization.”

The subcommittee’s chairman, Sen. Maria Cantwell , D- Wash. , suggested a doubling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget, which is now about $4 billion , and giving the agency additional responsibilities.

Cantwell, however, said the key has to be passing comprehensive climate change legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

“Protecting our oceans is an environmental and economic imperative,” Cantwell said.

Farms downsize with miniature cows

Tekamah, Neb. — Walking through their lowing herd of several hundred cattle, Ali and Kenny Petersen were like two Gullivers on a Lilliputian roundup.

The half-sized cows barely reached Kenny’s waist. The ranch’s border collie stared eye-to-eye with wandering calves.

“Aren’t they sweet?” asked Ali, 52, shooing Half-Pint, Buttercup and a dozen other cattle across a holding pen. “They’re my babies, every little one of them.”

The Petersens once raised normal-sized bovines on this stretch of Nebraska’s rolling eastern grasslands, but with skyrocketing feed costs, the couple decided to downsize.

They bought minicows — compact cattle with stocky bodies, smaller frames and relatively tiny appetites.

Their miniature Herefords consume about half that of a full-sized cow yet produce 50% to 75% of the rib-eyes and fillets, according to researchers and budget-conscious farmers.

“We get more sirloin and less soup bone,” Ali said. “People used to look at them and laugh. Now, they want to own them.”

In the last few years, ranchers across the country have been snapping up mini Hereford and Angus calves that fit in a person’s lap. Farmers who raise mini Jerseys brag how each animal provides 2 to 3 gallons of milk a day, though they complain about having to crouch down on their knees to reach the udders.

“Granny always said I prayed for my milk,” said Tim O’Donnell, 53, who milks his 15 miniature Jerseys twice a day on his farm in Altamont, Ill.

Minicows are not genetically engineered to be tiny, and they’re not dwarfs. They are drawn from original breeds brought to the U.S. from Europe in the 1800s that were smaller than today’s bovine giants, said Ron Lemenager, professor of animal science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

The Petersens’ mini Herefords, with their white faces and rounded auburn-hued bodies, weigh in at a dainty 500 to 700 pounds, compared with 1,300 pounds or more for their heftier brethren.

Big cows emerged as a product of the 1950s and ’60s, when farmers were focused on getting more meat and didn’t fret as much about the efficient use of animal feed or grasslands.

“Feed prices were relatively cheap, and grazing lands were accessible,” Lemenager said. “The plan was to get more meat per animal. But it went way too far. The animals got too big and eat so much.”

Today, there’s little room for inefficiency on a modern farm, and that has led some farmers to consider minicows.

It hasn’t been an easy transition. When the Petersens bought their first dozen animals in the mid-1990s, friends told them they’d lost their minds. Some ranchers said they’d have trouble selling consumers on their mini-steaks. Even their youngest daughter was reluctant to show them at 4-H livestock contests when she was younger.

“I got tired of people sneering and hearing the jokes,” said Kristie Petersen, now 23.

But gradually, a mini-boom in minicows took hold.

Today, there are more than 300 miniature-Hereford breeders in the U.S., up from fewer than two dozen in 2000. And there are about 20,000 minicows, compared with fewer than 5,000 a decade ago, according to the International Miniature Cattle Breeds Registry.

Still, the animals represent a minor portion of the 94.5 million head of cattle in the U.S. this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Here in Tekamah, a farming village of 1,900 about 40 miles north of Omaha, the Petersens’ phone steadily rings with tour requests and orders for live animals. The couple have sold animals from the farm’s 300-head herd to cattlemen from Indiana, a pair of bull riders in Texas and a retired couple moving to Missouri.

John Dunham came shopping recently for his 80-year-old father, who raises livestock in South Dakota’s Black Hills. His dad’s farm has been struggling to stay profitable.

“I’m thinking about sneaking a few of them onto the farm,” said Dunham, 50. “Maybe he’ll think his eyes are playing tricks on him.”

The minicows have been a perfect fit with another trend in farm efficiency — the move to ranchettes, smaller operations run by families or small groups of workers. The number of smaller farms has boomed in recent years, growing to nearly 700,000 in 2007 from 580,000 in 2002, according to the latest census by the Department of Agriculture.

“When you have a back four, instead of a back 40 [acres], you need to think small,” said Carolyn Peevler, 60, who runs the Mini Moo Farm in Veedersburg, Ind.

She and her husband, Mark, used to raise goats on their 59-acre farm, but they switched to minicows last year because “we figured they’d be easier to handle as we got older.”

