In her 2023 cookbook “Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky,” New Mexico-based chef and historian Lois Ellen Frank said the present era of Indigenous cuisine revolves around modern chefs understanding the ingredients and the farming practices of their ancestors.

“It’s now up to each Native American community and each Native American chef to decide what the New Native American Cuisine is and what they are going to serve on their plates,” Frank, who was advised by Navajo chef Walter Whitewater, wrote in her introduction.

Several young women chefs are doing just that in the Denver area, starting food businesses and planting gardens as a way to reconnect with the land and the traditions of the past. They are defining in real time what New Native American Cuisine can be, from cultivation to creation.

Their work is moving forward Indigenous cuisine in a critical time of repossession after the forced relocations of the 19th century and the food distribution programs of the 20th century, a recent period Frank referred to in her cookbook as “the most painful and most difficult in terms of health and wellness in Native American Cuisine history.”

Before the exploration of the Americas, most of the Indigenous diet in the Southwest and Four Corners region came from farmed foods such as corn, beans and squash (sometimes called “the three sisters”). After the country relocated Native Americans to reservations, they were issued government rations of mass-produced food different from what they were used to, Frank writes. To her and some of her colleagues, it amounted to “nutritional genocide.”

Denver has long associated Native American cuisine with Tocabe and its fry bread tacos, made with shredded bison, hominy and roasted green chiles. When Matt Chandra and Ben Jacobs opened Tocabe in 2008, the restaurant was billed as “the only American Indian-owned and -operated restaurant in metro Denver specializing in Native American cuisine.”

After learning that Jacobs, a Native chef, was using some of his family’s recipes, Micaela Iron Shell-Dominguez, 36, knew she had to work there.

An environmental and Indigenous activist — and actor with the Annishabae Theater Exchange — whose father is Lakota and mother is from the San Luis Valley, Iron Shell-Dominguez noted the sanctity of ancestral foods and emphasized the role women played in feeding Native communities.

“I remember after working there for a while, I told Ben and Matt I was so inspired by everything they did that one day I wanted to open and own an Indigenous restaurant just like them,” she said in an email to The Denver Post.

She is now a mother of two and worker-owner of Moonshell Pizza Cooperative (www.moonshell.coop), a roving pizza crew where her partner, Sid Farber, is lead dough roller. The bounty of foods native to the region, such as corn, berries and sage, makes it easy to base dishes around those ingredients, she said. Their buffalo chokecherry pizza is one such example, she added, the chokecherry plant being native to Colorado.

Iron Shell-Dominguez’s multidisciplinary and holistic approach to her Native culture is also shared by Indigenous groups outside of North America.

Alejandra Tobar, left, and Chef Andrea Condes harvest vegetables at The Rooted Andina in Arvada on Thursday, June 5, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)

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Andrea Condes, 39, was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and adopted into the United States, where she grew up and pursued a career in the culinary arts. It was in Colorado where the self-described “child of the Andes” landed. Although separated by thousands of miles, Condes saw many similarities integral to the experiences of the pre-colonial Americas.

“How people are treated, how the land is respected, how animal relatives and plant relatives are just that: relatives,” Condes said.

Drawn to root vegetables like the potato, which originated in the Andes, she started a catering company, Four Directions Cuisine (www.fourdirectionscuisine.com). She grows her own plants and is hosting meals two weekends a month through October as The Rooted Andina at her home in Arvada.

Learning about Indigenous foods and history, she said, helped her overcome the “cultural gap” of living in another country and brought her closer to her homeland.

“It’s definitely not something that I had language for when I first started walking down this path,” Condes said. “Reconnecting with those foods, I didn’t realize then, but I do now: It was me reconnecting with myself.”

Chef Andrea Condes harvests strawberries and medicinal sage at The Rooted Andina in Arvada on Thursday, June 5, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)

Since growing food was a way of life, some New Native American Cuisine chefs are returning to the practice, what Frank equates with “food sovereignty.” Planting companion crops, such as the three sisters, is one of the cultivation methods Frank teaches in an effort to bring what she calls “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK) back to Native communities.

