The pumpkin used to discover florigen, the universal flowering hormone. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them.
Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags again, in early January, some of the bulbs were dusted with mildew. I’d lost the instructions for when to plant the different types of bulbs, and what bulb belonged to which type of flower. As I brushed the mold away, I contemplated how little I knew, not just about these flowers, but about flowers in general.
Understanding flowers is not trivial. Darwin referred to the awesome expansion of flowering plants during the late Cretaceous period as “the abominable mystery.” The ability to manipulate flowering has always been key to crop domestication, allowing humans to expand the range of rice, wheat, corn and other staples. Despite this, scientists only recently discovered how flowering works on a molecular level.
The story is surprisingly brutal, and begins with chrysanthemums. In the early 1930s, Russian plant physiologist Mikhail Chailakhyan was trying to figure out how plants sense light and dark, and decide when to flower. He shone light on different parts of chrysanthemum plants — the stem, the leaves — and found it was the leaves that sensed light. When leaves detect a certain daylength, the plant bursts into bloom, he discovered.
Last month I spent a week scuba diving in Bonaire. Just writing that sentence makes me embarrassed about how much disposable income I have, but look, it was a cheap trip organized by a group, ok. I borrowed most of the equipment. And I don’t have kids to put through college.
I got certified to dive when I was in college myself, more than 20 years ago. So you might imagine that I’m a veteran diver, but in fact I haven’t dived that much. And I haven’t really wanted to that much.
Why? Diving is scary. You spend a lot of the training learning about what to do in potentially deadly emergencies. Breathing pressurized gas comes with risks that you have to thoroughly understand and monitor. I can feel claustrophobic underwater – the only space that is actually workable for human, air-breathing life is the mask over your eyes and nose and the regulator delivering air into your mouth. It’s easy to get disoriented under water and have a wee panic attack. Before you even get down there, there are a lot of things you have to do to get yourself all set to stay alive underwater and you often have to do them on a rocking boat. Also, as mentioned, it’s expensive. And the equipment is heavy – once I’m all suited up and get my tank and my fins on and I’m shuffling over to the edge of the boat to jump in, I’ve probably added a good 50 pounds to my weight. And my mask has a tendency to let in a tiiiiny trickle of water on one side or the other that dribbles into my eye, stings, and makes the whole experience annoying.
But last month, in Bonaire, I finally, finally got it. I figured out the sequence of things I had to do on the boat, and got them all done in plenty of time to jump in the water without feeling like I was holding anyone up. The last year of workouts had really helped with holding all the equipment. The group of experienced divers I’ve been with for my last two trips finally rubbed off on me; I relaxed.
And once I calmed down I noticed, oh my goodness, I’m in the ocean. Schools of glimmering fish swam by. A teensy shrimp waved from inside an anemone. Coral glowed greener than you’d think a living thing could grow. And those clouds and clouds of fish.
I was weightless; I flew.
I originally got certified so that I could scuba dive on a college study abroad program to Australia and New Zealand. My first open water dives were pretty bad–I did the required certification dives in a lake in Minnesota in the fall (there were snow flurries). Another anxious 19-year-old and I got each other through it by constantly reminding each other that we were doing this so we could dive on the Great Barrier Reef. So we did it, and we dived in Australia, and it was something–but it was claustrophobic, and the gear was heavy, and it was expensive, and I thought I’d probably had enough.
So why did I keep going back to something that I was so uncomfortable with? Other people. A boyfriend had a lifelong scuba habit and a conference in Hawaii; I refreshed my skills and went along. I was thrilled to see turtles and rays and whatnot, but never got over being scared of diving and jumpy about diving with an unknown set of strangers every day.
Then my dad got super into diving, so I went along on the most beginner-friendly trip his scuba club runs. The people were so friendly above water and so calm underwater, and patient with me as I tried to figure out how to be comfortable, too.
So I went back the next year, and there were the clouds of fish, and I worked out how to hover, mostly, and here I am. Ready to go again. Maybe next time I’ll figure out how to make my mask stop leaking.
Photo: Colin, a member of my dad’s dive club who probably has a last name.
During the descent of the most recent polar vortex, you probably heard that the Midwest was colder than Antarctica. And it was!
But then the Midwest usually is, this time of year.
The comparison “colder than Antarctica” makes sense on a visceral level. If the temperatures are below zero and the windchills are in the minus-dozens across large portions of the country, and you’re a journalist or a civic official trying to capture the extreme nature of the situation, then the question that comes to mind might well be What is the coldest place on the planet to which I can compare this historic phenomenon?
Antarctica is the answer, on the whole. But, not to be pedantic (okay, to be pedantic, but possibly for a good reason, I promise), the comparison should come with a couple of caveats.
I wrote this one year ago as my kid was ramping up his language skills in Mexico. Today, I am in a different country and my kid’s Spanish is rapidly disappearing. Sigh.
Having a baby is a miracle. Everyone tells me so, so it must be true. It’s also an adventure – again, according to pretty much everybody. I’ve had a lot of adventures and spent years searching for miracles and I have to say, those words don’t really fit.
It’s more like one long psychology experiment. Sample size of one, with the option for follow-ups to test reproducibility. The latest stage of my own research has been language acquisition. My son’s first word was “mommy.” Second was “kitty.” (Daddy was in the top ten though. I think.) Ever since then it seem like he’s just been collecting words and sticking them in his pockets like shiny pennies.
