The last year has been foundation-shaking for me. I went from two parents to zero in less than seven months and I’m trying to figure out exactly how life works now. Soon after the second parent died, my region was plunged into a miserable heat wave that lasted more than a week and made it hard to do anything other than sit inside and feel bad and wonder if this is just what summers are like now, if this is our new climate, and here I am, facing it parentless.
But the heat wave went away and the other evening it rained. I sploshed barefoot in the temporary stream down the middle of the alley, in the rain and the sun, and looked for a rainbow.
I realize that eventually finding yourself with zero parents is the correct order of things. But how on earth do people do it? Because, so far, I don’t like it.
An American: You guys have something called Flying Ant Day. Is this some kind of national holiday?
A British person who is tired of ants: I can see how you’d get there, given the past 14 years of British politics. Quite the opposite, though: it’s the summer day we all dread because unlike other commemorative days, Flying Ant Day is always a surprise. For a few weeks leading up to the event, British publications are stuffed with headlines including “When is flying ant day?”, “Is it flying ant day?” and “Flying Ant Day has arrived“.
Okay but I just looked online and it says Flying Ant Day is a myth.
More misnomer than myth. Does it happen for all ants on the same single day? No. But many colonies do use environmental signals to coordinate their flight, a strategy that minimises any given individual’s odds of being eaten by predators.
Ants turn out to be very good at predicting the weather, and they’re looking for a specific kind of warm and windless day to take flight en masse. So most British people are guaranteed the following experience: one sunny day in mid-summer, usually in July or August after a generally unpleasant wet and warm spell, you’ll step out of your house and find something wriggling in your hair. You’ll grimace and pick it out and then you will notice masses of ants writhing on the ground all around you. Then – as in any good horror movie – your gaze will pan up and take in the flying ant orgy in the sky, as far as the eye can see.
That’s horrible! And I have somany questions. Ants can fly?
They can.
These are normal ants? How do they just suddenly sprout wings?
Based on real adventures in aging. Of which I hope to have more.
(Feel free to add your own.)
It really IS a solid hose reel.
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Getting older is hilarious. Or, at least, that’s the best way to think about it. Here are more signs that time is a damn freight train and your foot it stuck in the tracks.
You can no longer see the instructions on your statin bottle.
You need a nap after going to Home Depot.
You consider that trip to Home Depot an outing, and you announce after that you’re done for the day.
Friday night is laundry night. Saturday night is laundry-folding night.
It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking through some lately that feel healthy, getting enough respite from droughts that their leaves and needles are many and green. Pine cones are falling and I stop to watch them.
The cones that catch my attention are from ponderosa pines. Light and woody, the size of softballs, they let loose one at a time, thumping branch to branch, then half a second of quiet as they fall the rest of the way and land in a nest of needle duff. Their papery seeds fall out as the cone slowly unfolds on the ground.
This week came with heartening news in the frog world. An Australian study showed that if you offer frogs a sauna in a greenhouse, it allows them to recover from the fungal disease that has played a role in 90 species extinctions so far. The greatest loss of biodiversity ever attributed to a single disease, the fungus in question is Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis, not-so-fondly-nicknamed Bd, and it infects the skin, needed in frogs for breathing. This causes electrolyte imbalance and eventually fatal heart attacks. Bd lives in the soil and water and threatens amphibians worldwide.
Sadly, we can’t give every frog a sauna or anti-fungal treatment, but there are other possibilities. My friend Anne Madden runs the Microbe Institute, where she’s been spreading the word about a bacterium (Janthinobacterium lividum) that can fight the fungus by producing a purple pigment called violacein. There are other bacteria that produce the same anti-fungal medicine, but we don’t know how many and where they live.
So the Institute is launching a citizen science project whereby you will soon be able to test your local waters and send them any purple-pigmented bacteria samples you find. A grant from National Geographic Society also supports a lesson plan on bioinformatics, PCR and DNA sequencing for a range of students, so they can learn while they save the frogs.
But that’s not all: what’s really captured my heart is Anne’s BioArt project, a collaboration between beneficial microbes and humans, modeled after the AIDS quilt. It turns out that in addition to saving the amphibian world, that purple pigment can dye fabric naturally, without a water-intensive setting agent.
