Heard Around the West

WYOMING At 23, Kathleen Vernon is definitely young for her job as Albany County coroner in southeastern Wyoming, but she seems born to do the work. Her mother was a homicide detective in California, her father was a special agent for the BLM, and “the walls of her childhood home were decorated with framed pictures […]

THE WORLD The U.S. military would love to send sure-footed robots to Afghanistan so that machines — and not soldiers — can hump bulky equipment straight up mountains. Boston Dynamics has worked since 2004 on what it calls its “Big Dog cargo ‘bot,” yet the robot is still too big, too noisy and too expensive […]

THE WEST We may be intelligent, but we’re hardly in the same league as the Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the keen Corvidae family. They cache “up to 100,000 nuts in dozens of different spots at the end of spring, and can find them all again up to nine months later,” says scienceblogs.com. And the […]

NEVADA What helps someone survive an ordeal that would most likely kill anyone else? Rita Chretien, 56, should know. She and her husband, Albert, 59, who own an excavating company, were on their way from British Columbia to a trade show in Las Vegas when they lost their way in the mountains of northeastern Nevada […]

MONTANA So far in the West, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is the only one who kills bad bills by whipping out his custom branding iron, which spells out VETO. The latest Tea Party proposals that have flamed out include a bill making it harder for people to register to vote, another to permit the use […]

CALIFORNIA Never at a loss for novel ideas, the animal rights folks at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, want the mayor of San Francisco and other city leaders to change the name of the city’s Tenderloin District to the “Tempeh District.” Tempeh, for those who prefer hamburgers and are unfamiliar with it, […]

MONTANA What’s next — offering a free derringer with every mammogram or a free Uzi with the purchase of a La-Z-Boy? You just might see it happen, because guns sell. The managers of a Radio Shack in Hamilton, Mont., found that out after they placed a giant sign above their Super Store: “Protect yourself with […]

COLORADO “Plants can’t run and hide” in the world, so over time, some have evolved the ability to alter their structure when they perceive a threat. That’s the mechanism now being exploited by Colorado State University biologist Jane Medford, as she and some 30 undergraduate and graduate students genetically engineer plants to signal the presence […]

WYOMING There’s nothing like a bunch of bad yaks to get the Cowboy State’s Legislature riled up. Woolly wanderers, these particular yaks have never been content to graze the grass growing solely on the “Yak Daddy Ranch” owned by John and Laura DeMetteis. The big guys routinely seek out other pastures and crash through fences […]