Narissa Ribera, a member of the Navajo Nation, started planting out of necessity. She was always fascinated with food systems, a jack-of-all-trades who learned to garden as a child and had years of experience baking cottage foods.

The lifestyle developed into Ch’il Indigenous Foods (www.chil-indigenousfoods.com), a meal pickup service she started three years ago. She works out of a commercial kitchen in the Wheat Ridge Center for Music and Arts in Wheat Ridge, baking cookies with ingredients grown by Indigenous harvesters and other delicacies, like blue corn ice cream. (She’ll soon open an outdoor eating area at the arts center.)

Narissa Ribera poses for a portrait at Ch’il Indigenous Foods in Wheat Ridge on Thursday, June 5, 2025 (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

The city of Wheat Ridge lent her two commercial plots of land behind the city’s community garden, where she cultivated the beans, corn and squash (including Apache gourds and Lakota squash) along with sunflowers. It’ll be a couple of years until the crops are ready to harvest, she said.

Until then, Ribera is preparing to launch a Native cookie and tea business with the ingredients for the tea grown in her garden, she said. She received federal grants to help with marketing and her brand, which she would one day like to see in supermarkets.

“I want representation,” Ribera said.

Popcorn kernels at Ch’il Indigenous Foods in Wheat Ridge on Thursday, June 5, 2025 (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

Although she welcomes non-Natives who support her work and want to learn about Indigenous foods, her main concern is reconnecting Native people to their ancestral foods.

“So much was taken from us, including so much of our food,” she said. “You’ll find a lot of Native people… they’re just not interested in cooking.”

She solicits social media followers to help tend the Wheat Ridge gardens and visits classes at Jefferson County schools, showing students how to make Indigenous dishes.

At a winter holiday market, Ribera sold a box of cookies that came with a paper describing each one and the history behind its ingredients. For her, the joy was in having an authentic option for Indigenous people to gift their friends and family.

Phillip Reese, KFF Health News

As summer ushers in peak mosquito season, health and vector control officials are bracing for the possibility of another year of historic rates of dengue. And with climate change, the lack of an effective vaccine, and federal research cuts, they worry the disease will become endemic to a larger swath of North America.

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About 3,700 new dengue infections were reported last year in the contiguous United States, up from about 2,050 in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All of last year’s cases were acquired abroad, except for 105 cases contracted in California, Florida, or Texas. The CDC issued a health alert in March warning of the ongoing risk of dengue infection.

“I think dengue is here with us to stay,” said infectious disease specialist Michael Ben-Aderet, associate medical director of hospital epidemiology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, about dengue becoming a new normal in the U.S. “These mosquitoes aren’t going anywhere.”

Dengue is endemic — a label health officials assign when diseases appear consistently in a region — in many warmer parts of the world, including Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. Dengue cases increased markedly last year in many of those places, especially in Central and South America.

The disease, which can spread when people are bitten by infected Aedes mosquitoes, was not common in the contiguous United States for much of the last century. Today, most locally acquired (meaning unrelated to travel) dengue cases in the U.S. happen in Puerto Rico, which saw a sharp increase in 2024, triggering a local public health emergency.

Most people who contract dengue don’t get sick. But in some people symptoms are severe: bleeding from the nose or mouth, intense stomach pain, vomiting, and swelling. Occasionally, dengue causes death.

California offers a case study in how dengue is spreading in the U.S. The Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes that transmit dengue weren’t known to be in the state 25 years ago. They are now found in 25 counties and more than 400 cities and unincorporated communities, mostly in Southern California and the Central Valley.

The spread of the mosquitoes is concerning because their presence increases the likelihood of disease transmission, said Steve Abshier, president of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California.

From 2016 through 2022, there were an average of 136 new dengue cases a year in California, each case most likely brought to the state by someone who had traveled and been infected elsewhere. In 2023, there were about 250 new cases, including two acquired locally.

In 2024, California saw 725 new dengue cases, including 18 acquired locally, state data shows.

