Until Max came to live with us, I never really noticed the moveable feast on suburban streets and park trails. My eyes must have glossed over it, the half-eaten apples, the barely tasted bagels, peanut butter sandwiches, French fries, pizza crusts, candies, dropped or discarded, wrapped in paper napkins, tucked discreetly under bus-stop benches or spilled along the sidewalk fronting a grocery store. Now I see it all: Max hunts for it unceasingly on our walks. Bred for hunting and retrieving ducks, he now ferrets out abandoned food scraps.

But this almost uncanny ability to detect and track down food, whatever form it may take and wherever it may be, is probably the very foundation of the very ancient human-canine bond: Indeed,  it may even account for the success of our species in Paleolithic Europe. In a new article published in American Scientist, Penn State paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman proposes that the possession of hunting dogs may have given modern humans a decisive demographic advantage over rival Neanderthal bands.

Several studies, she notes, support this contention. Recent calculations by a pair of Cambridge University archaeologists, for example, revealed that modern human populations swelled tenfold in Europe between 45,000 years ago and 35,000 years ago. At the same time Neanderthal numbers began falling dramatically, hitting rock bottom– extinction–around 25,000 years ago. Why? Fossil studies of canine skulls suggest that our human ancestors began domesticating wolves during this key period: Homo sapiens, in particular, seem to have become exceedingly fond of these new hounds. In one instance, a modern-human mourner tucked a bone into a dead dog’s mouth.

Like Max, the early canines must have been masters at tracking down food. In one recent study, Finnish researchers examined the success rates of hunters who employed dogs, specifically Norwegian elkhounds and Finnish spitzes, to assist in hunting moose—surely one of the best modern parallels to hunting mammoths in Paleolithic Europe. The dogs had little difficulty finding moose, and by barking loudly they immobilized the prey and brought human hunters running. Men who went out hunting with elkhounds or spitzes returned home with 28.8 pounds of meat per person for each day in the field. Those who had no dogs returned with just 18.5 pounds.

It’s easy to see how this may have played out in Paleolithic Europe. The more game modern humans and their dogs brought home, the more babies women could have and the more breast milk they could supply to their infants. And as modern human bands grew larger in size and better fed, they may have outcompeted neighboring Neanderthals in Europe, or so Shipman hypothesizes.

Existing studies still fall far short of proving these contentions, but I find Shipman’s ideas intriguing. Moreover, they remind me of a paper that maverick American archaeologist Stuart Fiedel published a few years ago on the role dogs may have played in the peopling of the Americas. Fiedel thinks that the earliest Asian migrants brought dogs on their great journey to the New World—dogs that assisted in tracking game and retrieving waterfowl in proglacial lakes; dogs that hauled sledges or travoises loaded with food and hides; dogs that served as camp sentries in a wilderness inhabited by lions, short-faced bears and other large carnivores.

If Fiedel and Shipman are on to something here,  I think researchers will need to take a new look at the role of dogs in ancient hunting cultures. Suddenly, best friend doesn’t really seem to cover it.

Photos and Illustrations: Profile on a hunting dog signalling steady on point,  by William Henry Jackson, 1902;   Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century);  Hunter and Dog with Their Catch, by Blaine Hansel

Checking back in my calendar, I see that I was covering a physics meeting, and that reminded me of why I signed up. Twitter was still relatively new to me and others over 30, and I thought it might be a good way to cover a big gathering.  Soon afterwards I caught on to Twitter’s other main draw: the opportunity to promote one’s work. I tweeted my stories as a matter of course, awkwardly at first (“My shot at explaining the iron pnictide mania”); then with a growing sense of how to make a succinct pitch in 140 characters (“Breaking lemur news the world must know! They floated on tiny, adorable rafts to Madagascar”). Covering breaking news of a more serious sort, though, I accrued more followers.  After the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March of last year, my numbers shot up from the hundreds, to more than a thousand.

In Twitter’s world, followers are a proxy for popularity, and who doesn’t want to be more popular? So as my status has grown, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with satisfying those who track me. I’ve noticed that the most successful Twitter users tweet many times a day with links to things that interest them. In principle, tweeting what you read is not a bad way to go, but I spend a lot of my spare time on the Internet meticulously following civil aviation accidents and watching declassified nuclear test films from the 1950s and 1960s.  A tweet on the ground acceleration generated by a 1.4 megaton nuclear detonation? It does not get clickthroughs (I did try once).

Instead I’ve found myself coming up with things to tweet that I think will get clicks.  Recently I’ve tweeted a viral video about how to build an automatic weapon entirely out of LEGOs, and a gallery of Japanese hipsters taking dubious radiation readings around Fukushima. The tweets themselves never take long, but then I compulsively check for clicks and favorites. Did my followers like it? Did my colleagues retweet it? What else can I come up with?

Even as Twitter expands my reach, I feel it pulling me in. My daily tweets typically involve a small cadre of science journalists and scientist users. Our online banter is easier and more instantly gratifying than picking up the phone to call a source or going out to report a story. Of course, I still do both of these things, often several times a day, but I feel Twitter and other social media like slashdot and reddit are a growing part of my life.

The consequences of this time suck are difficult to gauge. Many Twitter users more prolific than myself do very good journalism, and I find Twitter invaluable for tracking breaking news stories. I think any negative impact is more on my own ability to sit back and reflect. Life at Nature is already hasty, and being on Twitter has me flitting around more inanely than ever before.

Journalism is about finding a balance: between being outside and being inside, for example, or between insight and speed. Twitter doesn’t change any of that, but it is yet another world to get sucked into—another clique to be a part of. Unfortunately for someone like me, this is a clique with metrics. However alluring it may be, the fact remains that it is a very small part of a world that I, as a reporter, am supposed to be covering. I feel that I, and perhaps others, are giving it more attention than it deserves.

Am I going to get off Twitter? Absolutely not. A new Russian Superjet SSJ-100 crashed in Indonesia last week, and I’m following aerospace blogger Sergey Dolya to learn what happened. A photo Dolya took of the cockpit sometime before takeoff shows that the plane’s Terrain Awareness and Warning System may have been switched off. I’ll keep watching his feed to find out more.

___________

Bio:  I write for Nature and freelance sometimes for NPR and others.  You can follow me on @gbrumfiel.

Photos:  whale fail - Jenn and Tony Bot; good Twitter/bad Twitter – Rosaura Ochoa

**

The study was published earlier this month in Nature Methods.

Many thanks to Andrea Facheris of Soundtrack4u for granting permission to use the music in the video. The song is called “Symphony 5″ (a reworking of Beethoven’s), by the Robot Symphony Orchestra.

I was researching for a book when I came across a chaplain named Ray Stubbe, who had also been in the siege at Khe Sanh, who didn’t know Baig — why not? — and likewise found him interesting.  So years later, Stubbe interviewed Baig’s family and researched military history, declassified documents, soldiers’ memoirs, and CIA debriefings, and wrote an essay about Baig that was detailed but vague on the logic in exactly the way you’d expect if Baig was in Marine counter-intelligence, which he was.

Baig was 25 when he joined the Marines in 1957 and by 1964 was in Vietnam on intelligence operations, which had been going on quietly since 1960 and which included getting to know the locals, interrogating enemy prisoners, and figuring out where the enemy, the North Vietnamese troops, were.   Then for some reason — because he’d been in battles and knew North Vietnamese tactics? — in the summer of 1966, he was in Santa Barbara, California, briefing a secret group of academic physicists, probably on North Vietnamese infiltration habits.  Then he went back to Vietnam, establishing “collection nets” that would help predict where the enemy would be next.

In January, 1968, Baig reported to Khe Sanh, a Marine base surrounded by high hills on three sides, just in time for the North Vietnamese to move into those encircling hills and cut off the road out on the fourth side.  The only way into and out of Khe Sanh was by air and under fire.  The ratio of Marines to enemy was around 1:4, and the enemy was mostly invisible during the day, attacking at night, digging tunnels and trenches, drawing the siege lines tighter and tighter.  The last time this happened was in 1954 with a French military base and the same North Vietnamese general; the French lost.

But this time that secret group of academics had designed the first electronic battlefield – seismic and acoustic sensors dropped in enemy territory which signaled the enemy’s location — and handed it over to the military, who used it for the first time at Khe Sanh.  Because he’d briefed the group, Baig must have known roughly how to use the sensors, though apparently few others did.

By now his title was Target Intelligence Officer; the area around Khe Sanh held 3,000 separate targets; Baig’s colleague said he had a head like a computer.  He’d collect the sensors’ signals, analyze them for the enemy’s location, analyze subsequent signals for the enemy’s movements, put it all together with his intelligence training and his knowledge of the enemy’s military habits, then draw imaginary boxes around the targets into which bombers and artillery would pour “walls of steel.” Once an enemy artillery round hit the camp, leaving a small crater.  Baig measured the crater, looked around until he found a piece of hot shrapnel, bounced it in his hand, looked at it carefully, examined a map, and calculated the coordinates of the enemy artillery — which of course the Marines knocked out.

