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.
When I interviewed Paul Steinhardt, the theorist of the title above, I told him I loved this story so much that it should be turned into a book and if he wanted, I could help. I don’t remember the words he used but the meaning was, Way ahead of you, and I can write it my own self thank you. And he did; the book is The Second Kind of Impossible (great title).
I haven’t read the book yet — it’s just been published — but I’m pretty sure this post has no spoilers. I mean, every hero/quest story always ends with the hero winning the quest, right? This originally ran on September 17, 2012.
Paul Steinhardt looks like a tidy and successful lawyer, though a touch geeky. He’s a physicist whose fields include the gritty physics of matter, the first instants of the universe, and the possibility that the universe won’t end, it’ll just cycle. He’s a theorist, that is, he uses computers, math, and his brains to make sense of data that the more hands-on experimentalists collect. So how odd to hear that he’s just back from an expedition to the Koryak mountains in far east Russia, farther east than Siberia, on what he thought was a 1 percent chance that he’d find a rock from outer space containing a forbidden crystal. “My wife was quite calm until we left Anadyr,” he said, and then she texted him, “this is absolutely crazy why are you doing this,” but the tundra doesn’t have wireless so he couldn’t answer. “My sanity was questioned,” he said. But he found the rock, and in it was the forbidden crystal.
A three-year-old was lost in the woods of North Carolina for two nights last week. The weather was blustery and freezing as searchers covered ground for three days, finding no sign of the boy, doubtful he could have survived a single night, much less two with temperatures reaching the low twenties.
On Thursday evening, he was found alive, tangled in briars 40 or 50 yards into the woods from a dirt road. He was heard calling for his mother. A rescuer waded through thick brush and standing water and disentangled him, reporting that after being lost for three days, the boy was cold, but verbal, and for the the conditions, he was doing “very well.”
He was discovered not far from home near the small town of Ernul, where he’d wandered off while playing, leaving rescuers to wonder how they could have missed him.
The Craven County Sheriff said, based on the child’s story, “he had a friend in the woods that was a bear that was with him, that was with him for two [days].”
A bear in the woods saving a lost child? When I heard the news, I wondered, could such a thing happen?
