Local News

SALINA, Kansas — Ebony Murell and a few interns meticulously sort 99 kinds of silphium. It’s a wild relative to a sunflower. And the biologists at The Land Institute — an outfit devoted to finding out how science can make farming more planet-friendly — want to unravel the plant’s secrets for tolerating bugs and diseases.

“We don’t know what all of these traits mean in terms of plant defenses,” Murell said. “Any or all of them could matter.”

Journalist Sian-Pierre Regis and his mother, Rebecca Danigelis, became something of a minor sensation in 2017 when word got out that, following Rebecca’s sudden firing from her decades-long hotel housekeeping job, Sian-Pierre came up with a novel way to help her cope: He asked her to create a bucket list of things she’d always wanted to do, but that her job had kept her from trying.

When schools shut down last spring because of the coronavirus, Wichita West High art teacher Kevin Kelly collected his students' scrapped pieces and got to work on his latest show.

This week on The Range, we talk to the painter about how he's transforming discarded art into something new.

Plus, after going dark more than a year ago, movie theaters are reopening. But will the allure of sound and spectacle on the silver screen be enough to draw audiences away from streaming at home?