Eventually, after 70 days of this, the North Vietnamese got tired of not winning, and in fact, of losing ammunition dumps, truck parks, camps, and weapons positions, and of having their attacks shot up before they could even start them; so they went and attacked elsewhere.  The Marines got out of Khe Sanh.  Stubbe thought Baig was a major reason they made it out alive.  Baig was awarded a Legion of Merit.

The Marines thought he was funny, tremendously intelligent, and “bubbling with enthusiasm.”  He’d open his C-rations and exclaim, “Aha!  I have cookies!”  He’d run around the camp, telling jokes about eating pork and killing infidels, yelling about incompetence, wearing a Boy Scout pack he’d gotten from Sears Roebuck where his uncle worked.   In the two photos of him I’ve seen, he’s thin and short, dark hair in a widow’s peak, wearing dark-rimmed glasses too large for his face.  He has a little smile, intense eyes, and he does indeed look funny and smart.

After Khe Sanh and a short leave back to the United States, Baig was assigned to Thailand from which he would make undercover forays into Laos – native dress, make-up, French accent and all – and find things out and then return to Bangkok.  His wife and daughter lived with him there in the Imperial Hotel.  On April 20, 1971, a grease fire broke out in the hotel kitchen, spread through the ventilation system, and killed Baig, his 30-year old wife, and his 10-year old daughter.  Baig was 39.  The fire escape doors on their corridor had been bolted shut from the outside and Stubbe says flat out that Baig was assassinated — wouldn’t a hotel fire be an unreliable method of assassination?

In November, 1971, seven months after Baig died, his commander read aloud his report on Khe Sanh at a congressional hearing that established the value of this new way of fighting, this electronic battlefield.  Since 1971 and with manifold improvements, the electronic battlefield is at this minute using sensors to analyze enemies’ actions, figure out enemy locations, and bomb the hell out of them.

And now you’d like to know why I’m interested in this story.  Baig was such an unlikely person — a well-connected Pakistani Muslim in Marine counter-intelligence.  Maybe I’m just naive and most people in counter-intelligence are unlikely.  Or maybe his real unlikeliness was in the combination of  the attitude of  bubbliness, the raw intellect that could hold a piece of shrapnel and calculate its trajectory back to its source, and the ability to calmly, repeatedly order lethal walls of fire.  I’m always interested when people have to make decisions that balance the pragmatic and the moral.  But I don’t know enough about Harry Baig to know if he was weighing the need to get out of Khe Sanh against thou-shalt-not-kill; or if he was just happily doing a little math, a little physics, and blowing the enemy infidel — and aren’t all enemies infidels? — to kingdom come.

__________

Photos:  Khe Sanh – Routard05; Hill 881S, Khe Sanh – Marine Corp Archives and Special Collections

To commemorate mother’s day, Cassie starts the week by wondering whether paper/rock/scissors is a good way to trick her indecisive biological clock;

Making the case that Cassie should take the plunge, Cameron introduces us to the unforgettable stadium metaphor;

Christie says a family of two is a family too;

Jessa and Michelle explain their one-child policy;

And I clear out the room by talking about the future of artificial wombs.

Happy weekend, everyone! Next week we’ll tell you about our evil plan to dedicate an entire post each to our favourite comments of the past year.

The reply was brief and furious: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

Another joined in: “When a man can get pregnant, I’ll be happy to listen to his opinions about abortion.”

The abortion flamewar I’m describing took place in 1999, and it had the honor of being my first. It was quite an education. Unfortunately, the dialogue hasn’t advanced much in the last 13 years, either on messageboards or in real life.

Anonymous Internet Person #2 was right: men can’t get pregnant. But will women always have to bear the sole responsibility and consequences for reproductive decisions that two people made? Perhaps not. Technology advances may soon allow men and women to approach parenthood from a similar perspective, by separating the act of ending a pregnancy from the act of ending the developing fetus’ life. The concept they enable is called ectogenesis, or gestation outside the womb. Not only would ectogenesis completely reframe the long-ossified abortion debate, it could also help women who have trouble carrying their own child to term, giving them an option beyond surrogacy. In the future, ectogenesis might even give indecisive women like Cassie and me the choice of offloading our pregnancy onto our male partners. But is the external uterus an inevitable reality or a fairy tale?

In 1997, a pro-life group called Nightlight Adoptions set up a program called Snowflakes. It brokered the surplus frozen embryos generated during fertility treatments, which would otherwise be discarded or donated to science, and offered them to pro-life people for adoption. To adopt the snowflake, a woman could simply implant that embryo, become pregnant, and bring the baby to term. Embryo adoption wasn’t only for people of the pro-life persuasion, and it ended up being not so simple, but it was the first example of a pro-life critique with a concrete solution.

If only there were some way to extend the concept, transplanting a developing fetus from a woman who found herself accidentally pregnant.

But a straight-up fetus transplant is just not in the cards, says Claus Andersen, a reproductive physiology professor at Copenhagen University Hospital, and here’s why. From the moment the blastocyst implants into the mother’s uterine lining, it is on her life-support system. At that point, removing the embryo becomes roughly on par, in complexity, with removing an egg from cake batter. To transplant it, you would need to move all the support systems too: the growing amniotic sac, the placenta, and probably some of the uterus too. The mother might become sterile, and the fetus would probably die.

And even if it were possible to transplant this entire delicate ecosystem into a new host, the next problem is immediately apparent. Like any organ, a transplanted uterus (and the attendant embryo) would likely be summarily rejected.

But this apparent dead end does leave one intriguing loophole: scoop up the blastocyst before implantation. This is possible during the 7- to 10-day window after the sperm has joined with the egg, and the blastocyst is still a free agent, rolling down the Fallopian tube to the uterus. Snap it up then, and you avoid getting the mother’s system involved.

But if the mother’s system isn’t yet involved, how would you know conception had happened? During its journey, the blastocyst emits a signal to alert the uterus to get ready for a pregnancy. This hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, is already detected by ultra-sensitive pregnancy tests that can identify a pregnancy several days before you even miss your period.

Make the hCG assays a little more sensitive, Andersen says, and you’d have a way of knowing the egg has been fertilized, which would give you a chance to catch the embryo before it implants. Granted, that leaves the problem of locating the blastocyst, which at this point in its development is 0.1 millimeters around and invisible to the human eye.

But let’s assume you can find it and extract it: then what?

You could vitrify the embryo, or flash-freeze it, the way IVF procedures do now. That way it can be stored without problems for at least five years. It could then be adopted. Or, if the technology matures sufficiently, the embryo could be implanted into an artificial uterus.

Brave new world. Literally. In Aldous Huxley’s vision of the dystopian future, all babies are “decanted” from artificial wombs. He wasn’t the first proponent of the external uterus; the technology has been hotly anticipated since the 1600s. In the 1920s, external baby incubators were thought to be were just around the corner, and the term “ectogenesis” was coined.

The actual science, however, remained largely theoretical until the late 1990s, when, in a much-publicized Japanese experiment, Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University successfully sustained a fetal goat in an artificial womb for a few days. He and his team had removed the fetus from its mother after four months of normal gestation, connected its umbilical cord to tubes and an artificial placenta in an artificial uterus, and let it finish out its gestation. Kuwabara, who has since passed away, was on record as saying he hoped his technology would soon be advanced enough to support a human fetus.

But the chances of that are slim, Andersen says. “If we knew how to take a developing child out of the womb in the second or even early third trimester and successfully grow it in an external uterus, we would be doing it right now,” he says. There are so many premature births rights now that if we had any idea how to make it happen, someone would be making a lot of money off the technology. But it’s too complicated: Kuwabara’s goats were born with deformities.

But what if you took the opposite approach, creating an artificial uterus that, like nature’s version, grows around a newly implanted blastocyst? Hung-Ching Liu, a fertility researcher at Cornell University, demonstrated success doing just that. She and her team grew an artificial uterus from donated uterine lining cells. Liu successfully got mouse as well as human embryos (donated from IVF procedures) to implant into the uterus. According to regulations, you can’t experiment with human embryos older than 14 days, so these studies had to be stopped. However, the mouse trials were promising. Still, after a flurry of research in the mid-2000s, research on the artificial uterus seemed to fall off a cliff.

Recently, however, it has been quietly gaining ground again. After Liu’s work, the science has become more focused on mimicking the uterine environment either by manipulating living tissue or with engineered materials. In 2010, for example, researchers at Tufts University grew an artificial cervix using spider silk. In a 2009 study, Chinese researchers constructed an artificial womb out of several layers of real uterine tissue, and concluded that it could support the development of an embryo. The following year, German researchers reported progress in blood vessel growth in engineered tissue, including the kind suitable to create an artificial uterus. If the technology advances sufficiently, it might even be possible someday to implant such an artificial uterus in a man.

