Smithsonian.com

The Waldo Canyon fire was the most destructive in Colorado’s history. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

Last year was one of the worst wildfire seasons in Colorado’s recent history. A series of destructive blazes drove tends of thousands of people from their homes and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage.

Last year’s awful fire season was spurred by a dry winter and higher-than-average temperatures. Those same conditions are back, says Climate Central, and the western U.S. is at risk once more.

Drought conditions have encompassed nearly the entire Western half of the country, with the worst of it centered in the Southwest and into California, which received only about 25 percent of its average precipitation during the year-to-date. “We’re confident we’re going to see above-normal significant fire potential,” Sullens said.

From California to Colorado, he says, the early-summer fire risk is high. Indeed, California has already seen a big blaze.

Forecasters are also concerned about a high risk of large wildfires along the Pacific Coast from California northward to Washington, and inland into Idaho and Southwest Montana, where very dry conditions exist in areas that have an abundance of vegetation, or fuel, to support potential fires.

… Vilsack said the combination of the drought, an abundance of dead or weakened trees from an epidemic of mountain bark beetles, and a likelihood of another unusually hot and dry summer is “a combination that doesn’t bode well.”

In many places the spring fire season has been off to a slow start, says Andrew Freedman, but according to the federal government this “has no bearing on where we think this fire season is going to go.”

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Another Mayan Ruin in Belize. Not the one that was destroyed. Image: Rita Alexandrea

In Belize, they needed to build a road. Roads require rocks, there happened to be a really convenient, large pile of rocks for the construction team to use nearby. It also happened to be one of the largest Mayan pyramids in the country. Now that pyramid is gone, destroyed by bulldozers and backhoes.

The construction company building the road appears to have extracted crushed rocks from the pyramid to use as road fill. The pyramid, called the Nohmul complex, is at least 2,300 years old and sits on the border of Belize and Mexico. It’s over 100 feet tall, the largest pyramid in Belize left over from the Mayans.

Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology said that the news was “like being punched in the stomach.” The pyramid was, he said, very clearly an ancient structure, so there’s no chance the team didn’t realize what they were doing. “These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness,” Awe told CBS News. He also said:

“Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines. To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s mind-boggling.”

And it turns out that this is an ongoing problem in Belize. The country is littered with ruins (although none as large as Nohmul), and construction companies are constantly bulldozing them for road fill. An archaeologist at Boston University said that several other sites have already been destroyed by construction to use the rocks for building infrastructure. There isn’t much in the way of protection or management of these sites in Belize, so many people who live in the country either aren’t aware of their significance, or aren’t taught to care.

The Huffington Post has photographs from the scene, showing backhoes and bulldozers chipping away at the stone structure. HuffPo ends this story on a lighter note, pointing out that due to the destruction, archaeologists can now see the inner workings of the pyramid and the ways they were built.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Why Did the Mayan Civilization Collapse? A New Study Points to Deforestation and Climate Change
Spectral Images of a Mayan Temple

Image: Phillip von Ostau

Today, Angelina Jolie announced that she has decided to have a preventive double mastectomy, after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene implicated in increasing the risk of breast cancer in women. Her decision is a drastic one, but she’s not the only woman to have both breasts removed before any sign of cancer. While the procedure is still rare, rates of preventive double mastectomies are on the rise. But no one is quite sure what’s driving these increasing rates, and doctors disagree about the benefits of the procedure.

Jolie joins a few celebrities who have had the procedure. Sharon Osbourne had her breasts removed last year. Miss America contestant Allyn Rose said in January that she would have hers removed once the contest was over. In 2006, the then 23-year-old Lindsay Avner became one of the first women to undergo the procedure to avoid breast cancer. A study from last year reported that the rate of these surgeries—which remove breasts before cancer is found—is on the rise. In 2002, 94 women in Pennsylvania had preventative surgery. In 2012 that number was 455. (These number include both women who had two seemingly healthy breasts removed and women who had one healthy breast removed after a diagnosis of cancer in the other.) The Journal of Clinical Oncology found that bilateral mastectomies—in which a woman with cancer in one breast has both removed—increased from 1.8 percent in 1998 to 4.8 percent in 2003.

It’s hard to track these sorts of things, though. There is no good nationwide data on exactly how many are done each year and how that number has changed from year to year. But doctors generally agree that the rate is increasing.

The reasons for that increase are also slippery. Easier and cheaper genetic testing is providing more women with the information that often spurs the procedure. And surgeries to remove the breasts are getting safer and less expensive, as are plastic surgeries to replace tissue or minimize scarring.

