research

South Lake Tahoe's major summer event, the American Century Championship, will once again add another U.S. Army veteran and hero to the 2015 event this July.

Retired United States Army Sergeant Major Rodney Gorman will join the field by virtue of his victory in the 2014 George W. Bush Presidential Center’s Warrior Open. He will join Corporal Chad Pfeifer at Edgewood this summer. Pfeifer was the three-time defending Warrior Open champion and the 2014 tournament's fifth place finisher.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month: Treatment Not Jails

Across the nation, many counties are investing huge sums of money to house people with mental illness in jails, with little return for the community in terms of public safety or treatment for people who need it most. A new national initiative, Stepping Up, provides an opportunity for counties to get support in addressing this problem.

After taking the South Tahoe High Varsity Girls Soccer team to back-to-back NIAA state championships, coach Jeremy Evans has left the program to become the new Lake Tahoe Community College women's head soccer coach.

LTCC found themselves without a women's coach after first year Coyote coach Christian DeLeon recently left the program to become the new women's head coach at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village.

When children are removed from their homes and put into foster care, it is most likely the worst day of their life. Foster children are kids who have to be taken from their homes due to some sort of safety risk, such as abuse, neglect, parental incarceration, or illegal activity in the household. When a community does not have enough homes to accommodate for foster youth, the children have to move to the closest available foster home, often times being several hours away.

Give Where You Live! is a 24-hour giving challenge coordinated by the El Dorado Community Foundation. This year's day long giving day is Thursday, April 23, 2015.

“We have approximately 70 nonprofits participating in the event this year. Each nonprofit will have its own website presence to highlight a particular need or needs for which it is focusing giving dollars, as well as more information about the organization in general,” said Megan Buchanan, donor services coordinator at the foundation.

The majority of Tahoe locals and tourists lack knowledge of bear precaution, causing the growing presence of bears in South Lake Tahoe’s residential areas. In recent years, Lake Tahoe’s black bears have become problematic when outside their natural meadow and forest habitat. Because of human habits, bears have become attracted to local neighborhoods. Passing routines down to their cubs, bears remain dependent on the human food source left outside many residents’ homes.

Northern Nevada is on the radar of businesses seeking to relocate to the state, due in part to the much-publicized Tesla Motors' mammoth battery gigafactory under construction east of Sparks.

Over the past year and into 2015, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada has assisted in bringing nearly three dozen businesses to the region and helped in at least seven expansions of existing businesses.

Clarity levels at Lake Tahoe in 2014 showed the biggest improvements in more than a decade, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, who have studied the lake for the last half century.

The improvements are in part due to continuous work from the Lake Tahoe community to lower pollutants to the lake. They were also influenced by the drought, as reduced precipitation meant fewer contaminants flowed into Lake Tahoe, particularly during the summer, when clarity levels were the highest recorded since 2002.

In July of 2014, dozens of Lake Tahoe real estate professionals filled the TRPA board room when a proposal was discussed that would make BMPs mandatory at the Point of Sale for homes.

At that time, the room full of agents, brokers and mortgage companies, all voiced their opinion against the proposal.

A newly released scientific study highlights the importance of collaborative work to prevent the introduction of aquatic invasive species at Lake Tahoe, and confirms what many public and private stakeholders have feared: That the invasive quagga mussel, if introduced, could establish in our mountain lake’s clear, iconic waters.

The floor of the South Lake Tahoe Ice Arena resembled a large hair salon on Friday as almost 100 people, young and old, male and female, had their heads shaved for childhood cancer research. The 4th annual St. Baldrick's fundraiser has raised over $55,000 so far in 2015, and donations are still being accepted.

Christy Smith started the local St. Baldrick's event in 2011 in honor of her grandson, South Tahoe High junior Bailey Johnson. Bailey was a four time Stage 4 cancer survivor by the time he was 5.

California water agencies are on track to satisfy a state mandate to reduce water consumption 20 percent by 2020. But according to their own projections, that savings won’t be enough to keep up with population growth just a decade later.

A 2009 state law requires urban water agencies to reduce per-capita water consumption 20 percent by 2020, compared with use at the start of the century. Most agencies are on track to reach that goal, and have made even more progress thanks to emergency cuts over the past year triggered by the ongoing drought.

Fact. Research has found that using a cell phone behind the wheel makes a driver four times more likely to get into a crash serious enough to cause injury.