In the wake of this research, ethicists and legal scholars have jumped into the fray. Some think these recent technological advances mean ectogenesis is right around the corner. Others insist that it is merely a biologically impossible but convenient fantasy.

After all, the promise of the artificial uterus is seductive: ectogenesis would put men and women on the same moral ground when deciding the fate of a developing (or frozen) embryo, free to regard it from the same abstract perspective. One frequent complaint from men’s rights groups is that a woman can decide to keep a man’s child and legally force him to pay for 18 years to support that child—he has no way of “terminating” a pregnancy if his partner does not consent. On the other hand, some men say they have been traumatized by a woman’s decision to abort a child that was not strictly her own. Removing a pregnancy from one partner’s body would take the choice and responsibility away from one and give it to both.

But in solving one ethical dilemma, ectogenesis would pose ten more. How long could you put off reviving a frozen pregnancy? And if you choose instead to implant it into an artificial uterus,  what happens to the unwanted child after he or she has been born? Does he or she go straight to an orphanage? If neither parent wished to be involved in the child’s life, the state might get involved, requiring them to pay child support to ensure their offspring has a decent quality of life.

I don’t know which will happen first, an external womb designed so that no one has to be pregnant, or an artificial womb designed so that anyone can get pregnant. But from years of tech reporting I can say one thing: if the desire for a technology is there, someone will make it happen. There are a lot of ethical minefields to clear, but ectogenesis comes with an irresistible hook: this technology would bring us closer to the day when motherhood and fatherhood mean the same thing.

Image credits: Images from the History of Medicine

Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child.

Jessa: So let me check I have it right: you’re an only child yourself and have an only child as well?

Michelle: That’s right, and I always thought that if I became a parent I would have an only kid. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. What about you? Do you have siblings?

Jessa: Yes, I have an older brother. I know a lot of people seem to recreate their own family structure when it comes to forming their own, but somehow that didn’t really figure in for me, for whatever reason.

Michelle: You have a boy, right? How did you decide to have only one child?

Jessa: Yes, I have a three-year-old son. It’s really a combination of factors. I think I got away with murder in terms of the personal freedom I still have, even as a mother of a young child. Mostly as a result of him having a very involved father. And I don’t want to push my luck. What was your transition to parenthood like?

Michelle: Funny, it sounds like there are some similarities — my husband is self-employed, like I am, and he was willing to share care of our daughter. So while our transition to parenthood was exhausting and confusing in all the typical ways, I really had a lot of freedom to continue my career — and I don’t think I would have the same kind of flexibility with a larger family. In some ways, I think of my job as a second child! My daughter would win in a pinch, of course, but my job is something I love and want to nurture — and it’s something that would and could take all my time if I let it. How did you and your partner arrange care?

Jessa: To begin with, Sam had nine months of paid parental leave through a government job. But Oliver’s also had full-time childcare from a very early age. And it’s one of the reasons I don’t worry so much about the cultural truism that only children are poorly socialized — in daycare, Oliver has a much more social life than I do myself. It’s funny — anecdotally it feels like we’re in a tiny minority and bucking expectations, but single-child families now make up almost half of Canadian family units, according to the latest Canadian census. Doesn’t feel like it somehow, perhaps because for every four-sibling household, for example, there are four people telling their friends they have a big family. So it starts to feel like big families are the norm. Did you have outside pressure to have another?

Michelle: Our social circle has a lot of one-child families in it, so I don’t feel pressure from friends to have another child — and of course my parents only had one, so they’re happy with one granddaughter. I’ve wondered when and if my daughter would ask for a sibling — she loves babies, and often talks about other kids’ sisters and brothers — but so far she hasn’t. Sometimes she’ll say “Some people have two sisters, or two brothers, but you and me, Mama, we don’t have any sisters OR brothers, just us!” That doesn’t seem to be a bad thing to her, at least not yet. Does your son ever talk about siblings?

Jessa: It hasn’t come up yet, but then it’s still a novelty that Papa is Daddy’s Daddy, etc. There’s plenty of time for it to come up, but he has cousins around his age. For me also, resources are an issue. Not just financial ones — although it takes about a quarter-million dollars per child to raise them, not including help with college — but also time, patience, and attention, all of which are finite. I really admire people who can make room for three, four, five, or more people who need all of that — but I’m not sure I’m cut out for it, and I wouldn’t want to try only to find out that I’m not!!

Michelle: I know what you mean — and since I didn’t grow up with siblings, I feel clueless about sibling rivalry. I’m afraid I wouldn’t have the energy to handle it, and I’m also afraid I wouldn’t know how to — while in raising an only child, I can draw on my own experiences. As far as resources, I’ve thought about all the ones you mention, and also about planetary resources — I know some people feel very deeply that they don’t have a complete family without multiple kids, and I wouldn’t want to restrict or criticize people who have larger families. But I’m glad, just for resource-use reasons, that I feel like our family is complete with one child. Is that something you thought about?

Jessa: Honestly, I doubt it would have kept me from having another. I think I can understand people who feel two or more children make a complete family, because it’s a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference — the same reason I decided against it. As soon as the children equal or outnumber the adults, the culture of a family becomes kid-centred. The degree of chaos seems to increase exponentially. I value my peace, and with one I can still have it. Also, it’s quite an elegant and portable (quite literally) number of children, in my mind. I’ve heard people talk about worrying that if one child’s life goes awry, you’d still have another to bank on. Do you ever worry about all your eggs in one basket?

Michelle: I think I worry about that on a very deep gut level, for instance when it comes to my daughter’s safety — maybe I’m unconsciously aware that my entire genetic heritage is running around in one tiny package! But on a more conscious level, no, I’m not worried about that. Maybe one of the advantages of being a somewhat older parent — I was 34 when I had my daughter — is that I had my own identity well established when I became a parent, so I don’t worry about her life going “awry” for anything but her own sake. I don’t feel attached to her attaining any kind of traditional success, unless that’s what she wants for herself. Does that make sense?

Jessa: We’re totally in line on that one — I resent the notion that kids are just future adults, too. I think they’re legitimate humans at every age, and a lot of people lose sight of that!

Michelle: Do you ever think about having another? I don’t in any serious way, but sometimes I have the urge to witness the whole awesome transition from infancy to kidhood again — now that I’m more awake and not so shell-shocked. It’s as if I’d like to watch the movie a second time.

Jessa: Many of my decisions are very context-driven, so I wouldn’t rule it out. This is going on the internet forever, so if my future second child is out there reading it, I’m sure I had a great reason for having you!!

Image: iStockPhoto

On Monday, Cassie explained how the reproductive choices available to her felt like both a blessing and a curse. “I want to want a child,” she said, while admitting that, as of yet, she doesn’t. She’s not sure what to do.

I can’t (and won’t) tell Cassie what to do. The thing about the decision to have a baby or not is that there’s no right answer. Whichever path you take will become your life, and you’ll make it work. There’s no way to know for sure which choices will make your life most satisfying, and so, as Tim Kreider writes in his seminal essay, the Referendum, “We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated.”

As someone who’s childless by choice, I’ve been on both sides of the equation. Though I’ve never longed for a child of my own, I know that I’m forgoing a powerful human experience, and once in a while I wonder if that should bother me, before assuring myself that it doesn’t, because I’m also missing out on the inverted exorcist, the terrible twos, and the chance to fill my house with a bunch of sticky plastic crap.

The question of baby or no baby touches on one of the most fundamental  decisions we face as adults—how will we focus our attention? Because no matter how wealthy or successful you become, your time and energy remain fixed and finite resources. Life offers an almost infinite variety of possible experiences, and the hard truth is that it’s simply not possible to experience them all.

Growing up, I was primed to view life choices as my right, but I was, perhaps, under-prepared for the actual decision-making. That having choices meant eventually making them and actually closing some of the very doors I wanted the option to open came as a shock.

I’d always believed I could have it all—a husband, a child, a career, a full travel schedule, an active social life, and an endless array of personal pursuits. And it’s true that women of my generation really can have all those things, but they can’t have them all, 100 percent, at the same time. Every hour spent changing diapers or leading a board meeting or commuting to work or meeting a deadline is an hour you’re not reading a novel or writing one or reading to your child or learning to salsa dance. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all, and so we set priorities and make choices.

For me, that has meant saying no to motherhood. There are at least 100 reasons not to have kids, but in my mind, it really came down to this: how do I want to spend my 30’s and 40’s? And my honest answer is, not engaged in the exhausting work of raising a child.

Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother, caught tons of grief when she declared in the New York Times, “I love my husband more than I love my children,” but I understand what she means and feel the same way about the children I will never have.