The women who opt for the surgery cite a few reasons. The first is the real risk of breast cancer. Angelina Jolie, in her opinion piece for the New York Times, says that “doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.”

The second is peace of mind. Women living with the gene say they feel as though cancer is looming over them at all times. “There wasn’t a minute where it didn’t cross my mind in some way,” Sara Tenenbein wrote in XO Jane. “BRCA was taking over my entire life.” Tenenbein opted for the preventive double mastectomy. She knows her choice was unusual, but she doesn’t regret it. “I know that I chose something extreme in order to live without fear. I chosejoie de vivre over vanity, and I am proud of it,” she writes.

“A lot of women really feel that it’s liberating,” Jocelyn Dunn, a breast surgeon in Palo Alto, California, told the Daily Beast. “Regrets are rare.” But peace of mind has a dark side, too. The Daily Beast also talked to Stephen Sener,  a doctor and former president of the American Cancer Society. “The main motivation is fear. Some women say, ‘I can’t live with the anxiety of having this happen again’.” The opening of a 2007 story about another woman who chose the surgery reads: “Her latest mammogram was clean. But Deborah Lindner, 33, was tired of constantly looking for the lump.”

But doctors say that there’s also a problem in risk perception. Only 5-10 percent of the women who get breast cancer are positive for the “breast cancer genes.” Women with the genes have a 60 percent chance of getting breast cancer. But having the double mastectomy doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be cancer free, either. One study found that the procedure doesn’t work for all women. The study looked at women who have preventive mastectomies after being diagnosed with cancer in one breast and found that the procedure only seemed to help women under 50 whose cancer was in very early stages. Another study that looked at preventive mastectomies says that, while the procedure does reduce the risk of developing breast cancer, “there is conflicting evidence on whether or not it reduces breast cancer mortality or overall death.”

While the research is still out on how effective it is, women who have the BRCA1 gene or a family history of breast cancer might see people like Jolie and Osbourne as examples. Removing both breasts might seem drastic, but it can feel worth it to those who have watched a loved one die of cancer. But that fear and dread could be pushing women to make decisions that aren’t medically sound. Allyn Rose, the Miss America contestant, says her father suggested the procedure, and when she pushed back he told her that, if she didn’t do it, “you’re going to end up dead like your mom.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

How Breast Cancer Genes Work
Take That, Cancer!

If you know of one of these female Mangarahara cichlids, let the London Zoological Society know. They need her help to save the species. Photo: Berlin Zoo

There are just three Mangarahara cichlids left in the world, so far as we know, and they’re all men. Two are at in the London Zoo, one is in Germany at the Berlin Zoo. The species was wiped out in the wild when the Mangarahara River in Madagascar dried up because of dams built to block the river, says the Associated Press.

The Berlin Zoo used to have a female, but she has unfortunately passed away, along with the best chance to revive the species in captivity. Now, the Zoological Society of London says in a release, they’re on a global quest to find a lady friend for their male cichlids. If you or anyone you know has one in a fish tank somewhere, they would really, really like to hear from you.

Launching the appeal, ZSL London Zoo’s Brian Zimmerman said: “The Mangarahara cichlid is shockingly and devastatingly facing extinction; its wild habitat no longer exists and as far as we can tell, only three males remain of this entire species.

“It might be too late for their wild counterparts, but if we can find a female, it’s not too late for the species. Here at ZSL London Zoo we have two healthy males, as well as the facilities and expertise to make a real difference.

If a female can’t be found, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to sit idly by and watch a the last of a species wait out its final end. Just recently, Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, passed away. And botanical gardens around the world feature the identical faces of the last E. woodii, each of them a clone of the same male plant.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Last of His Kind, Tortoise Lonesome George Dies, Leaving No Offspring

A partial solar eclipse in Albuquerque, New Mexico as photographed by Colleen Pinski. This photo was one of the finalists in Smithsonian’s annual photo contest. Photo: Colleen Pinski

Technically, this partial solar eclipse—which will produce this stunning “ring of fire”— will occur as the early morning Sun rises on Friday in Australia. But for those of us in North America, the spectacle will play out this evening starting around 6:30 pm on the East coast.

If you’re in Australia or the Philippines, enjoy the show. But if you’re not and still want to watch, you can tune in to the Slooh Space Camera to watch the whole thing live.

This is only a partial solar eclipse, so there will still be a bit of bright sun poking around the dusk of the Moon. This is what gives it the moniker “ring of fire.” For an idea of what you’re in for if you decide to turn into the Slooh feed, here is a video shot during last year’s similar eclipse.

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