The Microbe Institute will send you a scrap of the microbe-dyed purple fabric (they’ve sent me a lovely strip of delicate purple lace) to include in a square paper art tile. We’re to use the symbiotic glory of the bacterium/frog relationship as our inspiration, and our squares will be incorporated into a vast collage. Do join me in creating against destruction.
As for Anne, her passion for science is rivaled only by her talent for millinery. Check out her Microbe Hat project and spot those purple microbes at work in some of its creations.
This post ran ten years ago, about a landscape that existed where the Bering Sea now lies, and how humans have been plying it from then till now. Living far inland in a desert environment, I don’t think of the sea often, but when I do, my mind flies to this tundra island, once the land-locked high point on the Bering Land Bridge, now the middle of a cold and churning sea.
Twelve Siberian Yup’ik men motored into the Bering Sea with two aluminum skiffs to visit relatives on the US side of the Bering Strait. Their journey retraced a route that has been used since the Ice Age, one of the most important lines of travel in human history.
Leaving the Russian coast, they traveled 70 miles through notoriously difficult waters to St. Lawrence Island, which is a far-flung piece of Alaska, a treeless hunk of tundra 90 miles long and little more than 10 to 20 miles wide. They came to the island’s only two villages, where residents are also Siberian Yup’ik, speaking the exact same language as their Russian counterparts.
Yup’ik people and their early relations have been on St. Lawrence Island for at least 2,000 years, traveling by boat back and forth all the while, but that is relatively recent history. During the Ice Age, this was not water at all, but entirely land. St. Lawrence Island was a high point in the middle of the Bering land bridge, as far from any coastline as Cincinnati, Ohio. Though evidence has been submerged under sea levels that rose up to 400 feet since then, it is believed that this is how people first reached North America. Continue reading →
In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House Finches and House Sparrows. But! Last week, it did deliver us this:
Yep, that’s a Blue Jay — an iconic eastern bird, flitting through the mountains of central Colorado. It isn’t the first we’ve seen; we’ve had “Blue Jay” on our whiteboard of bird observations since last spring. Not that all of my friends believe it: I’ve had more than one person question the sighting, as though we can’t tell a Blue Jay from a Scrub Jay from a Steller’s from a Pinyon. But now we have definitive proof! (This, by the way, gets at the affirmative argument for capitalizing common bird names: There’s a difference between a blue jay — i.e., a jay that is blue — and a true Blue Jay.)
This was first published October 21, 2019 but the universe hasn’t changed much in the years since. I mean, a few stars may have come and gone but on the whole, the universe is too big to change that fast. But we, at least we in the US, we’ve changed though. We seem to have lost our good nature, we are in a frenzy of dire and bad thoughts: about political disaster, the apparent decline in national rationality, godawful heat and floods and storms and fire, and honestly every morning I have to haul myself out of the deepest despair over our decay and dissolution. This post is an unexpected antidote: everything, even the stars and galaxies and entire universe, is dying sooner or later and you don’t have to be a science writer to find that oddly comforting.
@nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta. “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years. The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the whole universe will change “over time scales which greatly exceed the current age of the universe.” That is, take the present planets, stars, galaxies, and universe and fast-forward them into the far future, farther into the future than the Big Bang was in the past, in fact, all the way to the end. It doesn’t end well. The paper starts small, though, with stars.
@shannonmstirone Replying to @nattyover: Today is one of those days when I’m comforted by knowing that one day our sun will die and our galaxy will merge with Andromeda and there’s no escaping, this is all temporary.
@shannonmstirone is Shannon Stirone, and she is also a science writer. The sun — after it blows up like a balloon and fries the earth along with most of the solar system — will shrink back down into a barely shining cinder. Our galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are going to collide and merge and become an entirely different galaxy. Our cosmic identities are temporary, change is inescapable.