I love my husband, and I don’t long for interlopers in our marriage. I like that lingering in bed together in the early sunshine and sharing leisurely breakfasts while discussing the morning newspaper are not special occasions for us, but regular pleasures that don’t require any pre-planning. At a recent women’s weekend, a mother friend remarked how wonderful it was to sleep past eight am. Last time she’d slept that late uninterrupted, she’d jumped out of bed in a panic, wondering why her kids hadn’t rousted her yet. (Turned out, they were occupied googling images of “boobies.”) Her story made me chuckle, but it also made me grateful that my life is fully my own.

Without children to care for, my husband and I can focus our attention on ourselves, and I doubt we would have achieved the marital happiness and intimacy we currently possess if the time we now devote to one other was instead spent hustling to get kids ready for school or supervising homework sessions.

Some people consider it selfish for people like us to decide not to sacrifice our autonomy for the children we’ve chosen not to conceive, but I’ve never understood this logic.

The idea that it’s noble for my mother to devote her life to nurturing me and my needs and yet selfish for me to apply myself to the very same task is exactly the kind of sexist judgment we need to move past.

As Lionel Shriver, writes in her Maybe Baby essay,  “There’s a crude logic to the idea that your own life has to be worth living on its merits, without having to redeem itself by producing another; someone’s life has to be worth something for its own sake, or all of human existence is pointless.”

I’m not one of those militant “childfree by choice” people who complain every time they’re forced to share a public space with children. I like kids. I enjoy their company, and I’m happy for my friends who have them. I don’t want to change anyone’s mind about having children. But please don’t call it “starting a family”—my husband and I are a family too, and we don’t need children to make us complete.

In fact, research shows that childfree couples are happier than those with kids.  An eight-year study of more than 200 couples found that marital satisfaction dropped following the birth of their first child, and a 2005 study concluded that, “There is no type of parent who reports less depression than nonparents.” A widely discussed survey of more than 900 working Texas mothers asked them to rate the enjoyableness of 19 routine activities. These mothers ranked child care as less pleasurable than 15 other activities, including preparing meals, shopping and housework.

What about all those mothers who insist that their kids are the best thing that ever happened to them? “Children are the best thing in a parent’s life,” Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness told one reporter “but only because they tend to get rid of every source of joy we had before they came along.”

In a provocative 2010 New York magazine feature, Jennifer Senior discusses a meta-analysis of 97 children-and-marital-satisfaction studies published in 2003 by psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge. “Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last—our current one most of all.”

Researchers have a hypothesis to explain this. Previous generations went from being children themselves to becoming spouses and new parents in their first independent households, without ever experiencing the unencumbered lives that most people now enjoy in their 20’s. In other words, people who delay childbearing get a taste of child-free adult living, and so they know what they’re missing.

Given the data, childlessness seems like a reasonable choice, yet there remains the worry that Cassie expressed—will she regret not having kids? Probably not if they aren’t something she’s always longed for. Laura Carroll, author of Families of Two, has interviewed thousands of childfree people and says, “not one person has spoken of regret. Instead they talk about the regret they would have if they had had kids.” But while this is true of the deliberately child-free, it may not hold for people who find themselves involuntarily childless.

And while most parents trumpet the virtues of parenthood, some do regret their decision to procreate. In 1975, Ann Landers asked her readers with children, “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” A whopping 70 percent of respondents said no. For obvious reasons (no one wants their child to feel unloved or unwanted) parental regret remains a taboo topic, yet the internet has given parents a chance to finally vent their true feelings anonymously. I imagine these parents are in the minority, but that’s doesn’t make their experiences less valid.

What about Cassie’s other worry, “If we don’t reproduce, who will take care of us? Who will visit us when we’re old?” These are important questions, but children aren’t necessarily the answer. Studies suggest that elderly people who are childless are no worse off than their parent peers. A 2011 study of nearly 500 Swedish 85-year-olds concluded that both parents and childless people this age were “equally likely to end up in institutional care, to have friends close by and to be in contact with neighbours.” Middle-aged and elderly people without children aren’t lonelier, unhappier or more depressed, nor are they less satisfied with their lives than those who are parents.

Social interaction, whether from family or friends, keeps us vibrant at any age, and these social ties don’t have to involve family. As one of my happily child-free friends told me recently, “It will probably be a lot better to have friends around us in our dotage instead of children or relatives with all the attendant emotional baggage that family ties can create.”

Expecting your children to take care of you as you age straps them with a huge financial and emotional burden. I’d rather save the $221,190 I’d spend raising a child over the next seventeen years to pay for care in my golden years.

Of course decisions about whether to have kids rarely come down to money. Instead, they take us to the mythical stadium that Cameron describes in her motherhood post.

When I was a child, my mother gave me a record album titled, Free to Be You and Me. The title song spoke of a land where “you and me are free to be you and me.” Now that my generation has entered into that fabled land, we face a challenge that our feminist forebears probably didn’t anticipate–deciding which me we want to be. I have chosen to be nobody’s mother, and it’s a choice that feels exactly right.

**

Photos: couple by Adwriter. Cartwheel by setaysha.

Cassie, when you proposed this series of posts—well, the truth is, I was worried.  There’s nothing that seems to make a comments section ignite like someone pontificating on motherhood. And I’m embarrassed to say, I’m not quite sure if my—our—decision to have kids had much to do with science, beyond that biology might have conquered all.

There wasn’t a particular moment that settled it. What I remember was that at some point, the if in the ongoing conversation between my husband and me turned into a cautious when.

This shift happened right around the time I turned 30. The timing was perfect. I could just tell people—I imagine I have told people, people who I didn’t really want to get into it with—that it was that rhythmic ticking, insistent as the clock inside the crocodile that trailed Captain Hook in hopes of his other hand and everything attached.

But I’m guessing that doesn’t help you much. At least, when I was trying to think about what life with kids might be like, and how to make a decision about that life, that’s not what I wanted to know.

This was not a decision I made rationally. The truth is (and I can’t believe I’m admitting it in front of you) it mostly had to do with feelings, with memories. Even with poetry.

One of these feelings: how loved I felt as a kid. I always knew my parents were crazy about my brother and me. My dad, in particular—he was 50 when he met my mom, and at that point, I don’t think he thought he would ever have a family.

Sometimes it's like this.

I couldn’t figure out exactly what we were doing to be so delightful, but even at the time, I knew he thought we had changed his life for the better.

I guess another way to talk about how I made the decision is to tell you about a poem I once read. I can’t remember the name of it, or who wrote it, and I might even be misremembering what it’s about. But in my memory, there is a stadium filled with all of the lives that a person could have led, and they are all sitting there, watching the life you’ve chosen play out the rest of the game.

I first read the poem when I was in Spain, and realized that the doctor that I thought I was going to be needed to step off the grass and into the stands, to watch.

And later, as my husband and I thought about having children, I realized that the game I wanted to see was the one in which a mother stood at the center of the field.

Because I knew—for me—this would be the most unpredictable life, the one that would deal out the most challenges, provide the most risk. Another person could find a cause and fight for it, move to another country, transform herself from the inside out.  She could invite children into her life in other ways, and really let them in.

And this is one of my weaknesses. I’m too cautious to do any of that. Too happy to keep doing things the way I’ve always done them. Too quick to throw up very comfortable walls that keep the rest of the world out.

One of the things that I was both dreading and wishing for was exactly this: that parenthood would make me a different person. A selfless person. I had a friend who, on several occasions when I put her off by saying we were waiting a few more years to have kids, said, “So, you’re just going to have a few more selfish years, then?”

After I had my first son, I found that I was a different person. And I wasn’t at all. I still got hungry and grumpy and worried and tired. I still did not mind cleaning toilets, like I had in college. I still wanted nothing to do with vomit. I still looked longingly at waves I didn’t have time to ride.

But new things have emerged, and continue to do so. I’ve found I am (usually, mostly) more patient than I ever thought I could be. I can (usually, mostly) sing lullabies until my voice gets hoarse.  Even though I’m not someone who would have been described as warm, nurturing, motherly—I liked it all so much (usually, mostly) that I wanted to do it again.

But it's more often like this.

And here’s where maybe the science part comes in. Through my children, my capacity for wonder has returned. Before they were born, I had come to a point where, even though I asked questions for a living, I had stopped asking the questions that mattered.

Now I have to answer questions from the time I wake up until long after we should all be in bed.

In answering, I realize how much I don’t know. Why, for instance, is the ocean salty–how did it get salty in the first place? What is that slimy stuff coming out a snail? Why do people like shoes so much? Do monkeys sweat?

There are all the questions that I will never have the answers to: Will we all die in the same house? Where is Grandpa Morley now? When we die, will our dishes still be here?