And in two languages. I’m raising my son to be bilingual because I live in Mexico and also because apparently it’s the hip thing to do these days. Studies suggest that a second language promotes things like problem-solving, attention, and seeing things from multiple points of view. In addition, it also increases the ability to, you know, speak a second language.
(My own research also suggest that when your baby is bilingual you can lord it over other parents at Gymboree because you are so culturally sensitive and they are total parenting failures. I’m not judging, that’s just science.)
But not all research supports teaching second languages. Some studies have shown that when a person grows up with two languages their vocabularies in each is lower than in those who speak just one. Now, the margins are small, and they might not even be real. But to a secretly highly insecure parent like me they are enough to freak out about.
Christie’s new book about recovery is out today! It’s called Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. If you are an athlete, you will love it. If you are a wannabe athlete or a science writer or a person, you will still love it because Christie says that sleeping is really great. Also, the cover is bright yellow, which just makes me happy. I asked her questions about sleep and beer and other things that also make me happy.
Cameron: Christie! You wrote a book! It’s about the science of recovery–and it’s also about beer. You’ve written about beer and running before for LWON–is that when you started thinking about writing the book?
Christie: Sort of. That beer study we did certainly got me thinking about how tricky it is to study recovery and how difficult it can be to answer even a seemingly simple question (does beer impair recovery?) with a single study. As I pondered the beer question, I came to appreciate what a difficult challenge sports scientists face.
I’m currently working on a story about a homicide. In my case, there’s no doubt about the identity of the victim or the person who killed him. But I’ve used online court records, social media pages, real estate listings, and other digital data to fill in their biographies. It is a commonplace now to observe that most of us know leave extensive and difficult to efface traces online. My research has only confirmed that. My dead man was in his 70s and, as far as I know, never opened a single social media account. And yet by spelunking into his 2005 bankruptcy documents, available online to the public, I was able to learn his address, how much money he owed, his sources of income, even the fact that that he had a cat. All that I’m missing is the cat’s name.
I get it. Furry things, especially those that like to snuggle and smell like Fritos, make us feel warm inside. I myself hug goats on a farm in my spare time, and I’ve been known to butt in front of small children at the petting zoo. (Don’t judge me—that kid was a whiney brat who deserved to fall down in the snow.)
But some of the life forms I like best come from a very different collection, a line of creatures that slogged to shore about 370 million years ago. You may know them as amphibians. They, like the lobe-finned fish from whence they came, said “No!” to fur and warm blood and social graces. Evolution scooped them up and ran, laughing maniacally, chewing ‘shrooms. Now there are more than 7,000 wild and wacky iterations; 90 percent of those species are frogs (as opposed to toads, salamanders, and the admittedly ugly but apparently motherly caecilians), and all of them awesome.
Still, I can’t help but play favorites. And one of my favorites is definitely This Frog. Phyllomedusa bicolor, the giant monkey frog or bicolor waxy frog or waxy monkey frog or waxy monkey tree frog, depending on how much time you have, is based on a crayon drawing of a muppet by Evolution’s five-year-old son. I love this frowny frog and its ridiculous fingers so much it hurts.
Waxy frogs live in South America, in rainforests, up in the trees. Some never touch the ground: They have an opposable thumb of sorts that gives them the grip of a monkey, good for branch walking and handsy love making. During the rainy season, females lay their eggs along the central vein of a leaf and then fold that leaf over, creating an egg sandwich. They’ll choose a leaf on a low-slung branch above a stream so the tadpoles, when they bust out, fall straight into the water. Pretty smart cookies.
These photos kindly shared by Alejandro Arteaga and Lucas Bustamante from Tropical Herping.
Interesting aside: The eggs of the red-eyed tree frog, also laid over a stream, will hatch prematurely in a sort of Hail Mary if a snake or other predator starts rooting around in the egg jelly. Presumably the vibrations clue them in to the danger. Amazing sensory survival strategy, wouldn’t you agree? I wonder if it happens with This Frog, too. I’m betting yes. Good ideas in evolutionary biology oft get repeated, after all.
Another bit worth sharing about This Frog: The “waxy” in its name comes from the lipid-and-peptide substances the animal secretes from glands behind the eyes to reduce water loss and protect the skin. The stuff is a full-on pharmacy that includes a natural opioid, which probably explains the frog-licking behavior of some humans. (Scientists have studied the secretions of waxy frogs, purportedly used by hunters many moons ago to treat various ills and by shamans in some purification rituals, and have found they contain pain-killing and anti-microbial compounds. Nature’s gifts are the very best gifts.)
Before you go, I insist you watch This Frog fabulously apply that waxy sunblock of its own making all over its little hunched body. Watch to the end, please. If this behavior doesn’t make you want to trade your needy puppy for a low-key ‘phib, or if it doesn’t at least force a big smile, then you and I are no longer friends.
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Special thanks to the really nice guys at tropicalherping.com for sharing photos and working so hard to protect my favorite animal family
Back in the day, we used to run an intermittent series called Penis Friday, also known as TGIPF. It involved things like banana slug sex and deep sea squid sex. Then #metoo happened, and we kind of lost our taste for it. But bed bugs are on the rise around the world, and you, Dear Reader, have a right to know about the kind of weird sex that’s happening in your own bed.
You see, the female bedbug has a perfectly good genital
tract, but the male bedbug has never been observed to use it. Instead, about
five times per feeding, the female has to submit to a horrific process called ‘traumatic
insemination’. It involves a needle-like organ piercing its cuticle and
inseminating directly into her body cavity.