Fact. When sending or receiving text messaging behind the wheel, a driver’s eyes are off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, equivalent to driving the length of a football field at 65 miles per hours.

Fact. The likelihood of crashes dramatically rise when your actions require a combination of visual, manual and cognitive attention

For the first time since World War I was ongoing, a rare Sierra Nevada red fox was spotted in Yosemite National Park. The video above shows the fox making tracks through the snow-covered mountains early this past December.

The National Park Service said in a press release that two documented sightings have occurred in park since early December, one on Dec. 13, and another on Jan 4. These marks the first confirmed sightings of the rare fox in the park in nearly 100 years.

Skiing is a phenomenally exciting and fun sport. However, the injury rate is relatively high, with more than 20,000 knee injuries sustained each year by skiers in the U.S. alone, most of which involved the ACL. The question is why and what can you do about it?

My advice on how to avoid common injuries is based on my 55 years of skiing, more than two decades of being an orthopaedic surgeon for the U.S. Ski Team, the Pro Ski tour, the Jeep Tour, 48 Straight Ski tour and other winter sports events. However it is not gospel. There are many views and disagreements on skiing safety.

The Douglas County Board of Commissioners have a new clerk after Laure Penny was hired to replace the retired Lorraine Kabat.

Penny, who began work Monday, was most recently was a paralegal for Nevada Attorney for Injured Workers with prior employment as a Supreme Court Clerk and legal secretary.

“Douglas County is one of my favorite places to be and I am very excited to be able to work for and serve the wonderful people who live here,” said Penny.

1980 South Tahoe High graduate Dr. Graham Kent from the UNR Seismological Laboratory will give a presentation on ALERT Tahoe in Incline Village on Thursday, January 8.

ALERT Tahoe is a new, one-of-a-kind, fire camera and multi-hazard tracking system that includes smoke investigation, prescribed fire oversight, wildfire tracking, Earthquake Early Warning, and monitoring of extreme weather events. A prototype of the fire camera system is functioning, scoring early successes during the summer of 2014.

Dr. Kent will present on the existing and planned camera system.

Flu season is underway. Misconceptions about the flu prevent people from taking the proper precautions. For example, being out the in cold does not cause the flu. Here are a few more flu myths I hear and facts to help you stay healthy this winter.

FLU MYTHS

MYTH:If you think you have the flu, go to the doctor to get antibiotics.

Past climates in the region characterized by ice ages or droughts leave clues that are etched into our mountain slopes. These records remain today for us to uncover in the field, laboratory, and through computer modeling efforts.

Ongoing weather and climate research in the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin and how it shapes our understanding of the greater Earth system will be discussed in the next Tahoe Center for Environmental Science free public lecture.

Several key public service positions have been filled the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA).

Tom Lotshaw has been hired to work as TRPA’s Public Information Officer. He replaces Jeff Cowen, who worked for TRPA in that and other roles for eight years.

Lotshaw graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in public affairs journalism and has seven years of newspaper reporting experience. He worked most recently as a reporter for the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana, and as a reporter and photographer for the Tahoe Daily Tribune.

The Gene Upshaw Memorial Golf Classic is moving to Truckee's Schaffer's Mill in 2015, the seventh year of the tournament.

Upshaw, who played often in South Lake Tahoe's American Century Celebrity Golf, withdrew from the 2008 tournament held July 11-13 that year. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in North Lake Tahoe just a month later. He had a home on the North Shore and was hospitalized at Tahoe Truckee Hospital where he died on August 20, 2008.

Divers are mobilizing at the mouth of Emerald Bay to start removing 5 acres of rubber mats that were laid on the lake bottom two years ago for a pilot project to control Asian clam populations in the area.

Divers are anticipated to be working in the water through November, so boaters are asked to exercise caution when entering and exiting Emerald Bay and obey a no-wake zone that extends 600 feet from shore at Lake Tahoe.

The Lake Tahoe Community College Foundation’s Speaker Spotlight Series continues on Monday, October 27 with visiting speaker Jesse Livezey, a U.C. Berkeley doctoral student. He’ll present a talk about brain physics from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in LTCC’s Board/Aspen Room, inside the library building.

Why should we care about investing in higher education in our local, state and national communities? According to a 2013 report by the Economic Analysis and Research Network in Washington D.C., "States can build a strong foundation for economic success and shared prosperity by investing in education.