 From Carnegie Studios in Longmont, Colorado, it's Puppet News. Good evening. I'm Herman Hansen. And dinner is soy-ved. And I'm Waluwanda Rower, and this is Puppet News. Lavinia Lavi Maunga had no idea a baby was coming when she went into labor on a flight from her home in Utah to Honolulu last week. I just didn't know I was pregnant. And then this guy just came out of nowhere, Maunga said during a video interview with Hawaii Pacific Health. The baby boy, Raymond Maunga, arrived early at just 29 weeks while mom was traveling to Hawaii for vacation with her family. Dr. Dale Glenn, a Hawaii Pacific Health Family Medicine physician, along with Lonnie Bomfield, Amanda Beading, and Mimi Ho, neonatal intensive care unit nurses from North Kansas City Hospital, were also on the plane. And helped the new mother and baby. Yeah, just overwhelming and just nice that there was three NICU nurses on the plane and a doctor that were able to help stabilize him and make sure that he was okay, Maunga said. When deciding on a name, Maunga's father suggested Glenn, in honor of the doctor who helped her during the flight. Names are pretty important in our culture, said Maunga, who was Tongan. I didn't really want to name him Glenn. Instead, she asked Dr. Glenn, who gave his adopted children Hawaiian middle names, for a suggestion. He offered Kaimana, which is now one of the boy's middle names. The child will have to stay in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit until he is full term, about another 10 weeks, Maunga said. The aloha spirit is definitely felt here, she said about the care she has received in Hawaii. It's very different from the mainland, Maunga said. It just feels comforting and everyone is willing to help. Boulder County Public Health, or BCPH, officials are warning residents that unhealthy air could invade the region sooner than ever before. The caution comes after one of the worst years for air quality along the front range. Record breaking wildfire season blanketed Boulder County in smoke for much of the summer and fall, ozone level regularity exceeded the EPA national air ambient air quality standard for health with 43 ozone action day alerts according to a BCPH news release. Because of the high ozone levels recorded during the summer of 2020, the area will be reclassified to severe non attainment of the 2008 national ambient air quality standard in late 2021 or early 2022. We often think of the Rocky Mountains as a crisp clean environment, but the truth is that those same mountains can trap air pollutants, including air pollutants from outside the county up against the foothills. Bill Haines, Boulder Public Health Air Quality Coordinator, knowing when air quality is bad and what to do when it is can help protect your health, he said. Ozone used to be thought of as a summer problem, but ozone season is starting earlier and ending later due to climate change. Public officials recommended on poor air quality days, residents should stay indoors and limited strenuous activity. People should avoid physical activities on days with wildfire smoke. A couple in Las Vegas said they will have to wait to continue building their pool after construction crews unearthed a set of bones dating back to Earth's most recent ice age. Matt Perkins and his husband, who recently moved from Washington state to a newly built home in Nevada, said police and crime scene investigators showed up Monday at their home to analyze the bones. The pool guy said he was going to come check out the pool, Perkins told KTNVTV. We assumed that was normal. We wake up. He's out front with the police. The pool builders discovered the bones about five feet below ground. After an investigation, police said the bones did not belong to a human and raised no law enforcement concerns. Nevada Science Center Research Director Joshua Bond said the bones are between 6,000 and 14,000 years old and are those of a horse or similar large mammal. Bond said the area where they were found was fed by natural springs and served as a watering spot for wildlife in the arid Mojave Desert about 14,000 years ago. The backyard discovery came near Tully Springs Fossil Beds National Monument where rare fossils such as mammoths have been unearthed before. If people are digging in their backyard, it shouldn't be a surprise when they hit something, Bond said. He also noted that the U.S. has laws that discovered fossils belong to property owners. Perkins is now deciding how best to preserve the fossil. Sifting through a shovel load of dirt in a suburban backyard, Michael Raup and Paula Shrewsbury find their quarry, a cicada nymph, and then another, and another, and four more. In maybe a third of a square foot of dirt, the University of Maryland entomologists find at least seven cicadas, a rate just shy of one million per acre. A nearby yard yielded a rate closer to 1.5 million, and there's much more afoot. Trillions of the red-eyed blackbugs are coming, scientists say. Within days, a couple weeks at most, the cicadas of brood 10 will emerge after 17 years underground. There are many broods of periodic cicadas that appear on rigid schedules in different years, but this is one of the largest and most noticeable. They'll be in 15 states from Indiana to Georgia to New York. They're coming out now in mass numbers in Tennessee and North Carolina. When the entire brood emerges, backyards can look like undulating waves, and the bug coarses lawnmower loud. The cicadas will mostly come out of dust to try to avoid everything that wants to eat them. Squiggling out of holes in the ground, they'll try to climb up trees or anything vertical, including rope and Shrewsbury. Once off the ground, they shed their skins and try to survive that vulnerable stage before they become dinner to a host of critters including ants, birds, dogs, cats, and rob. It's one of nature's weirdest events featuring sex, a race against death, evolution, and what can sound like a bad science fiction movie soundtrack. Some people may