Tagged: Editor Pick

If you came face to face with a great whale, you might find a few surprises in its chin: Like whiskers, if you look closely at the surface.

And, hidden inside the chin, lies a mysterious sensory organ, unknown to centuries of whalers and biologists.

The state Transportation Department has torpedoed a proposal for floating billboards on Lake Washington in Seattle.

The company's owner said he'll pursue other Seattle waters. However, the Seattle Times reports the city of Seattle says no deal.

With the Occupy Seattle protests having morphed into a movement targeting banks and companies that protesters believe do not live up to progressive ideals, the local protest movement self-dubbed “Working Washington” says it will be at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday in force.

And, with continual protests focusing on its Seattle offices, as Seattle tech blog Geekwire reports, the company is warning protesters to stay off its property.

RICHLAND, Wash. – A new book details how a dramatic series of Ice Age Floods transformed the landscape of the inland Northwest.

The new book called, “On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods: The Northern Reaches,” details what happened when floods whooshed into the Northwest and created the channeled scablands.

Bruce Bjornstad spent five years researching and writing his geologic guidebook. One fact in the book: It might have been as many as 1,000 floods that shaped the region, not just two or three big events.

With the spring rains descending upon us, ushering in the "June Gloom" a little early, Crosscut.com's Knute Berger has come up with eight simple rules to preserve your sanity while living in Seattle.

The Millennial generation is changing the music scene in Seattle – much like the music tastes of a prior generation lifted grunge music – by driving "electronic dance music" or EDM into the mainstream and overwhelming music venues in the region.

"It was a bad strategy. It was badly executed."

The words of JPMorgan Chase's CEO, Jamie Dimon, as he admitted late yesterday that the investment bank — or, more precisely, a single "rogue trader" working for the bank, had lost some $2 billion in the last six weeks in risky hedge-fund trades.

The news has sent chills through the markets. Shares of JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, lost 7 percent in after-hours trading and British bank Barclays lost 2.9 percent, while more than 2 percent was shaved from Royal Bank of Scotland.

NPR's Jim Zarroli reports, the trades at JPMorgan Chase:

More babies in Washington are entering the world at full-term. An effort to end the practice of mothers scheduling an early delivery has led to a 65% drop since 2010.

Even doctors have been “really surprised” to see compelling research that babies born just two weeks early are more likely to have medical problems, all the way up through age five, says Dr. Tom Benedetti, an obstetrics professor at the University of Washington.

Until a couple years ago, if a baby was born at 37 weeks, it was still considered full-term. 

Some mothers would schedule the delivery – to be induced or have a C-section. Benedetti says their reasons include:

RICHLAND, Wash. – Giant smoke stacks and industrial dump sites are no longer the only water quality problem on the Columbia River. A recent study has found that our day-to-day life has a major impact as well.

U.S. Geological Survey researchers looked at nine cities along the river, from Wenatchee to Longview, Wash. They detected hundreds of contaminants flowing from wastewater treatment plants and stormwater runoff.

Hydrologist Jennifer Morace says the toxic contaminants included things like shampoo and pharmaceuticals.