(Actually, I can probably guess at the last one. Barring natural or unnatural disaster, there will always be dishes in the sink.)

I guess this is getting into something that you didn’t ask about, which is, what was the result of all of these feelings, this poetry?  For me, it’s been connection. Connection with the questions that I should be asking. Connection with other parents, and with my own.

One of the great joys of being a parent has been seeing my mom being a grandmother. Seeing how she loves my sons, I can see how much she loved me as a child, how much she loves me still.  I feel the same joy seeing my brother be an uncle. Seeing my husband be a father.

I realize I haven’t said much about what’s hard about being a parent, but it seems like enough people talk about that. There are things that I have given up, at least for the moment. But with everything I’ve received from my children, I feel like I’m only now entering my selfish years.

Somewhere in that stadium in the poem that may or may not exist, many people who I might have been fill the stands. At least one of them is a doctor. At least one of them is a biologist. One does research on bioluminescent plankton in Belize, another climbs into tree canopies, another works in Antarctica. Several wrote books before they turned 35. They speak many languages, and they surf more gracefully, ski more boldly, and run faster than the person standing in the center of the field.

But that’s the thing: I’m not alone out there.

There are so many people with me. Some of us have kids and some don’t, and some are doctors and some are biologists and some have written books. One of them is you. And my boys are there, too, saying that now is the time for me to play.

***

Images   Top: Allie Wanberg  Middle & Bottom: Chris Cottrell

This post has been edited since it was first posted. I fell asleep while putting the kids to bed and didn’t get the chance to clean up my messes, here or in the sink.

Rock, paper, scissors is a great game for making tough decisions — like who will get off the couch to order takeout. A couple of months ago, I asked my husband if he wanted to play. We were in a bar, and I was tipsy. “Let’s do paper, scissors, rock to decide whether to have a baby,” I said.

My husband wouldn’t play, but he wasn’t surprised at the request. I’ve had babies on the brain for months. You see, I haven’t decided whether I want a child. That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that I’m 33 years and 7 months old. While my brain leisurely mulls the pros and cons, my womb beeps like a smoke alarm low on batteries. This relentless distress signal has me on edge.

A woman’s fertility begins to decline in her late 20s. And then, in her mid-30s, it takes a nosedive. Or, as LWON’s own Virginia Hughes charmingly puts it, “By the time I’m 38, my bank account may be pregnant, but my eggs will be fossils.” Excellent. If I hadn’t already been in a panic, I would be now. I feel like I’m shopping at a going-out-of-business sale. I’m not really sure I want the clothes, but this is my last chance to get them. What if that jacket is the exact thing I want to wear in five years? My anxiety is, in many ways, unwarranted. I can probably have kids for years to come. And even if I can’t, my husband and I could adopt. Still, I can’t help but feel the insistent ticking of that biological clock.

A child sounds like a nice idea in theory. I like the idea of family. And I always assumed that, at a certain age, the urge to procreate would kick in. After all, it’s what we’re born to do. But as I near the breeding equivalent of last call, I find I’m still undecided. I love my friends’ kids, sure. But being around them doesn’t make me yearn to have my own. In fact, hanging out with the parents of young children only serves to highlight the drawbacks. Raising a kid is a shit-ton of work. They demand pretty much constant attention and infinite patience, things I have in short supply.

Plus, I like my life. I want to travel unencumbered and go out with my friends. I want to sleep in on the weekend. In his phenomenal Times’ essay, Tim Krieder puts it like this: “I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.”

My situation is complicated by the fact that we live below two exceedingly noisy toddlers who wail and scream and race across the floor, their little feet jackhammering rather than pitter-pattering. Perhaps they’re normal toddlers making normal toddler noise, but that noise doesn’t gel with the silence I need to sleep or write or stay sane. The pounding and dropping and screeching sounds—my life’s horrifying new soundtrack—fill me with black rage. My womb has likely never been less hospitable to life than it is right now.

Mommy material?

But when the children upstairs are asleep and the apartment is quiet, I can think of reasons to have a child too. My husband and I are both basically only children. So the pressure to reproduce has been intense. Our parents started asking about grandchildren before we were even married. My father-in-law already has a playroom in the basement for his nonexistent granddaughter. Decide not to have a child and I’m denying them grandparenthood. Decide not to have a child and I’m denying my husband fatherhood. And he would be a truly amazing father.

I recently asked my mom what she would say if she were trying to convince me to have kids. “I don’t think that there’s anything I can say to convince you,” she said. She added, “If you have to be convinced, maybe it really isn’t for you.” But then she began to talk about the importance of family, and her fear that I will be lonely. “I have a million brothers and sisters that I call my family, but for you what’s that going to be?” she asked. “When the family starts to go, it’s like you’re all alone.” She paused. “I think about that a lot for you, and how that will be.”

I think about it too. If we don’t reproduce, who will take care of us? Who will visit us when we’re old? Will the peace and quiet that I wanted in my 30s become unbearable in my 60s? I imagine us gray and shriveled sitting in matching chairs. Sure we’ll have friends. But we’ll spend Christmases alone. I doubt I would regret having a child, but I may well regret not having one.

But those seem like the wrong reasons to bring a new human being into the world. I’m supposed to want to be a mother because it’s an incredible, life-altering experience. “You can never understand the heart’s capacity to love another human being until you have a child,” my friends with kids gush. And in the next breath, those same friends tell me not to take the leap unless I’m certain. So I’m supposed to be certain about wanting something that I can’t fully understand until I’ve experienced it? Um, ok.

I am anything but certain. As much as I don’t want to do the work associated with raising a child, especially right now, when I think about never having a kid, it makes me sad. Somewhere, beneath 14 layers of selfishness, some niggling part of me can’t give up on the idea of motherhood. Here’s what I can say: I want to want a child.

Not long ago, I read an article in women’s magazine that discussed a new fad. Apparently indecisive women just like me are going off birth control and leaving the decision up to fate. In truth, they’re leaving the decision up to biology, and that’s probably not the best family planning strategy. But I can see the appeal. Sometimes I wish the decision weren’t mine to make. It’s a tough choice with high stakes.

I should be grateful to have a choice. My grandma didn’t. And my mom got pregnant before she had time to even think about whether she wanted to be a mother. But having options seems to be both a blessing and a curse. So what’s a girl nearing her mid-30s to do?

***

Image credits: All the photos in this post are of me, my parents, and a friend’s baby. Unfortunately I don’t know who took most of these pictures, but I’m sure they won’t mind me sharing them with you.

April 30 – May 4

Guest poster Sam McDougle starts the week the only way any week should ever start: with space dinosaurs. Anyway, his post seems to be about space dinosaurs; inside, you find a question about how far scientists should stretch the implications of their research to draw attention to the science (I see what you did there). Many opinions ensue.

Of all the descendants of the dinosaurs, is any as improbable as the hummingbird? They don’t weigh much more than a coin, guest poster Whitney Barlow tells us, but somehow these tiny vagrants undertake jawdropping transcontinental trips that occasionally end at the American Museum of Natural History.

Michelle takes us through the gruesome but fascinating history of mine lighting, in which the definition of “fireman” became “the guy who creeps ahead wrapped in water-soaked clothes and holding a long, flaming stick.” And hopes he doesn’t explode in a giant fireball.

Heather wonders if the world’s most expensive food is worth the extinction of the near-mythical creatures we must kill to get it.

Tom informs us of the existence of a scientific test (no, seriously) called Draw a Scientist. Inevitably, Tom’s scientist drawing turns into a bit of a Rorschach test; are those crocs or leopard print slippers? Oddly angled keyboard or bag of Fritos? And what does all of this mean about my mother?

Extra credit: If I were a statistician, perhaps I too would change my job title to Professional Dragon King Hunter.

Beluga caviar may well be the world’s most expensive foodstuff. Demand has long far outstripped supply, and the palest roe, which apparently possess a subtle, buttery flavor, now sell for $10,000 per pound. But a black market in Beluga caviar has long prospered and poachers are unable to resist the call. Wild sturgeon are on their way out: they currently hover at the “critically endangered” mark.

I had no idea that these huge fish once ran in the Danube River, much as salmon now run in the river below my house, until I came across a recent paper by a Serbian archaeologist, Ivana Zivaljevic. Zivaljevic is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the role that fishing played in the rise of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements along the Danube Gorge, but her research interests are much broader. She is particularly intrigued by “the cultural perceptions of animals and humans in prehistory,” and by the “fluidity of the concept of a human being and person: is it universal and stable, or can it be more flexible and include other beings and things.”

The people who resided along the Danube Gorge, at 8000-year-old settlements like Lepenski Vir, saw the sturgeon as much more than sturgeon. The huge fish, which fatten for much of their lives on little fish in the Black Sea, had to fight their way upstream and past dangerous rapids in the Gorge to reproduce and perpetuate themselves. It is an epic journey, a struggle that has a true nobility to it and a kind of risky biological imperative that is a metaphor for our own lives.