be repulsed. Psychiatrists are calling entomologists worried about their patients. But scientists say the arrival of brood 10 is a sign that despite pollution, climate change, and dramatic biodiversity loss, something is still right with nature. And it's quite a shell. Rob represents the narrative of cicada's lifespan with all the verve of a Hollywood blockbuster. You've got a creature that spends 17 years in a COVID-like existence, isolated underground sucking on plant sap, right? In the 17th year, these teenagers are going to come out of the earth by the billions, if not trillions. They're going to try to best everything on the planet that wants to eat them during this critical period of the nighttime when they're just trying to grow up. They're just trying to be adults, shed that skin, get their wings, go up into the treetops, escape their predators, he says. Once in the treetops, hey, it's all going to be about romance. It's only the males that sing. It's going to be a big boy band up there as the males try to woo those females, try to convince that special someone that she should be the mother of his nymphs. He's going to perform, sing songs. If she likes it, she's going to click her wings. They're going to have some wild sex in the treetop. A rabid skunk bit a dog at a property on Quell Road in Longmont last week, and a risk assessment was completed for the dog and dog owner. Boulder County Public Health spokeswoman, Angela Simmental, said she could not disclose the results of the assessment on the dog owner. The dog approached the skunk and the skunk bit the dog's leg and paw, according to Boulder County Public Health. The owner released the rabid skunk from his dog and called animal control and submitted it for rabies testing. After the skunk tested positive for rabies, a risk assessment was completed for the dog. Anyone whose pet may have come in contact with wildlife or who sees wildlife or stray pet that looks sick or is acting unusual should call their local animal control office. Other wild animals that may carry rabies include raccoons and foxes. The wine is out of this world. The price is appropriately stratospheric. Christy said Tuesday it is selling a bottle of French wine that spent more than a year in orbit aboard the International Space Station. The auction house thinks a wine connoisseur might pay as much as $1 million to own it. The Petru 2000 is one of 12 bottles sent into space in November 2019 by researchers exploring the potential for extraterrestrial agriculture. It returned 14 months later, subtly altered. According to wine experts who sampled it out of tasting in France, Tim Tiptree, International Director of Christie's Wine and Spirits Department said the space-aged wine was matured in a unique environment of near zero gravity aboard the space station. The trip turned a $10,000 bottle of wine known for its complexity, silky ripe tannins and flavors of black cherry, cigar box and leather into a scientific novelty. And still a fine bottle of wine, Tiptree said. It's just a very harmonious wine that has the ability to age superbly, which is why it was chosen for this experiment, he said. It's very encouraging that it was delicious on return to Earth. Private space startup Space Cargo Unlimited sent the wine into orbit in November 2019 as part of an effort to make plants on Earth more resilient to climate change and disease by exposing them to new stresses. Researchers also want to better understand the aging process for mentation and bubbles in wine. At a taste test in March at the Institute for Wine and Vine Research in Bordeaux, France, a dozen wine connoisseurs compared one of the space-traveled wines to a bottle from the same vintage that had stayed in a cellar. They noted a difference that was hard to describe. Jane Anson, a writer with the wine publication Decanter, said the wine that remained on Earth tasted a bit younger, the space version slightly softer and more aromatic. The wine, being offered by Christie's in a private sale, comes with a bottle of terrestrial Petru of the same vintage, a Decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. It's all held in a hand-crafted wooden trunk with a decoration inspired by the science fiction pioneer Jules Verne and the Star Trek universe. Proceeds from the sale will fund future research by Space Cargo Unlimited. Several other bottles from the dozen that went to space remain unopened, but Christie says there are no plans to sell any of them. Tiptree says the price estimate, in the region of $1 million, reflects the sale's likely appeal to a mix of wine connoisseurs, space buffs and the kind of wealthy people who collect ultimate experiences. The lot includes the bottle of 2000 Petru that remained on Earth so the buyer can compare the two. Should they decide to open the one that went into orbit? I would hope they will decide to drink it, but maybe not immediately, Tiptree said. It said it's peak drinking, but this wine will last probably at least another two or three decades. St. Verne Valley School District's Pathway to Teaching, or P-Teach program, received a $100,000 grant from Early Milestones, Colorado as part of the Early Childhood Workforce Innovation Grant. The grants were issued to support innovative changes in the early childcare industry after the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2017, the program has introduced high school students across the district to the education profession by offering concurrent enrollment courses at the University of Colorado Denver and Front Range Community College. Field trips and paid externships with SVVSD's Community Schools program. Last semester, the program opened up to paraprofessionals and other education specialists in the district who are interested in becoming teachers. What this grant will allow us to do is provide tuition funding so that our adult working paraprofessionals can access the courses that we're already providing to our high school students through concurrent