They soon realized they had more field than cattle; one animal needed less than an acre for grazing. Because the minicows could be grass fed, the couple were spending at least half the amount on feed than they would have on regular-sized animals. The minicows also reached their mature weight faster, so they could be sold for meat sooner.

The Peevlers have built their herd up to 16. One steer provides enough beef to fill the couple’s freezer for a year. Carolyn Peevler also considers them “green” red meat: They cause less wear and tear on her pasture land and fences and, she said with a laugh, they emit less methane gas.

“I’m 5-foot-2, and a regular cow is just too much animal for me,” Peevler said. “Besides, these are adorable.”

Their size does have some drawbacks for farmers, who’ve learned they must also scale down their operations.

Richard Gradwohl, a minicow farmer in Kent, Wash., installed partitions in his 24-foot-long trailer to prevent the animals from getting jostled too much. He also got feed troughs and water tanks that sat a foot off the ground because the old ones were too tall. Even his fencing had to be modified.

“You’d be surprised how small a space they can get under,” said Gradwohl, who has written a beginner’s guide for minicow owners.

Martha Mintun and her partner, Fred Joosse, switched to a female veterinarian after they found that the hands of male vets were too large to examine pregnant minicows.

They also had a tough time finding collars for ID tags small enough to stay put on their calves. So the owners of the Sonoma Little Cattle Co. in Santa Rosa, Calif., went to a pet store and bought dog collars. “It wasn’t until later that we realized they had tiny hamburger and hot dog designs on them,” Mintun said.

But no big adjustments have been necessary for student 4-H groups, which have embraced the smaller breeds because they are cheaper to raise and easier to handle. State fairs have exp
anded their lineups to include miniature classes.

There are even rodeos for kids and their wee bucking bulls: The Stephens County Fair & Expo in Duncan, Okla., will host the Mini Bucking Bulls World Finals next month, when 45 riders, ages 7 to 14, will vie for $9,500 and a rhinestone-encrusted belt buckle the size of a tea cup.

The 4-H minicows are a far cry from the full-sized black bull Kristie Petersen had showed when she was in high school. The animal weighed nearly 2,000 pounds. Kristie, with a slender dancer’s frame, barely clears 5-foot-2 when she’s standing tall.

She gritted her teeth when the bull dragged her across the barn.

Now, she shows the family’s minicows at state fairs with pride. But she does try to give the animals a bit of a pep talk before they enter the barn.

“They cower a little bit when they spot those big bulls,” she said, patting the head of Stud, her mini Hereford bull. “But really, who wouldn’t?”

Alaska cracks down on man who feeds wild bears

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Charlie Vandergaw is crazy about bears.

That’s obvious in a documentary made last year by a British filmmaker at Vandergaw’s remote Alaska cabin and featured in the recent Animal Planet series “Stranger Among Bears.” The videos show him scratching the belly of one black bear as if it was the family dog, feeding a cookie to a large black bear sitting under a tree, and feeding dog kibble to a cub from his outstretched hand.

Vandergaw has been coexisting with bears this way for the last 20 years, and he wants to be left alone.

That is not likely to happen now that the state is using a beefed-up law to prosecute Vandergaw for feeding bears. Game officials consider feeding bears a danger to humans, especially if others duplicate the behavior.

Not everyone thinks the state needs to be going after a 70-year-old retired teacher and wrestling coach.

Even if Vandergaw ends up being killed by the bears he loves, that’s the Alaska way, said John Frost, who has been friends with Vandergaw for years. He recalled that when he came to Alaska in 1973 he saw a T-shirt that said “Alaska land of the individual and other endangered species.”

“Yet here we are as a state going to crush this kind, gentle little guy,” Frost said.

The bears at Vandergaw’s cabin about 50 miles northwest of Anchorage are more than bold, said Sean Farley, a research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, who helped troopers serve a search warrant on Farley’s cabin last year.

During the search, bears had be scared off with “cracker shots” that make a loud noise when fired.

If bears were that bold in an Anchorage park or campground, Farley said, he would recommend they be shot right away.

He also noted what happened to filmmaker Richard Terry at Vandergaw’s cabin: “He got whacked and dragged across the yard by one of the bears during filming. Charlie has been nipped and slapped around.”

The state last week charged Vandergaw with 20 counts of illegally feeding game — a charge that could put him in jail for a year and fine him $10,000.

The law was recently changed to include stiffer fines and jail time, and Frost says it was specifically changed to go after his friend, Vandergaw. Farley denies that Vandergaw was the motivation behind the stiffer penalties.