Zivaljevic and some of her colleagues think that the people of Lepenski Vir saw the returning sturgeon as ancestors, fish ancestors. They sculpted boulders into rotund figurines that are half human-half sturgeon. One has the eyes and nose of a human being, but the distinctive mouth of a sturgeon: along its upper back, the artists sculpted a row of scutes. There is no clear distinction or boundary between fish and human: they are one and the same,  a view of the world that would have been familiar to ancient Native Americans.

And yet here is the most interesting part of all. Lepenski Vir overlooks one of the best fishing spots in the gorge, and archaeologists working in the ancient settlement found sturgeon bones scattered along the house floors and stone mallets lying near hearths. Brushed with sacred red pigment, many of the mallets took the shape of fish or boats: some archaeologists have described them as “scepters” for rituals. But Zivaljevic thinks the story is more complicated. In historic times, she notes, fishermen along the Danube set up traps for sturgeons where they swam closest to the banks: then the men rowed out and stunned the giant fish with blows to the head. For this, they carried large wooden clubs, not unlike the stone mallets.

In other words, the people of Lepinski Vir may well have seen the returning sturgeon as both a sustainable source of food and as spirit ancestors or spirit helpers. The “dichotomy between ‘ritual’ and ‘profane” (often insisted upon in archaeological literature),” writes Zivaljevic, “may be more apparent than real, as symbolic meanings can be built upon practical solutions and functional objects, and vice-versa.”

I think Zivaljevic is right. In modern secular societies, we are far more comfortable when we can hive off the sacred from the profane, when we can stifle our sense of awe at one of nature’s great riparian migrations and simply concentrate on the business of cashing in on a seriously endangered fish. The people of Lepinski Vir saw the world differently.

Soon their dead will stand watch for nothing.

Photo of beluga sturgeon, Charleen N. Simmons; Caviar by Monica Mueller; Illustration of Beluga sturgeon from Fishes of Turkestan, by A. P. Fedtshemko, 1874. 

But then there are the perceptions. The preconceptions. The stereotypes. And because scientists are nearly as prone to mirror gazing as journalists are, it’s perhaps no surprise that there’s a robust literature on the public perception of scientists and their work. (Upshot: trustworthy but cold. And maybe a little weird.)

When it comes to kids, and what they think about scientists, one of the oldest survey methods is something called the Draw-A-Scientist Test, or DAST, first deployed in the early 1980s. (Actually it was anticipated by Margaret Mead as far back as 1957, though she favored essays over doodles.) And for as long as researchers have been asking kids to draw pictures of scientists, those researchers have been quite certain that the kids should have drawn something else.

As a 1992 review put it, “The stereotypical image of the scientist is a balding, middle-aged man in a white coat surrounded by bunsen burners, or doing unspeakable things to rats.” Boys, typically, draw only men doing science, while girls are more likely to include a few female practitioners. As in, 28 woman scientists out of 5,000 total drawings in the original 1983 study. Things have apparently improved vis a vis gender representation since then, but even the reviewer above didn’t think to mention that the drawings almost invariably depict the color spectrum of science as ranging from paper-white to light pink.

The beakerhead doth protest too much, methinks

Abashed, some institutions have stooped to manipulating kids into drawing less starkly Einsteinian caricatures. Fermilab, for example, boasts a charming series of “before and after” images of and reflections on scientists, culled from pre and post lab-visit drawing sessions. (Many others have written about this, not least our own Ann Finkbeiner, in an early LWON post I just now learned about.) The pictures move none-too-subtly towards gender and ethnic equity, and in fact may outstrip many actual fields of science in doing so. The post-tour descriptions of what the students have learned are the best, though. One sample: “Scientists come in all shapes and forms. Women, men, chemists, biologists, and physicists are all in the field of science.” Another: “The stereotype gives the impression of a geek with glasses or someone who is bald. Actually, they are just people who ask and answer questions.” And “. . . anyone can be a scientist. I saw people walking around in sweatshirts and jeans. Who knows? Maybe I can be a scientist.”

But school kids are notorious suckers for propaganda. What about skeptical college students? One of them recently administered the Draw-A-Scientist Test to students in my environmental journalism class, a mix of Master’s-level journalism students and science majors and grad students, with other assorted souls sifted in for leavening.

And across the board, they drew visions of science that, hot damn, made me momentarily reconsider my long-ago decision to move on from science to journalism. Exploration! Glamor! Glamorous exploration in what could be a cave or an ocean!

My own doodle was of a gender-neutral individual with nose pressed to computer screen (see top image: not a self-portrait), but for my students, science seems to be nothing but a grand adventure, conducted outside in exotic locales, by smiling people.

Several of them are already primed to become excellent science journalists. But all of them are going to make science propagandists the likes of which we’ve never seen before:

Images Top: By the author, not of the author. In color: From the Fermilab series. The rest: The really quite cheery students of Comm/EnvRes 277c.

It was the first day of spring, and I was on a mission—a fact-checking mission, to be exact. For the past three months, several American Museum of Natural History employees and I had been tracking a Rufous Hummingbird who had lost her way while migrating to Mexico and ended up at the museum, of all places. She’d made our patch of winter-blooming shrubs at the 81st Street entrance her home and had grown into a local celebrity. Some say she’s the first hummer to overwinter in New York. The perfect news hook, I thought, for the first day of spring.

I just had to make sure she was still there. We’d seen the bird regularly the previous week, and as part of the Editorial team, I’d been planning an article for the news blog weeks before that.

But as I approached her favorite spot on my walk to work that morning, I saw white puffs of smoke rise from the shrubs as roaring machines overpowered the shrieks of birds. The throat lump of those environmental destruction moments in FernGully, or Avatar, or The Lorax, or whatever, came. And I panicked.

The real news, of course, wasn’t that the hummingbird would be there on March 20. It was that she had made it to New York at all, from as far north as Alaska, and had stayed for three whole months. The equinox sighting would just let me put “Spring” in the story title. It was a self-imposed embargo to support a silly news peg that didn’t have any bearing on the true wonder of this little bird.

We’ve always been a bit incredulous at the thought of hummingbird migration. The old folklore is that hummingbirds hitched rides on the backs of geese, since no one could imagine enough fuel fitting in such a tiny body to fly over, say, the Gulf of Mexico. Apocryphal, but enough to get mention in an ornithology textbook. These little beings that weigh as much as coins cross mountains, oceans, continents from north to south and east to west. Humans, of such little faith. The literature treats birds that travel outside their normal ranges like outlaws. “Vagrants” is the official term, but my personal favorite is “accidental birds”—as if they cease to be real birds when they stray from the course we’ve charted for them in books.

Or, I realized, on blogs.

She’ll be there on March 20, I kept telling myself as I wrote the story. She’s made it this far. She has to be. The post was prepped and ready to go, but as I ran toward the scene of the crime that morning, not a Rufous in sight.

The scene, I soon realized, wasn’t so criminal. What I had thought were chainsaws were actually leaf blowers. The white haze was a mist from power washing the sidewalk. No one was destroying any habitat. Even if they were, the bird could have headed next door to Central Park to feed on some other plants starting to bloom. Still, did spring cleaning have to be so literal?

At lunch, a few other employees and I scanned the bushes and put people on hummingbird watch in case she returned. One naturalist noticed the landscapers had left some extra leaves by the shrubs that morning, perhaps instructed to do so to give the hummer cover. It was a nice gesture. Nonetheless: no bird.

As I headed back to the office, I couldn’t help thinking that this was my reward for planning news before it happened. I was trying to fit nature into a mold for the sake of a headline. We were all setting this bird in some box: gawking at her for straying so far from her range, for not having dropped dead each week she survived the (mild—but still cold!) winter, for jetting off the day of my story. But nature does as nature does.

And then, just as the day was ending, an email arrived. The subject line: “NEWS FLASH!!” She was back in the bushes. I immediately called up the article on my computer and clicked “Publish.”

I haven’t seen her since.

*   *   *

Whitney (whitneybarlow.com) is an editorial assistant at the American Museum of Natural History and a science and nature writer in New York City. She loves tracking and studying all living things. Except wasps.

All views expressed here are her own and not the Museum’s.

Images: Anders Peltomaa; Ed Gailland.

You may have seen the extensive (and entertaining) press reaction days ago to a recent press release that cited Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow taking liberties in his paper on the chirality of α-methyl amino acids.  Breslow mentioned “advanced versions of dinosaurs,” who may live “elsewhere in the universe.” Gasp! The kicker? “We would be better off not meeting them.”