Climate change could contribute to growth in the Aedes mosquitoes’ population, Ben-Aderet said. These mosquitoes survive best in warm urban areas, often biting during the daytime. Locally acquired infections often occur when someone catches dengue during travel, then comes home and is bitten by an Aedes mosquito that bites and infects another person.

“They’ve just been spreading like wildfire throughout California,” Ben-Aderet said.

Dengue presents a challenge to the many primary care doctors who have never seen it. Ben-Aderet said doctors who suspect dengue should obtain a detailed travel history from their patients, but confirming the diagnosis is not always quick.

“There’s no easy test for it,” he said. “The only test that we have for dengue is antibody tests.” He added that “most labs probably aren’t doing it commercially, so it’s usually like a send-out test from most labs. So you really have to suspect someone has dengue.”

Best practices for avoiding dengue include eliminating any standing pools of water on a property — even small pools — and using mosquito repellent, Abshier said. Limiting activity at dusk and dawn, when mosquitoes bite most often, can also help.

Efforts to combat dengue in California became even more complicated this year after wildfires ripped through Los Angeles. The fires occurred in a hot spot for mosquito-borne illnesses. San Gabriel Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District officials have worked for months to treat more than 1,400 unmaintained swimming pools left in the wake of fire, removing potential breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

San Gabriel vector control officials have used local and state resources to treat the pools, said district spokesperson Anais Medina Diaz. They have applied for reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has not historically paid for vector control efforts following wildfires.

In California, vector control agencies are often primarily funded by local taxes and fees on property owners.

Some officials are pursuing the novel method of releasing sterilized Aedes mosquitoes to reduce the problem. That may prove effective, but deploying the method in a large number of areas would be costly and would require a massive effort at the state level, Abshier said. Meanwhile, the federal government is pulling back on interventions: Several outlets have reported that the National Institutes of Health will stop funding new climate change-related research, which could include work on dengue.

This year, reported rates of dengue in much of the Americas have declined significantly from 2024. But the trend in the United States likely won’t be clear until later in the year, after the summer mosquito season ends.

Health and vector control researchers aren’t sure how bad it will get in California. Some say there may be limited outbreaks, while others predict dengue could get much worse. Sujan Shresta, a professor and infectious disease researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said other places, like Nepal, experienced relatively few cases of dengue in the recent past but now regularly see large outbreaks.

There is a vaccine for children, but it faces discontinuation from a lack of global demand. Two other dengue vaccines are unavailable in the United States. Shresta’s lab is hard at work on an effective, safe vaccine for dengue. She hopes to release results from animal testing in a year or so; if the results are positive, human trials could be possible in about two years.

“If there’s no good vaccine, no good antivirals, this will be a dengue-endemic country,” she said.

Phillip Reese is a data reporting specialist and an associate professor of journalism at California State University-Sacramento.

This article was produced by KFF Health News , which publishes California Healthline , an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation .

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Brian Baker, CFA, Bankrate.com

Bitcoin mining is the process of creating new bitcoins by solving extremely complicated math problems that verify transactions in the currency. When a bitcoin is successfully mined, the miner receives a predetermined amount of Bitcoin.

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Bitcoin is one of the most popular types of cryptocurrencies, which are digital mediums of exchange that exist solely online. Bitcoin runs on a decentralized computer network, or distributed ledger, that tracks transactions in the cryptocurrency. When computers on the network verify and process transactions, new bitcoins are created, or mined. These networked computers, or miners, process the transaction in exchange for a payment in Bitcoin.

As the prices of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin in particular have skyrocketed in recent years, it’s understandable that interest in mining has picked up as well. A miner currently earns 3.125 Bitcoin (about $334,375 as of mid-June 2025) for successfully validating a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain. But for most people, the prospects for Bitcoin mining are not good due to its complex nature and high costs.

Here are the basics of how Bitcoin mining works and some key risks to be aware of.

How Bitcoin mining works

Bitcoin is powered by blockchain, which is the technology behind many cryptocurrencies. A blockchain is a decentralized ledger of all the transactions across a network. Groups of approved transactions together form a block and are joined by computers within the network (called miners) to create a chain. Think of it as a long public record that functions almost like a long-running receipt. Bitcoin mining is the process of adding a block to the chain.