There was no comment from Vandergaw. No one answered the door at his Anchorage home Wednesday and he hasn’t responded to messages. The state has seized the plane that he normally would use to reach the cabin, Bear Haven, which isn’t accessible by road. According to charging documents, the plane was used to transport dog food to the cabin.

Vandergaw’s lawyer, Kevin T. Fitzgerald, said in a statement that he found the state charges “curious as to both timing and substance.” He said Vandergaw stopped feeding bears last year.

The documentary describes how Vandergaw once hunted bears but quit after an encounter with a bear 20 years ago, shortly after he retired in 1985. A black bear appeared on his yard and crawled up to him on its belly. According to the Animal Planet Web site, Vandergaw reciprocated, and the encounter started “a long-lasting love affair” with bears.

Farley said there is a psychological component to Vandergaw’s behavior with the bears. “They are associating with Charlie only because of the food. That association is fulfilling some psychological need for Charlie,” he said.

Many Alaskans think Vandergaw is just plain crazy and lucky not to be “Treadwelled,” a term used by some unsympathetic Alaskans referring to Timothy Treadwell, a self-described “bear protector” who had a similarly chummy relationship with bears. He and his girlfriend were eaten by grizzlies in Katmai National Park in 2003.

On one of the videos, Vandergaw says: “I think basically what I do is my business as long as I’m not hurting anyone.”

But Farley said Vandergaw was profiting from Bear Haven and had drawn two friends into his enterprise. They also were charged.

According to charging documents, Firecracker Films in London paid Vandergaw and co-defendant Carla Garrod nearly $79,000.

“Charlie hasn’t just been quietly feeding them. He has been profiting from it,” Farley said.

Charging documents say a search of the home of Garrod — a real estate appraiser who also owns a photo business called C&C Bear Imagery — found receipts for thousands of pounds of dog food and hundreds of pounds of cookies.

Also charged was another Vandergaw friend, Terry Cartee. Documents say Cartee delivered 2,800 pounds of dog food to Vandergaw.

“It is unfortunate that the state of Alaska has taken this action now after turning a blind eye toward Mr. Vandergaw and his activities in the Susitna River valley for many years,” Brent Cole, Garrod’s lawyer, said in a statement. “This is an unfortunate occurrence which should make all citizens of Alaska pause and contemplate the unbridled power of the state of Alaska.”

9 Videos here: http://animal.discovery.com/videos/stranger-among-bears-videos/

Kelsey Ladt 14 and a Gift to Science

Two professors of medicine at the University of Kentucky looked out an office window into an open courtyard two years ago to see a student staring straight up, transfixed by something.

It was the hectic break between classes and students were flying past her, but this student didn’t move a muscle, didn’t shift her backpack, didn’t breathe. The more they watched her, the more concerned they became.

Then, Dr. Darrell Jennings recognized the university student who was captivated by the tangle of butterflies just above her head. It was Kelsey.

Everything made sense then.

What 11-year-old girl can turn away from the unbidden gift of the flash of a dozen pairs of brightly colored wings?

On Saturday, three months after her 14th birthday, Kelsey Curd Ladt graduated summa cum laude from UK with a degree in biology with honors.

The first time she stepped onto the campus was six years ago, when she was shown around the UK Hospital and its research labs after expressing an interest in medical research, specifically focusing on the brain.

She was just 8 then and had already completed elementary school.

By the time other students Kelsey’s age had completed fifth grade, she was graduating valedictorian of her high school class in Paducah and simultaneously getting her associate’s degree from West Kentucky Community and Technical College. Everybody at UK had said she was welcome there even though she was 11 and, with braces and pigtails, looked it.

This was no ordinary child. Yet, she was.

The first time she met her biology professor and mentor Felix Akojoe at WKCTC, she had just climbed a tree on campus. He did not ask that she come down for a proper introduction.

She has done cartwheels on the lawn of UK’s William T. Young Library. (And in the process got others interested. They, unfortunately, lost their car keys in the doing, and she had to help look for them in the big grassy field next to the library.)

She has been in biology labs where latex gloves could not be found in sizes small enough to fit her.

All along the way in her so-far extraordinary educational journey, she has been required to meet every intellectual expectation of her academic peers and she has done so with aplomb.

But she has always been allowed to have the joy and spirit to be a child among them.

“It was the unexpected bonus of Kelsey,” says Jennings, at UK’s College of Medicine. “We have gained so much from having her. It has enriched us.”

Accommodating her ‘special need’

The only concession ever made for Kelsey’s age while on campus was a small one.

