Looking at Giants

By: | March 15, 2019

Whales are great. You can get a bunch of people who you thought were grumpy and walking by themselves along the sidewalk, and suddenly there’s a whale and you are all shouting and grinning at each other and most of the people have even hung up their phones or stopped texting or tweeting about how they’re taking a walk right now.  Maybe you are all now trying to use your phones to take a photo of something that is a tiny ephemeral exhale on the horizon but that’s okay. Trying to capture the ephemeral is what art is, right? And talking to people you don’t know about whales is good. And the whales, the whales are great.

What is it that makes them so great? Many things, but today I was thinking about the elegance of their big bodies, the surprise of when it slides up into the open air like a glimmer of island on an empty sea. I was thinking so much about the whales that suddenly I started to feel guilty because I could have gone to my son’s field trip to the fire station instead of seeing whales and then puttering around the kitchen, thinking about seeing whales.

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DNA to RNA to Protein

By: | March 14, 2019
This frog’s DNA works the same way yours does.

Yesterday I was thinking about how much I love the central dogma of molecular biology.

“Central dogma” is a funny name for it. It sounds like it has something to do with religion, but it’s not; it’s just the thing that makes all living cells work. A cell has DNA; that DNA has a code, which gets transcribed into the almost-the-same-but-not-quite code of RNA; and then that RNA gets read and used as a template for building proteins. This is happening all the time in all living cells–the cells in the skin on your right ear, the cells in your pancreas, the cells in the rootlets of the plants outside, the cells in a polar bear’s liver.

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Redux: Water in Yomibato

By: | March 13, 2019

Alejo_GHS_5892
Alejo with his arrows, just in case. (c) Glenn Shepard

In 2016, I went to the Peruvian Amazon on assignment for National Geographic. I focused on a group of indigenous people, the Matsiguenka, living inside Manu National Park.

One of my sources was Alejo Machipango, a hunter, farmer, and member of the water committee for the village of Yomibato. Alejo is about 34, but I would have guessed his age at 22. He is married and has several kids. He is a jokester. He likes chewing coca, drinking manioc beer. He takes his arrows with him most places, just in case. I saw him shoot at some birds, but never hit one. And he always laughed when he missed.

One day, Alejo took me to see the spring where Yomibato gets its water. The water system in the village was installed by a charity called Rainforest Flow between 2012 and 2015. When I did my reporting in Manu, National Geographic hired Rainforest Flow to get me there, because they have their own boats and boat drivers.

A few generations ago, the Matsiguenka used to be more dispersed on the landscape. Each family lived apart, and households moved often. The whole community would gather together once a month, on the full moon, and have a big party with manioc beer. But more recently, many families decided to move to Yomibato to be near the school and clinic. As the community grew to several hundred, the local river and streams became contaminated with bacteria and waterborne illness became a chronic problem. Continue reading →

Robin Season

By: | March 12, 2019
An American Robin signing in the snow

There are approximately 50 American robins in my front yard, a noisy, colorful flock centered around my crabapple tree. They have been partying for at least 24 hours, gorging themselves on the fruit and singling lustily.

These festive aggregations are a common feature of spring throughout the United States as the birds migrate. Robins are big colorful thrushes that do well in the Anthropocene. They like the same sorts of habitats we do: lots of grass and a few trees and shrubs, and the expansion of the suburban landscape has increased their numbers in the last several decades.

We often mistake rarity for value and disdain the common. Robins are sometimes victims of this reflexive snobbery. I too have caught a bird in the corner of my eye, only to turn away once I identified it as “just a robin.” So in celebration of the flock that is visiting me, I looked up American robins in four bird books: one from 1827, one from 1922, one from 1988, and one from 2019.

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Guilty, We

By: | March 11, 2019

Just past lunchtime one warm Tuesday last spring, as I walked through my neighborhood to the local Indian restaurant for samosas, I saw a big yard sale going on. I’ve long been a fan of a good rummage sale—that hunt for something tired and old to dust off and love anew. From a distance I could see the usual household bits and bops, some well-used furniture, and piles of clothes and bedding spread over half a block of sidewalk and trampled grass. Odds and ends seemed to have toppled down the steps of the townhouse hosting the event—it was a remarkably disorganized set up. People poked around, others loaded items into trunks and back seats of hastily parked cars as drivers waited, engines running.

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How to lose a good name

By: | March 8, 2019

You may recall a moment a few years ago when all the papers were going crazy about a futuristic small electrical implant that would fit like a cuff around your nerve, interfering with its signals to bring the sick back to health. Asthma, arthritis, diabetes, and hypertension – all could be walked back, simply by overwriting natural nerve signals with artificial electrical ones.

As the initial excitement about these electro-stimulating nerve cuffs trailed off into the long slog of research and development, it seems only natural that articles extolling the devices would have tapered off as well. And they have tapered off – you don’t see them mentioned very much anymore. But waning hype is not the only reason you haven’t seen them mentioned. The real reason is much weirder: the devices lost their name.

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Science Metaphors (cont.): Isostatic Rebound

By: | March 7, 2019

Science, every now and then, interrupts its usual flow of thick, painful jargon to speak in metaphors that reveal the poetry at its soul and lay out a clear path to meaning in life.  I’m serious here.

I twitter-follow an author named Robert Macfarlane, whom our Michelle also likes, and who posted his phrase of the day, “isostatic rebound.” His definition was exemplary: ‘’the rise of land masses after the great weight of glacial ice was lifted at the last Ice Age’s end. Areas of northern Britain are still rebounding by up to 10cm a century; southern England is sinking by 5cm. We live on a restless earth.”  I’m less interested in the restlessness – anyway, I’m skeptical about 10cm a century qualifying as restless – than in the rebound.

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Small Quakes

By: | March 6, 2019

At 10:20 last Monday morning I sat at a table outside of Tucson, Arizona, writing these words: The land does not move, frozen to our eyes. Within a minute or two, a small but notable earthquake struck outside of the almost-ghost town of Bedrock, Colorado, 600 miles away. It was 4.5 on the Richter scale.

Since I was unaware of this Colorado earthquake, I kept working on a story I was writing. It involved traveling with a friend and sculptor. I’d shown him fields of balanced rocks in the southwest Colorado desert. I thought they might inspire his work. I wrote about the experience for LWON.

The words I wrote next were: the buzzing speed of our voices, our words too fast and high pitched to be heard, the terrain unaware we were ever here as it shrinks and grows, yawns and stretches.

I kept on for a another paragraph when a text came in from home: EARTHQUAKE!

Soon I was hearing from anyone within range. Our house had been rattled. An office chair rolled across the floor. No damage, but in a place not known known for its quakes, this was big.

Here’s the weird part, the epicenter was within a quarter mile of the location I happened to be writing about. I had been describing lying in the shade of a balanced boulder with the sculptor John Grade, discussing how long it might take for the large mass to fall, and whether we could scramble away if it toppled right then.

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