Bitcoin miners pick transactions from a group of unconfirmed transactions, called a mempool, to form a block on the blockchain. Before they can add the block securely to the blockchain, miners must solve what’s called a proof-of-work puzzle by guessing a number (also called a nonce). This number is combined with the block’s data and processed through a function called SHA-256.

The ultimate goal: create a block hash, which is a code with enough leading zeros to be less than, or equal to, the network’s target hash. The target hash is what determines how difficult the puzzle is to solve.

Target hash example: 0000000000000000ffff00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Block hash example: 0000000000000000057e29f1b57c1a9d5b90a6b7f1b4f0c9e2b0a1d3e4f5c6d7

Remember the block hash must be less than or equal to the target hash. Think of it like a dice game where the only way to win is if you roll a number smaller than or equal to a some number you’re given at the beginning. That number is made mostly of zeros, so you’d need a really insane and rare roll — a hash with tons of zeros in front of it — to win. In this example, the target hash’s “ffff” represents numbers that are non-zero and the block hash is less than the target hash, therefore solving the puzzle.

If you’re wondering whether this process requires a ton of computational power, you’re right. Miners use extremely powerful computers, called ASICs, to make billions — or trillions — of guesses about which nonces could work. One computer can cost up to $10,000. ASICs also consume huge amounts of electricity, which has drawn criticism from environmental groups and limits the profitability of miners. Technically, though, you could mine Bitcoin with, say, a MacBook Pro, but unfortunately you won’t get very far because there’s not enough computing power.

If a miner is able to successfully add a block to the blockchain, they will receive 3.125 bitcoins. The reward amount is cut in half roughly every four years, or every 210,000 blocks. As of mid-June 2025, Bitcoin traded at around $107,000, making 3.125 bitcoins worth $334,375.

Risks of Bitcoin mining

Regulation: Very few governments have embraced cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and many are more likely to view them skeptically because the currencies operate outside government control. There is always the risk that governments could outlaw the mining of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies altogether as China did in 2021, citing financial risks and increased speculative trading.
Price volatility: Bitcoin’s price has fluctuated widely since it was introduced in 2009. Since just January 2023, Bitcoin has at times traded for less than $18,000 and more than $110,000 recently. This kind of volatility makes it difficult for miners to know if their reward will outweigh the high costs of mining.

How to start Bitcoin mining

Here are the basic components you’ll need to start mining Bitcoin.

This is where any Bitcoin you earn as a result of your mining efforts will be stored. A wallet is an encrypted online account that allows you to store, transfer and accept Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Companies such as Coinbase, Trezor and Exodus all offer wallet options for cryptocurrency.

There are a number of different providers of mining software, many of which are free to download and can run on Windows and Mac computers. Once the software is connected to the necessary hardware, you’ll be able to mine Bitcoin.

The most cost-prohibitive aspect of Bitcoin mining involves the hardware. You’ll need a powerful computer that uses an enormous amount of electricity in order to successfully mine Bitcoin. It’s not uncommon for the hardware costs to run around $10,000 or more.

Bitcoin mining statistics

Creating Bitcoin consumes 184.4 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, more than is used by Poland or Egypt, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.
The price of Bitcoin has been extremely volatile over time. In 2020, it traded as low as $4,107 and reached an all-time high of $111,970 in May 2025. As of mid-June, it traded around $107,000.
The United States (37.8%), Mainland China (21.1%) and Kazakhstan (13.2%) were the largest bitcoin miners as of December 2021, according to the Cambridge Electricity Consumption Index.

Taxes on Bitcoin mining

It’s important to remember the impact that taxes can have on Bitcoin mining. The IRS has been looking to crack down on owners and traders of cryptocurrencies as the asset prices have ballooned in recent years. Here are the key tax considerations to keep in mind for Bitcoin mining.