It’s not surprising that a leading chemist discussing alien – and apparently dangerous – dinosaurish life forms would get some coverage.  Who doesn’t love giant highly-evolved deathly space-reptiles?! Breslow was likely being facetious (though this is unconfirmed), and presumably knows that the chance of distant alien life forms closely resembling distinct fauna of earth is extremely improbable.  Breslow’s paper is really just about amino acid chirality in a sample of meteoric rock.

Amino acids on earth have a stubbornly fixed chirality (“homochirality”). This gives our earthly amino acids a distinct chemical symmetry.  An oft-used metaphor to describe chirality is that of “handedness” – the building blocks of life here on earth happen to be “left-handed” with no exception.  Evidence of left-handed amino acids in recent samples of a meteorite (specifically, the Murchison meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969 near the town of Murchison in Victoria, Australia) have been analyzed by chemists including Breslow, and used to buttress theories of exobiology.  Exobiology is the idea that life did not spontaneously arise from chemicals already on earth after it formed, but were expressed shipped to earth on meteorites. Perhaps, according to Breslow, all our amino acids are intractable lefties because they were “seeded” here by an asteroid billions of years ago and never had an opportunity to be different.

Before we get any deeper on theories of exobiology, I need to admit something: I am writing about exobiology at this particular moment because a chemist with a sense of humor decided to mention (and caution us of) the highly improbable existence of space dinosaurs.  A cynic would say he was cheaply getting attention; I would say, with tongue half in cheek, that he’s being a shrewd professional.  The fact is, so much interesting science (like the amazing bodies of work on the origin of life) often falls under the radar of the modern internet press engine.  Molecular chirality and 40-year-old meteorites don’t have as sexy a ring as research on “What Facebook Is Doing To Your Brain.”  With American K-12 students ranking 21st in a sample of 30 industrialized countries, maybe it’s time we hook them with some space dinosaurs (and then softly explain that they probably don’t exist, of course).

Ok, back to exobiology (or the fact that we may all be aliens) — chemist Sandra Pizzarello and her team published work last year showing that some Antarctic meteorite samples contained traces of ammonia, which is a byproduct of organic chemicals, and suggested a link to exobiology:

Given that meteorites and comets have reached the Earth since it formed, it has been proposed that the exogenous influx from these bodies provided the organic inventories necessary for the emergence of life…an abundant exogenous delivery of ammonia, therefore, might have been significant in aiding early Earth’s molecular evolution toward prebiotic syntheses and the data in this study, showing the capability of some asteroidal bodies to provide it, would make a reasonable case for exobiology.

Interesting as these ideas are, it will be hard to ever prove the speculations of exobiological theories, as Breslow mentions in his paper:

The unusual amino acids delivered to Earth by the Murchison meteorite and related ones could have led to the dominance of [left-handed] amino acids and d-sugars on early Earth that would permit life to start. Of course, showing that it could have happened this way is not the same as showing that it did.

The origin of life is highly debated topic in astronomy, biology, and chemistry, and has various implications for our understanding of life on both earth and the broader, dinosaur-infested universe.

Sure, maybe it’s dishonest to allude to, in a chemistry paper, fantastical creatures that very likely don’t exist.  But if it gets a few more people to at least learn what chirality is, then that’s fine by me.  (Though, admittedly, it may only work once, and perhaps only with reference to space dinos.)

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Sam McDougle is a freelance science writer based out of Brooklyn, NY. He was born and raised in New York City, and feels its particular magnetism as a city rat feels the magnetism of a damp sidewalk on garbage day.  Sam used to study the neural basis of motor learning in the lab of Javier Medina at the University of Pennsylvania before exchanging the brain electrode for the laptop and coffee shop.  Most of Sam’s writing can be read at Vice Magazine’s science and tech uber-hub, MOTHERBOARD.  Follow: @smickdougle

Photo credits: Flickr user “anajonmary”; Sam McDougle

April 23 – April 27

This week, Ann does what put Ann on the map: she tells us about spy organisations and what they like to do in space. And then tells us about the citizen scientists who use binoculars, stopwatches and math to figure out what they’re up to up there.

With the help of a social ecologist marvellously named Peter Ditto, Christie explains why the truth doesn’t always win.

Ginny wonders whether there is a social limit on motherhood that won’t budge despite all the ways biology is being stretched by reproductive technologies.

After insisting that scientists eat, too, Cameron tells us the stories of cooking in the field, which are by turns fascinating (you can bake chocolate chip cookies in a gold pan!) and horrifying (two words: tuna balls).

And Tom introduces us to generation anthropocene, by way of explaining why his science writing students make him proud enough to “justify the outrageous necessity to leave one’s house — showered and presentable, no less — simply to earn a living.”

See you next week!

My culinary horizons started their slow expansion when I was 21 and wearing Carhartts so dirty that they could stand up by themselves. After a day spent measuring trees at a forest research station, the grad student I was working with had offered to make dinner. When I asked what I can do to help, he handed me a handful of green stuff.

It smelled sort of familiar. “What do I do with this, exactly?” I asked. He furrowed his brows at me—not unlike the expression he’d worn for most of the day as I mixed up Douglas and white fir.

But this time, he sounded more incredulous. “You don’t know what cilantro is?”

Eating in the field can have the same dislocated, heightened quality that accompanies foreign travel. Far from the comforts of home, you find yourself cooking with people who you’ve only ever seen hunched over a lab bench. (You mean, they eat, too?).

And the result can be more than palate-cleansing. I’m just guessing here, but it seems like field researchers are a self-selected bunch  who don’t mind experimenting in far-flung locales (and can often take pleasure in focusing on the tiniest of details). Why wouldn’t they also be fascinated by food?

Sometimes, the fine cuisine can be a direct result of research. Science journalist Douglas Fox once spent time on Heron Island, a part of the Great Barrier Reef, with researchers studying fish vision—researchers who traveled with wasabi and soy sauce. At night, after they harvested a fish’s eyes for their study, they’d call to Fox to come and get the rest to fillet.  He saw the whole process—from ocean to lab to plate—and got to eat fish that he’d never find in a restaurant. His favorite: trevally sashimi.

(Of course, some research doesn’t mix well with food. While staying with a crew of researchers for a story, freelance journalist Hillary Rosner discovered that one of the fridge’s produce bins held DNA analysis material—in the form of tiny snips of deer mouse tails. She stored her veggies in the other produce bin.)

Fieldwork also requires creative cooking techniques. During Anne Sasso’s first geology field job, she learned about more than just volcanic rocks in the Yukon’s St. Elias Mountains.  The graduate student she worked with taught her how to bake loose versions of chocolate chip cookies, rolls, and apple pie (in a gold pan) in a one-gallon Coleman fuel canister-turned-reflective oven.

Later, when Sasso conducted her own doctoral work in Argentina, her assistant would use their house’s electric space heater to broil open-face sandwiches with cheese and tomato sauce on local-style rolls. Says Sasso, founder of WaterRock Communications, “I think he got a few shocks. The whole electrical circuitry in our ‘house’ (generous term) was suspect.”

Not all experiments pan out.  Science journalist Emily Sohn was on a multi-media reporting trip in the Peruvian Amazon when, after a series of unfortunate events (venomous sting rays, killer bees, vampire bats, thunderstorm, flash flood, and finally, a flipped raft), she and her group were living on canned tuna, saltines, and bananas.

Sohn, consumed with improving on their lot, had an inspiration: tuna balls.  The idea: a combination of tuna, mashed-up saltines, and possibly another binding agent, all fried. Her description of the results:

“I had imagined something like croquettes. The reality was very different. We each got two or three of them. We stood there, around a fire, gulping them down. Nobody said a word. Despite our meager rations, some were left uneaten. Then, silently, we crawled into our tents and went to sleep.”

After hearing all of these stories, I was left feeling like my own fieldwork-and-cooking adventures reflected less on any groundbreaking meals (or research, for that matter), and more on my lack of culinary savvy. In fact, the first thing I thought of when I started remembering a summer-long stint at Toolik Field Station in Alaska was that it was where I first earned how to make coffee with a drip filter. (Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend. Does that make me sound like less of an idiot? No?)

But food memories, even from someone who doesn’t know much about food, still elicit powerful memories of something beyond just the place.  I’ve spent the last few days emailing with Laurie Gold, a University of Washington epidemiologist who spent the summer with me, picking tiny tundra plants. We have been reminiscing about Alaskan Amber, the legendary 4^th of July feast, the chocolate-covered espresso beans that we nicknamed “X pills,” X being the real name of our indefatigable, ever-cheerful PI.

From our hilltop study site, we could see the dust of eighteen-wheelers coming down the haul road and, we hoped, carrying mail for us.  Our families sent us care packages with more coffee, Clif Bars, other treats. But the biggest treat of the summer was when one of the truckers arrived with California nectarines.

Adding seasoning to all of these memories are the Arctic sun, the call of the loons, the permafrost melting underneath our feet, the sensitive, intertwined fauna of an ecosystem that will show how the climate warms, and how soon.