enrollment, said Diane Lauer. So they can move forward and earn their Early Childhood Education Teaching Certificate or a preschool director credential. The college level credits can also go toward the completion of an associate's degree in Early Childhood Education at FRCC or even a bachelor's degree at the University of Colorado Denver. Through the grant, a cohort of up to 15 district paraprofessionals have the opportunity to earn up to 12 college credits. In the heart of the world's deserts, some of the most expansive wild places left on Earth, Rome herds of feral donkeys and horses. These are the descendants of a once essential but now obsolete labor force. These wild animals are generally considered a threat to the natural environment and have been the target of mass eradication and lethal control programs in Australia. However, as we show in the new research paper in Science, these animals do something amazing that has long been overlooked. They dig wells, or ass holes. In fact, we found that ass holes in North America, where feral donkeys and horses are widespread, dramatically increased water availability in desert streams, particularly during the height of summer when temperatures reached nearly 50 degrees Celsius. At some sites, the wells were the only sources of water. The wells didn't just provide water for the donkeys and horses, but were also used by more than 57 other species, including numerous birds, other herbivores such as mule deer, and even mountain lions. The lions are also predators of feral donkeys and horses. Incredibly, once the wells dried up, some became nurseries for the germination and establishment of wetland trees. Ass holes in Australia research didn't evaluate the impact of donkey dug wells in arid Australia, but Australia is home to most of the world's feral donkeys, and it's likely their wells support wildlife in similar ways. Across the Kimberley in Western Australia, helicopter pilots regularly saw strings of wells in dry stream beds. However, these all but disappeared as mass shootings since the late 1970s have driven donkeys near local extinction. Only in Kachana Station, where the last of the Kimberley's feral donkeys are protected, are these wells still to be found. In Queensland, brumbies, feral horses, have been observed digging wells deeper than their own height to reach groundwater. Feral horses and donkeys are not alone in this ability to maintain water availability through well digging. Other equids, including mountain zebras, grevy zebras, and the Coulon dig wells. African and Asian elephants dig wells too. These wells provide resources for other animal species including the near-threatened Argali and the mysterious Gobi Desert Grizzly Bear in Mongolia. These animals, like most of the world's remaining megafauna, are threatened by human hunting and habitat loss. Digging wells has ancient origins. These declines are the modern continuation of an ancient pattern visible since humans left Africa during the late Pleistocene beginning around 100,000 years ago. As our ancestors stepped foot on new lands, the largest animals disappeared, most likely from human hunting with contributions from climate change. If their modern relatives dig wells, we presume many of these extinct megafauna may have also dug wells. In Australia, for example, a pair of common wombats were recently documented digging a 4 meter deep well, which was used by numerous species such as wallabies, emus, guanas, and various birds during a severe drought. This means ancient giant wombats may have dug wells across the arid interior too. Likewise, a diversity of equids and elephant-like proboscidians that once roamed other parts of the world may have dug wells like their surviving relatives. Indeed, these animals have left riddles in the soils of the earth, such as the preserved remnants of a 13,500 year old 2 meter deep well in western North America perhaps dug by a mammoth during an ancient drought, as a 2012 research paper proposes. Feral equids are resurrecting this ancient way of life. While donkeys and horses were introduced to places like Australia, it's clear they hold some curious resemblances to some of its great lost beasts. Our previous research published in PNAS showed introduced megafauna actually make Australia, overall, more functionally similar to the ancient past prior to widespread human-caused extinctions. For example, donkeys and feral horses have trait combinations, including diet, body mass, and digestive systems that mirror those of the giant wombat. This suggests, in addition to potentially restoring well-digging capacities to arid Australia, they may also influence vegetation in similar ways. Water is a limited resource made even scarcer by farming, mining, climate change, and other human activities. With deserts predicted to spread, feral animals may provide unexpected gifts of life in drying lands. Despite these ecological benefits in desert environments, feral animals have long been denied the care, curiosity, and respect native species deservedly receive. Instead, these animals are targeted by calling programs for conservation and the meat industry. However, there are signs of change. New fields such as compassionate conservation and multi-species justice are expanding conservation's moral world and challenging the idea that only native species matter. Boulder County Public Health extended its facial covering order to align with the Colorado Face Covering Order and Jefferson County's order issued in May. The extended public health order continues to require face coverings regardless of vaccination status or group size in high-risk indoor settings such as personal services and healthcare settings. The order also continues to require face coverings in grocery stores, retail stores, and other public-facing indoor spaces regardless of number of people in the room or vaccination status. And that's all we have time for. For Puppet News, I'm Al Cowell of Al Canal. And I'm La La La La La La La. Good night.