Early on, her advisers decided she needed a smaller peer group to work with. At UK, there’s a group of students who are in an accelerated course of study for 18-year-olds who are certain they want to be doctors. Thus committed, they get through college and medical school in seven years, instead of eight. The group meets at 5 p.m. Fridays.

During the winter, the group finishes up after dark. Pretty soon, it was clear to Jennings and others that they couldn’t “turn Kelsey loose in the middle of the medical center campus” at night before her mother came to pick her up. So they arranged for people to take turns waiting with her.

“We would do the same for someone deaf or blind,” Jennings said. “We would expect them to live up to our academic standards but we would help accommodate their special needs.”

This was her special need: She could chew you up and spit you out in Calculus III but not necessarily otherwise until she got a little older.

In a ‘Twilight’ zone

Today, Kelsey and her parents are leaving Lexington to settle into new surroundings in Bethesda, Md., so Kelsey can start a year of research at the prestigious National Institutes of Health. From there she will apply to programs across the country that combine medical and doctoral degrees in a seven-year course of study. She will begin in spring 2010.

Her heart’s desire is to be a researcher and a clinician, to solve the problem of sickness and to cure the individual, to touch them in the doing.

Last summer, when Kelsey was just 13, she spent her days at the NIH in an internship program that had her using transcranial magnetic stimulation in neurological research aimed at understanding what influences our decisions.

At night ��� at least one night ��� she found herself third in line at a Bethesda Barnes & Noble with what seemed like every other teenage girl in Maryland waiting for the midnight release of Breaking Dawn, the third volume of the teenage heart-throb vampire saga Twilight. Kelsey had to know if Bella Swan was going to marry Edward or Jacob. She was, she says, “on Team Edward.”

She read the book quickly between soccer games and basketball and church group and softball, things her mother couldn’t help but sign her up for the minute she hit town.

“Her parents put a special focus on her socialization,” says Kelsey’s longtime mentor, Joy Navan, director for gifted studies at Murray State University. “They enrolled her in every sport. She had sleepovers, lots of friends her age. They wanted her to be seen for who she was and not for what she could do in the classroom.”

Kelsey wears flip-flops with peace signs on them. She won’t let anyone photograph her room. She likes the rock band Panic at the Disco.

Navan explains that close tabs have been kept on Kelsey since she was 5 to make sure she was neither stressed nor hurried in her intellectual development.

Still, to her mother, there is this: “Kelsey’s greatest gift is her heart, not her mind,” she says. “She has always been full of compassion and empathy toward others. Not only has she raised funds for charitable organizations since she was 8, she meets individual needs as they arise, sometimes anonymously, sometimes directly.

“As an example, this past summer, we made the mistake of visiting a popular hamburger restaurant in Bethesda the day it had a big write-up in The Washington Post. It was so hot, and we were so hungry. After waiting an hour and a half in line, Kelsey took all of her food to a man who was looking in the trash for food.”

It is part of the Ladts’ core belief: Kelsey must be a good steward of her extraordinary intellectual gift. To hear all those around her tell, she is the one least impressed by it.

Recognizing her potential

Vickie Ladt agrees that all parents think their kids are gifted. Still, when she and her husband, Ric, had to hire someone to play school with their 2-year-old daughter ��� to teach her Spanish and sign language b
ecause the usual stuff you do with toddlers wasn’t all that fascinating to Kelsey ��� they didn’t think too much about it.

“Our frame of reference was Kelsey,” Vickie Ladt says.

So they bought workbooks for preschoolers and took her to two preschools ��� one in the morning, one in the afternoon ��� to keep her engaged.

In kindergarten, the school allowed Kelsey to get a library card and let her give herself comprehension tests on the books she read while the other kids in the class were putting “L’s” on their left hands and “R’s” on their rights.

When Kelsey was doing third-grade math before most kids had counted to 100, it was time to get the child’s IQ tested, they were told.

First, they went to Murray State’s Navan, who performed IQ and grade-placement tests on Kelsey. Further testing was done by Linda Silverman at the Gifted Development Center in Denver.

Both experts soon sat down with the Ladts and, in effect, said, “You need to get her into college as soon as possible.”

“We were the proverbial deer caught in headlights,” says Ric Ladt. “Where do we start?”

Everything that happened next was just plain godsend. The McCracken County school district, with its 27,000 students, reevaluated Kelsey’s educational program and moved mountains to make it work. Teachers taught her everything they could in a grade until they were out of curricula. If a community policy had to be changed, the community changed it.

