Redux: Science Metaphors (cont.): Arctic Resignation

By: | January 11, 2019

The Svalbard archipelago, midway between continental Norway and the North Pole, is famous for its polar bears, but it is also home to the distinctive (and distinctively adorable) Svalbard reindeer. Shaggy-haired and stubby-legged, the Svalbard reindeer is not only the world’s smallest subspecies of reindeer but also the world’s northernmost herbivorous mammal, and its survival is something of a daily miracle.

Winter vegetation on Svalbard is sparse to begin with, and because winter temperatures regularly rise above freezing, any greenery is usually covered with ice. So between April and late August, when the Arctic sun shines all day and vegetation grows round the clock, Svalbard reindeer eat frantically, laying on fat for the months ahead. When winter descends, they enter a state that’s not quite hibernation—they stay alert, and their body temperature stays constant—and not quite torpor, for their metabolic rate doesn’t change much. They just … stop moving. Norwegian zoologist Arnoldus Blix has dubbed this curious state “arctic resignation.”

Continue reading →

Year of the Cat

By: | January 8, 2019

We’ve had a number of cats around here over the last year, roamers and strays. Two we brought in and three, the feral ones, came on their own.

A little more than a year ago, a barn cat showed up at a friend’s ranch an hour from where we live in southwest Colorado. It was a lanky pure black neuter, a short-hair with a nip out of one of its ears. The old man who owned the next ranch down the creek had died and one of his cats came nosing around, looking for a new home.

We needed a mouser. We brought him home and named him McElmo for McElmo Canyon, Colorado, where he came from. Though he spent many of his nights indoors, his days were out. If a door opened, he was free before you could take a step.

In the few months we had McElmo, I didn’t notice a decrease in songbirds who’d fly through every fall, but I’d be a fool to think this cat wasn’t eating birds. We’d unleashed a new predator. In the continental US, domestic cats are believed to kill from 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds each year. That may be concentrated in urban areas where habitats are more focused, but we were adding to the problem locally. With patience, he’d be indoors eventually, not necessarily what a barn cat wants, but we tried.

Continue reading →

Can’t Find It

By: | January 7, 2019

Google is mighty, everybody says so.  Like, nobody needs a library for anything. Like, my flight was delayed and the airline’s app was informative but needed 68 clicks so I googled the airline and the flight number, and Google not only told me first click straightup what the current delay was but also the expected departure gate and reason for delay.  I might be remembering that last wrongly but you get the idea:  every piece of information on God’s earth is on Google. Google is omniscient (nice word: “omni” + the “sci” is Latin “scio,” knowing, as in “scientific.”)

So when a friend and I were talking about another friend’s illness, naturally we googled it.  My goodness but we learned things:  the illness is caused by a microbe, a bug, which gets into you by various means and then sets up shop in one of various organs — lungs, eyes, brain, muscles.  It can be knocked out with various antibiotics.  But once the bug gets in, it stays there; so active infections can recur.  The bug tends to reactivate when the immune system goes haywire.

Interesting as all this is, it wasn’t what we wanted to know.  We wanted to know about our friend, not facts from some bug fan club.  Our friend’s infection had been reactivated in the same organ that was originally infected; and we wanted to know whether the infection could move to a different organ, in particular, could it move to the brain because the brain is, you know, important.  Our friend is otherwise entirely healthy and robust and full of beans; so we wanted to know whether the infection could reactivate even with a fully-working immune system.  These questions were not arcane, not hyper-specific; they’re questions anyone would ask. We googled and googled until our fingers were sore. 

Continue reading →

How To Make Friends And Influence People, According to My New Dog

By: | January 4, 2019

Last fall, when I was deeply in need of a warm, distracting project, I got a puppy. She is very cute, extremely soft, and really annoying. She enjoys chewing everything, but she especially loves my shoelaces and my wrist, both of which she would carry in her mouth at all times like a prized possession, if I would let her. She is also very good at making new friends.

At puppy class, she is usually the most excitable dog in attendance. She wants nothing more than to meet someone, human or canine, and make physical contact with them, ideally as quickly and as energetically as possible. “Personal space, Sunshine!” is something I shout at her daily. Recently, I noticed something about her friend-making habits. Her default setting is excited, open, eager, friendly — but then she calibrates. 

Here is her inner monologue from last Sunday, translated by me:

Continue reading →

Ice skating: an overanalysis

By: | January 3, 2019
Skating monster by Hieronymus Bosch, Wikimedia Commons

 “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.

A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.

When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.

I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow science journalists will relate to this  — I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.

“Did you know that hundreds of people have been poisoned by carbon monoxide emissions from Zamboni machines at indoor ice rinks?” I asked Pete one evening, as I downloaded a case study about a girl who got impaled with an inline skate in the vagina.

Continue reading →

New Person of LWON

By: | January 2, 2019

May we introduce Emily Underwood, to whom you’ve already been introduced because for years she’s been writing guest posts here, like the one about her suicidal hamster. She writes about neuroscience, the environment, mental health, and of course everything else. Her bio is here; her first official post is tomorrow, 1/3/2018. She’s one of the most delicately civilized people on earth. She spends a lot of time — as she and Kenneth Grahame say and as Helen so redoubtably illustrates — messing about in boats.

______

Art by Helen Fields