Are you a business? If Bitcoin mining is your business, you may be able to deduct expenses you incur for tax purposes. Revenue would be the value of the bitcoins you earn. But if mining is a hobby for you, it’s not likely you’ll be able to deduct expenses.
Mined bitcoin is income. If you’re successfully able to mine Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, the fair market value of the currencies at the time of receipt will be taxed at ordinary income rates.
Capital gains. If you sell bitcoins at a price above where you received them, that qualifies as a capital gain, which would be taxed the same way it would for traditional assets such as stocks or bonds.

Check out Bankrate’s cryptocurrency tax guide to learn about basic tax rules for Bitcoin, Ethereum and more.

Is Bitcoin mining profitable?

It depends. Even if Bitcoin miners are successful, it’s not clear that their efforts will end up being profitable due to the high upfront costs of equipment and the ongoing electricity costs.

Worldwide, bitcoin mining uses more electricity than Poland, a nation of 36.7 million people, according to the University of Cambridge’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

As the difficulty and complexity of Bitcoin mining has increased, the computing power required has also gone up. Bitcoin mining consumes about 184.4 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, more than most countries, according to the Cambridge index.

One way to share some of the high costs of mining is by joining a mining pool. Pools allow miners to share resources and add more capability, but shared resources mean shared rewards, so the potential payout is less when working through a pool. The volatility of Bitcoin’s price also makes it difficult to know exactly how much you’re working for.

Bottom line

While Bitcoin mining sounds appealing, the reality is that it’s difficult and expensive to actually do profitably. The extreme volatility of Bitcoin’s price adds more uncertainty to the equation.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin itself is a speculative asset with no intrinsic value, which means it won’t produce anything for its owner and isn’t pegged to something like gold. Your return is based on selling it to someone else for a higher price, and that price may not be high enough for you to turn a profit.

(Bankrate’s Logan Jacoby contributed to an update of this article.)

©2025 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Prosecutors charged a 23-year-old St. Paul man Monday in connection to the attempted theft of a sign at a Highland Park home.

The homeowner reported the incident after he saw other residents had reported vandalism of pride flags in the Highland Park and Macalester-Groveland neighborhoods. There were 37 instances of damage, mostly to rainbow flags, and also some cases of other vandalism, including to the new Minnesota state flag, between June 6 and 26, according to police.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office charged George Thomas Floyd with felony possession of burglary or theft tools, saying he had a knife “with intent to use” it to commit burglary or theft.

Police said Monday the investigation into the pride flag vandalism is ongoing, including into whether Floyd is a suspect. The county attorney’s office received another case from police involving Floyd for charging consideration; he had not been charged with other offenses as of Monday afternoon.

George Thomas Floyd (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Charge: Used knife to ‘manipulate’ storm door hinges

The homeowner on Pinehurst Avenue near Cleveland Avenue had a Ring doorbell and it showed that, in the middle of the night on June 6, a man went to his home wearing a blue baseball cap, a green bandana over the lower part of his face, a dark T-shirt, distinctive shoes and blue jeans.

He later noted the man who tried to steal his sign, which said, “We will not obey,” wore a knife holster on his waist similar to security footage that showed a man damaging the rainbow flags, said a criminal complaint.

The suspect tried to open a locked storm door at the home and pulled out a large fixed-blade knife and “used it to manipulate the hinges on the storm door,” the complaint said. The homeowner had the sign in the exterior part of his inner door.

The homeowner got on the Ring intercom, asked the man what he was doing, and the man then left his stoop.

Police encountered a man, identified as Floyd, during a traffic stop on Wednesday. “Officers later noted Floyd wore a necklace and black T-shirt like that of the man” on the homeowner’s stoop. He also has “a large mole or freckle just below the elbow crease on his left arm just like the man” on the Ring video, the complaint said.

On Thursday, police carried out a search warrant at Floyd’s Highland Park residence on Pinehurst Avenue near Fairview Avenue, about three blocks from the homeowner’s residence. Officers found the baseball cap, green bandana, distinct shoes, black shirt and fixed-blade knife that prosecutors say he used on June 6.

Police took Floyd into custody and he declined to talk to them.

Floyd is due to make his first court appearance on Tuesday; an attorney wasn’t listed for him in the court file as of Monday afternoon.

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