Alaska Beat

AK Beat: Mountain Village woman arrested, charged with ATV assault

Woman charged with assault for hitting woman and child with four-wheeler: A Mountain Village resident has been charged with assault after allegedly hitting a woman and her child with a four-wheeler, Alaska State Troopers report. On Tuesday afternoon, Georgianne Hanson, 22, was driving a four-wheeler with a passenger riding along in the Southwest Alaska community of Mountain Village. Hanson stopped when she passed 34-year-old Jeanette Myre, who was walking with a stroller. The two began to argue, and Hanson allegedly told Myre she was going to hit her with the four-wheeler. Hanson drove away, and then turned around and struck Myre and the stroller. Hanson drove away afterward. Myre and the child where taken to the Mountain Village clinic by a good Samaritan and suffered non-life threatening injuries, troopers write. Hanson was arrested and charged with assault in the first degree, assault in the second degree, and failure to render aid. Her bail was set at $100,000 and a third-party custodian, according to online court records. She will be taken to the Yukon Kuskokwim Correctional Center in Bethel, troopers write.

What attracts mosquitoes: Think you attract more than your fair share of mosquitoes? You might be right. Some 20 percent of people turn out to be bitten more often than everyone else, and Slate's compiled a video explaining what researchers have been able to determine so far about what makes you a good-looking target. Some of them -- like blood type -- cannot be changed. But a few things -- from moderating alcohol consumption to avoiding certain clothing colors -- you can control.

More on the weapon destroyed on Kodiak's rocket explosion: In 1998 Osama bin Laden was spotted at an Afghanistan terrorist training camp, but by the time missiles could be deployed from a ship in the Arabian sea, he was gone. This, reports The Guardian, was one of the experiences that led the U.S. to start working on a program to develop a hypersonic weapon -- a version of which was destroyed when a rocket launch was terminated earlier this week at the Kodiak Launch Complex. The Guardian piece has more on the background and development of these weapons systems (Russia and China are working on similar weapons too) and where they fit in the world of global geopolitics -- including fears from some critics that they will heighten the possibility of a nuclear confrontation.

Ancient Pacific Coast may've been very different: The first humans crossing the Bering Land Bridge may've encountered a dramatically different coastline when they reached North America's Pacific Coast, according to new research published in the Journal of Archeological Science and reported on by Phys.org. In the past, scientists believe that sea levels rose more or less uniformly as continental glaciers from the last ice age melted. But the rebounding of land as the weight of the ice was removed -- and the depression of ocean basins under the additional weight of water means that conditions likely varied a great deal from location to location, the researchers found. "The researchers ran models of what the sea level may have looked like over the last 20,000 years -- based on knowledge of ice sheet dimensions and the topography of the ocean floor -- and concluded that parts of the West Coast looked radically different than previous reconstructions based on a model of uniform sea level rise," Phys.org reported. This finding helps explain how humans might've moved into North America earlier than previous estimates -- and might help researchers do a better job locating the submerged remains of prehistoric coastal settlements.

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