She was home-schooled during the middle school curricula by mutual agreement of the school and the Ladts, for Kelsey’s security and well-being. The process was anything but expected, anything but parent-driven.

“Unfortunately, it was faith,” says Vickie Ladt. “We didn’t want her leaving the nest early. She’d come home from school and say, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to skip a grade.’ Or, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to home-school me.’ Kelsey was happiest with her academic peers,” says her mother. “With our fingers crossed and a lot of prayers, we’ve held on.”

They have done more than that. Ric Ladt has gone on to be president of the National Association for Gifted Children and is on Kentucky’s Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, in hopes of improving education for all the state’s children.

When she was accepted into UK, they made the difficult but necessary choice to live apart four days of the week. Ric Ladt stays in Paducah, where he is president and CEO of PEBCO, a powder and bulk solids equipment handling company. He drives to Lexington on Thursday nights and stays through Sunday.

Vickie Ladt has her own human resources consultancy and can work from anywhere.

“I would, like any parent, like the opportunity to be with my family all the time,” says Ric Ladt, with tears in his eyes. “But Kelsey has given up a lot, being with her friends and family. If she’s willing to do it, I can do my part.”

Less than 1 in 6 million

Kelsey’s parents prefer that she be called “profoundly gifted.”

But just how gifted is she?

Murray State’s Navan explains that estimates are imprecise, but the likelihood of having Kelsey’s brain power is something less than 1 in 6 million. Kelsey’s “rage to know,” he says, and the help she has received that accelerated her learning have only amped her potential.

Kelsey also has a very clear goal of who she wants to be and what she wants to accomplish. Jennings, of UK’s medical school, explained that Kelsey’s greatest advantage might be that she will be finished with her formal training ��� with a medical degree and a Ph.D. ��� when she has just turned 22, a time when most students are only starting medical school.

“Not to put pressure on Kelsey, but historically most major conceptual revolutions in science have been conceived by those with profound insights when scientists were in their 20s.”

He gave the examples of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Marie Curie’s work with radioactivity and James D. Watson’s discovery of DNA. The question seems to be “are we expending the most creative years of researchers’ lives in training? If so, Kelsey may get to skirt that.”

Understanding it all

Asked to talk about how her brain works, Kelsey, always polite and yet luminous, demurs.

“I just think of myself as just a little faster processor,” she says. “Otherwise, I’m a typical teenager.”

One who has, at last, found her intellectual level and is working at it. She must study, she insists now.

And yet, there is this: “If there is something I see that I don’t know, I want to understand it.”

Like film, for example. So she took a film class at WKCTS and can talk about symbolism in film noir now. Like scuba. She was 11 and had to wait until she was 12, legal age, to learn. Like what free radical attacks proteins in the cell membrane that is preventing cell regeneration in spinal cord injuries.

She is working with Dr. Joe Springer and others in his lab on this and is writing a paper with his help on the topic.

Or like butterflies. She continues to study them. Every chance she gets.

China to build 20 hydro dams on Yangtze River

BEIJING – China plans to build more than 20 dams along the country’s longest river by 2020 as part of a plan to further develop the Yangtze River’s hydropower, an official said Tuesday.

The river already has the world’s largest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam. China is looking to hydropower as an important alternative to help it move away from coal, which provides more than 70 percent of the country’s energy supply.

Hu Siyi, the vice minister of water resources, announced the plans during a forum in Shanghai that called for hydropower projects on the tributaries and upper reaches of the Yangtze, a notice on the Web site of the Ministry of Water Resources said.

But environmentalists and scientists have questioned the effect of big dams on the environment, with some reporting problems.

A recent Chinese Academy of Sciences report said the Three Gorges Dam is harming water quality and ecosystems of the wetlands as well as fish stocks, the official China Daily newspaper reported Monday.

Climate change is also likely to reduce the river’s water supply because rainfall has decreased every year since 2006, it said.

Cai Qihua, director of the Yangtze Water Resources Committee, was quoted by the newspaper as saying Tuesday that the government plans to use 60 percent of the river’s hydropower resources by 2030. Only 36 percent of those resources were currently being used, he said at the forum.

China boasts the world’s largest hydropower resources, the paper said, at a theoretical potential of 540 million kilowatts.

The Three Gorges Dam has produced enough electricity since 2003 to supply about 8.8 percent of China’s electricity consumption last year, the official Xinhua News Agency said this month.

Hydro projects will be developed in the upper reaches of the tributaries, including on the Yalong, Dadu and Wujiang Rivers, the China Daily said.