On the rare occasion that I make a cup of coffee, somewhere I am still standing in my mosquito-proof shirt and XTRATUF boots, doling out a tablespoon into the filter before heading out. And somewhere, still, are those fragile, hardy tundra plants.

The most extreme example of someone who’s intertwined his love for food and science that I’ve met is ornithologist Walt Koenig. He’s spent several decades studying acorn woodpeckers at a California natural reserve . Each September, he embarks on a statewide acorn counting trip that, along with understanding the variability of an important food source for California wildlife, is a good excuse for Koenig to visit as many taquerias as possible. (He writes an annual newsletter about his research, complete with restaurant reviews).

When I interviewed Koenig at the reserve a few years ago, he somehow ended up cooking every meal for me. (Had someone told him about my kitchen skills?) One afternoon, he pulled together killer crab quesadillas from the dregs of his cupboards, and much of our conversation beyond woodpeckers focused on the scarcity of his  favorite foods in upstate New York, where he’s now based.

Koenig told me that his kids liked his homemade tortillas so much that they refused to eat tortillas from anywhere else. Inspired, I bought a tortilla press.

Use saran wrap or parchment paper to prevent dough from sticking.

Now, every time I make tortillas, I think of acorn woodpeckers and their crazily complicated family structures, their enormous granaries of acorns. And I think of Koenig, who’s either eating a taco right now or wishing he were.

The tortillas: you should try them. You can put almost anything on them and they taste delicious. Even tuna balls would work. Especially with a little bit of cilantro.

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I hardly know which question to start with.  Let’s begin with the questions I’m not going to ask:  what the NRO is up to, and what target that classified radar satellite is looking at, and why the target requires using radar and not regular optical imaging.  The answers I’d get would be neither exact nor satisfying.  I know this because I’ve spent time asking such questions and I swear, the people who answer them have taken lessons in stringing common English words into sentences that range from non-responsive to gibberish.  This pisses me off unbearably and I used to think I’d rather they just told me they weren’t going to answer.  But then I ran into some classified guy at a party and asked politely, “And what do you do?” and he said, “I can’t tell you,” and I wanted to yell, “Well for chrissakes then make something up, I was just being polite!”  The point is, classification is a mighty hard on friendly conversation with your fellow man.

No, the point is, I may have needed to get that off my chest but we’ve strayed from the subject: those amateur trackers.  They’re international – in addition to the countries above, they come from the U.S., England, South Africa, Australia, France, Germany – number around 15 to 25, and are mostly retired.   They operate out of their back yards using binoculars, stop watches, cameras, and math.  They’re not looking randomly around the sky, they’re looking for specific objects:  the International Space Station and the space shuttle carrying crews travelling to the station, satellites with decaying orbits, and mainly, classified satellites.  They hear about a launch – NRO announces launches which are full of conspicuous fire and thunder and not exactly secret – spot the satellite, communicate positions and trajectories to their colleagues, and calculate the orbit that the NRO doesn’t want them to calculate.

Orbits tell them something about the satellite itself.  A sun-synchronous orbit — that follows the sun’s path — is probably an optical satellite taking pictures, says Allen Thomson, a former intelligence analyst, of the same locations with the same sunlight and shadows.   A Molniya orbit sits over one location; Thomson says it’s probably a signals intelligence satellite.  The April 3 satellite’s orbit was retrograde – the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation – so it’s probably radar (for reasons I faintly understand and can’t begin to explain but having to do with the earth turning away from the satelllite, thereby enhancing the Doppler shift and ultimately the resolution of whatever the satellite is looking at).

Not that any of this is secret, though the tracker from the Netherlands says that they don’t publish everything they’ve seen.  The NRO reportedly doesn’t like the trackers but the trackers aren’t telling the bad guys anything the bad guys don’t already know.  Thomson says the bad guys can probably afford equipment better than stuff that trackers can order from Amazon.  The tracker from the Netherlands says, “If 15 retired hobbyists with simple equipment can do this, then rogue nations certainly can.  They really don’t need us.”

The trackers are space nerds, they like looking at space-type things that are supposed to be secret. Tracking is their definition of fun.  Some of them were at one time employed as government trackers, many have been tracking since the first decade of the space age.  They feel as though they’re recording a hidden history – the Netherlands tracker is an archeologist and thinks of his hobby as space archeology.

The trackers also don’t much like secrecy — I heard about them because the Federation of American Scientists‘ secrecy-hating Steven Aftergood put it in his Secrecy News – and like to point out that the UN Outer Space Treaty asks countries to disclose the whereabouts of their satellites.  The Netherlands tracker adds that the trackers have seen satellites going out of control within a few weeks of launch, and the US government won’t mention it until a year later when the thing becomes a public menace.  They’re currently watching an out-of-control 1.5 ton Japanese spy satellite, he says, that’s coming down mid-2012.

I’m always impressed by amateurs doing for free and pleasure the things that professionals are paid to do.  I’m also impressed that stuff this close to being classified is all over the internet – a person could make a career of following the links of these links.  I’m not sure whether this internet ubiquity is a testament to our country’s relative openness, or the internet’s ability to find dusty corners, or the irresistibility of secrets.

Meanwhile, the NRO is in the middle of a series of launches with an “unprecedented operational tempo” – oh yeah? and what’s that unprecedented tempo all about?  Good luck finding out.  And I wouldn’t google “NRO” and “patches” either — these are the fairly normal-looking ones.

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Photos of launch patches:  National Reconnaissance Office

I spent the past two days at the Science Writing in the Age of Denial conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The event explored the phenomenon of denial and what it means for science writers. How can journalists effectively convey science when its uncomfortable truths face organized resistance?

I walked away from the event feeling both energized and frustrated. Denialism is easy to spot, and conference speakers like Sean B. Carroll and Naomi Oreskes were especially adept at characterizing and documenting it. During his keynote talk, Carroll outlined a “denialism manual in six steps,” which he adapted from a history of chiropractors and vaccination published in 2000.

Step 1: Doubt the science.
Step 2: Question scientists’ motives and interests.
Step 3: Magnify legitimate, normal disagreements among scientists and cite gadflies as authorities.
Step 4: Exaggerate potential harms (scare the hell out of people).
Step 5: Appeal to personal freedom (I’m an American and no government official can tell me what vaccinations I need.)
Step 6: Show that accepting the science would represent a repudiation of a key philosophy.

As Carroll described this denialism playbook, people in the audience nodded knowingly. Any science writer who has encountered pushback from denialists has seen these strategies at work. But the question remains: how do we counteract them?

And the answer to that question remains elusive. Keynote speaker Arthur Lupia, a political scientist who studies how people make decisions, says that attempts to educate policy makers and the general public on scientific topics commonly fail, and he puts the blame squarely on the messengers. “The problem isn’t the audience, the problem is us,” Lupia told the journalists in attendance. “We have unrealistic expectations.” Many journalists and educators assume that if they simply present the facts, their audience will recognize them and change their beliefs accordingly.

As I’ve written previously, social psychologists call this idea the “truth wins” assumption —and it rarely pans out. Why? Because people don’t assimilate facts in a vacuum, they filter them through their pre-existing belief system. Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning”—it’s the tendency to seek out and view new evidence as consistent with one’s prior views.

We seek facts that confirm what we already believe, and reject the ones that contradict our world view. People deploy skepticism asymmetrically, says social ecologist Peter Ditto of the University of California, Irvine.  “They have stricter criteria to accept something they don’t want to believe.”

For this reason, bombarding deniers with more evidence is a losing strategy. It doesn’t matter how many facts you throw at them, or how correct your facts are—if those facts threaten someone’s self-identity or their world view, they will find a way to dismiss them. Forget items one through five in Carroll’s denialism manual, item number six explains everything.

Is there any hope for informing the willfully ignorant? In the session on “persuasive writing in the age of denial,” my fellow panelist Steve Silberman asked the audience if any of them had ever successfully changed someone’s mind with something they’d written. Only one hand went up.

When we convey facts to an audience that doesn’t want to hear them, we come to an impasse. The stronger the pre-existing belief, the stronger the motivation to dismiss the contrary evidence and the journalists who convey it. And there’s not much journalists can do about this. One of the points that Lupia emphasized was that credibility is bestowed by the audience. He presented the following formula:

Credibility =perceived common interests x perceived expertise.

I asked him how journalists who find themselves at the impasse can find a way to speak to, rather than past, their audiences. He told me that that making a personal connection—showing them that you share common interests or values—can help. But ultimately, it’s not entirely about you, it’s about how the audience perceives you. And the hard truth is that in many cases there’s not a damn thing you can do to change that.

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Photos: Club Denial by Spinneyhead

Denial gas pump by by mcfcrandall