Appalachian History Series What Congress Authorized and Why In July 1960 the Flood Control Act became law and it expressly authorized “the project for flood control and allied purposes on Laurel River, Kentucky,” to be carried out in line with the Chief of Engineers’ recommendations in House Document 413 of the 86th Congress.

Appalachian History Series Along a bend of the Ohio near Lloyd, Kentucky, the Greenup Locks and Dam turned a troublesome stretch of river into a predictable navigation pool and later became home to one of the valley’s most productive municipal hydro plants.

Appalachian History Series What and where Grayson Lake is a narrow, cliff-lined reservoir on the Little Sandy River in Carter and Elliott counties, Kentucky. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Huntington District built an earth and random rock-fill dam about seven miles south of the town of Grayson, creating a lake roughly 20 miles long with about 1,510 acres at summer pool.

Appalachian History Series A new lake in the Upper Cumberland On the Obey River near Celina in Clay County, Tennessee, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built Dale Hollow Dam during World War II to control floods across the Cumberland system. The reservoir sprawls across the Tennessee–Kentucky line and today anchors recreation, hydropower, and regional water management.

Appalachian History Series Setting the scene Kitts sat where a small mountain stream meets the Clover Fork of the Cumberland River, a few miles east of the county seat at Harlan. Historic USGS 7.5-minute topographic maps place “Kitts Creek” entering the river just below the rail and road corridor that funneled coal out of the valley, with the town of Harlan upstream and Evarts downstream.

Appalachian History Series Introduction In the first days of October 1864 Union cavalry rode into the steep valleys around Saltville, Virginia. Their objective was simple in design and daunting in practice. Destroy the Confederacy’s most important source of salt. The fight that followed became one of the best documented clashes in Appalachia during the war. What happened afterward made Saltville a byword for racial violence in the conflict.

Appalachian History Series Coal shaped Pocahontas before the town had a charter, a post office, or a railroad. In the early 1880s a 13 foot bench of the Pocahontas No. 3 seam drew speculators, surveyors, and the Norfolk and Western. The first commercial mine opened in 1882, the branch line reached town in 1883, and within a year tragedy and growth arrived together.

AI in academia, $1B NSF cut, AI+biosecurity, bacterial DNA from mammoth bones, understanding LLMs and their math, bioacoustics for conservation, Synthetic Eden, lots of R/AI updates, CRISPR horses...

GigaScience Press is again helping CitizenScience.Asia mobilise Citizen Scientists Across Asia for a groundbreaking biodiversity initiative from October 3 to 12 2025.

Very nice photo of Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops skeleton from DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk. I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere.

Appalachian History Series The mine and the men Scotia sat on the Poor Fork of the Cumberland in the Oven Fork community of Letcher County. Blue Diamond Coal opened the mine in 1962 in the Imboden seam. By early 1976 the operation employed roughly 300 workers with about 275 underground, producing near 2,500 tons per day on six active sections.