@nattyover: Nothing more soothing than the thought of a neutron star sublimating
I read this and had to go look it up, and oh my goodness. Sublimation is when a solid goes straight to gas, no liquid melting in between; dry ice is solid carbon dioxide sublimating. Neutron stars are a stage in the deaths of stars much bigger than ours, so big they don’t shrink down to cinders but keep shrinking until their atoms are all jammed into nuclei, no atoms any more, just mostly neutrons, a billion tons in a teaspoon of degenerate solid neutron star. And then their neutrons decay, as neutrons do, into other particles, which decay farther until the stars have evaporated. They’ve sublimed.
@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the galaxies turning redder and redder until they finally blonk out.
Stars live by burning gas and when the gas runs out, stars turn red; so when galaxies full of stars also run out of gas, they also turn red. Eventually all the gas in the universe has been used up as fuel and has pretty much dissipated, and no stars ever form again, neither do galaxies. What’s left is the black holes that had been at the centers of galaxies, and finally, via Hawking radiation, even the black holes evaporate.
@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the heat death of the universe.
Meanwhile, the universe which has always been expanding, keeps on expanding. In the end the warm, moving, shining universe is cold and still and dark.
@shannonmstirone: Deep-death-time makes me happy.
Twitter Web App: Dear People of Twitter, a question if I may: in these trying times when you consider the inevitable dissolution of stars and galaxies and the final heat death of the universe. . .
Twitter Web App: 111 votes · Final results
Twitter Web App: . . . are you comforted? 71%
Twitter Web App: . . . or in existential terror? 29%
So. @nattyover and @shannonmstirone aren’t alone. Only 30% of my science-y Twitter finds the death of the universe to be terrifying and somehow, for some reason, 70% find it comforting.
@shannonmstirone: It throws me into existential comfort, most of the time. Sometimes the shortness of everything makes me feel like my actions are useless but most of the time I think it gives life greater meaning. Ending make things beautiful, so I’m going with—comfort.
@nattyover : But what is comforting about endings? Surely it’s the sense that we have a limited time to improve the lot of our family/species/planet/universe. The comfort-chain continues until that last one ends. So why is the heat death of the universe still comforting?
@AnnFinkbeiner: Maybe it’s partly the aesthetic and intellectual beauty of the idea.
@nattyover : Yes, maybe. Plus maybe there’s a multiverse 🙂
The multiverse is the idea that the universe is only one of a whole foam of universes; it is backed by math and physics but not by any evidence whatever. It does not sound reasonable. I wouldn’t know what to do with all those universes; I quote Princeton’s great cosmological theorist, Jim Peebles: “One shot is enough for me.”
@shannonmstirone: I’m ok with it ending because it’s the natural course. I think it’s beautiful that this is temporary. That we exist and maybe others exist and these wonders pop into existence and fade. We all have a time and then it’s over.
I never voted in this poll and in fact, have few feelings about the death of the universe. I probably lean toward “comfort:” I’ve written books about HIV infection and parental bereavement, and returning to cosmology stories is always a blessed relief. Cosmology doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t even matter. Projecting human history into its farthest possible future, cosmology will never matter.
@AnnFinkbeiner: I think the comfort comes not only the beauty of the ideas but also from their gentleness — coming apart, fading, reddening, sublimating. The universe is full of violence, but these deaths are so peaceful.
@shannonmstirone: Exactly. I love the thought of everything quietly spreading apart over time. Fires cooling and going dormant. It’s maybe the saddest most final ending, but what a lovely way to go-to end with a flicker after all the violence that started everything. It’s built-in poetry.
@nattyover: I don’t know y’all, these are all very nice sentences that are making me wonder if the allure is entirely literary.
Oh you hard-eyed @nattyover, I love you.
@shannonmstirone: Thinking of starting my own public television show that is only 2 minutes long and it’ll just be a list of all the ways things die in space.
Thinking of how to fund @shannonmstirone’s TV series, How Things Die in Space.
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Should you want cosmological information on this subject that’s reliable and comprehensible, another science writer, Katie Mack, who was originally part of this Twitter conversation, has a book called The End of Everything.
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Photos via the amazing Public Domain Review: by the playwright, August Strindberg (Miss Julie). Strindberg laid out light-sensitive photographic plates on the ground to see what they’d record of the night sky. Turns out, what he recorded was not stars but the dust and various molecules in the atmosphere, interacting with the chemicals on the plates. Not stars but dust: there’s a lesson in here somewhere.
