Dysart has a history of good baseball teams. They won the American Legion Junior State Championship in 1956. This is an impressive feat, but only a few years before this monumental win, they almost won the high school state championship. They did this by defeating teams from communities ...

Next week the Iowa State Fair starts another year full of animals, 4-H projects, lots of interesting people, politicians, and the most important part, food. It is not a state fair unless there is pork chop on a stick or deep-fried Oreos. This means clogged arteries and full bellies. If one ...

In Iowa newspaper lore, it’s the headline that had to happen at some point. In 2007, Mason City Globe Gazette columnist Richard Johnson tried to find it and came up empty. He wrote, “like all good mysteries, [it] remains shrouded in the mists of time.” However, through modern research ...

“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver — not aloud, but to himself — that ten thousand river commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey...” ...

The question has been asked recently, “What is the normal climate?” The answer is that there is no normal climate. Earth’s climate is always changing. In the past when it was cold, you could walk across the Gulf of Mexico from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana. At other times ...

This year marks the last year the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma will be in the Big 12 Conference. They have been in this regional conference for almost 30 years. They leave for the Southeastern Conference on July 1, 2024, which is also the same year the University of ...

In the never-ending media circus the world lives in, news comes faster and faster. Whether it is through social media or television screens, new information comes and goes before one even knows it. Sadly, this means vital information can be missed. For Iowa, there is one piece of legislation ...

As I walk through the fields of corn and soybeans looking for any creature, leaf disease, or random imperfection, it is surprising how much each plant grows in a week. While humans do not grow at this exponential pace because humans have years to live and not a few months, these plants serve ...

Hydrogen has long been recognized as a possible alternative to fossil fuels because it has a high energy content and its combustion does not produce any greenhouse gases, just water. However, the difficulty of producing it has kept hydrogen from widespread use. This is changing with at ...

Admittedly, “Smash your smartphone” is a bit of a dramatic exaggeration, meant to shock you into paying attention. I didn’t smash my smartphone. It wasn’t until I dropped my smartphone in the toilet that I finally got rid of it. My wife still uses her iPhone 6 for a camera. My ...