Will You Find Me a Planet? Please?

By: | May 4, 2017

For someone who’s not interested in planets around other stars, exoplanets, I write about them a lot.  But exoplanets have been hot news for some time now and they’re not cooling off any time soon.* The planets are big or little or in between; they’re made of gas or rock or maybe some combination; they might have atmospheres or they might not or nobody knows; they’re hot or cold or in between; they’re in the habitable zone or not.  And that’s about it for actual facts.

So.  Boring, right?  To sex them up, public information officers and headline writers resort to aliens.  These are real tweets from responsible sources:

  • Alien life may swim on earth-like planets: oceans cover habitable exoplanets
  • We are searching for exoplanets that can support carbon based life but possibility of silicon based life grows
  • Scientists discover yet another rocky planet that could (maybe) host alien life
  • New super-sized Earth may be close enough to detect signs of life

Still boring.  So they also try to sex them up with artists’ lurid but scientifically plausible illustrations (see above).  The places they show look different but they don’t look real, I don’t have to take them seriously. Still boring. Then somebody tweeted these:

They have discovered a planet. It is brave and cautious. Something mundane stands there, awaiting the future.

They have discovered a planet. It is far away. The wind is heavy and smells strongly of doughnuts. Would you like to pet dogs there?

You have discovered a planet. It is large and beloved. Occasionally, there’s a a far-off howl in the forests. Join me?

God yes, oh yes, please, I thought you’d never ask.  Yes.  Please.

Continue reading →

Sleep Cute

By: | May 3, 2017

Most days, my kids pretend that they are other animals. Sometimes they are fantastic beasts—we have a lot of dragons and griffins. Sometimes, they’re creatures that we’re more familiar with, like dogs and seals. But most of the time, they are fennec foxes.

I’m not quite sure how they even know about fennec foxes. There is a character in the movie Zootopia who is a fennec fox named Finnick. But the two fennec foxes we have in the house, who hide on the rug under blankets and make dens in the couch pillows, have never seen the movie. Continue reading →

How March for Science activists could become a force to be reckoned with

By: | May 2, 2017

Back when I was training to become a scientist in the early 2000s, I also became an activist. First it was environmental issues, then labor and anti-war campaigns. It took some guts to step on a soapbox, and more to make a sign and maybe a noisemaker (like an aluminum can taped up with pebbles inside) to protest for a cause. But when you feel there’s something important that could be lost or people could be unjustly harmed, it’s exhilarating to band together and take a stand.

Thousands of people have marched in the streets in the United States and around the world during Donald Trump’s administration’s first 100 days, but not all protests are created the same. Unlike the Women’s March, the People’s Climate March and the Immigrants March, the March for Science isn’t built upon a social movement and a history and culture of activism. It’s unprecedented. While scientists and science advocates have focused on a few issues like nuclear weapons and air and water pollution before, now they feel that the very practice and enterprise of science itself is at stake. Continue reading →

Urban Wilderness and the “High Line Problem”

By: | May 1, 2017
A rail station covered in graffiti with golden grass in front
Abandoned station on the Reading rail line

In October of 2013, I toured three miles of disused railroad line in Philadelphia. Some of it was underground, some on ground level, and some elevated. All of it was covered in spontaneous vegetation—garden plants, common weeds, and native species, a wild, diverse hodgepodge of over 50 species alive with fungi and butterflies and ladybugs. I even saw a groundhog. My guides that day included Dale Hendricks, a permaculture expert and owner/operator of Green Light Plants and landscape designer and train enthusiast Paul vanMeter, an advocate for turning the city’s hidden wilderness into a park. Sadly, Paul died unexpectedly in early 2014. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 29, 2017

April 24-28, 2017

This week at the Last Word on Nothing:

There is magic in the ambiguity of a number given in place of your identity, says Rose. Huge bureaucracies inadvertently set the stage for serendipitous mistakes.

Cassie goes for a relaxing run only to witness a disturbing instance of littering. Plastic bags on the ground – who does that? Now we know.

Craig gets bitten by an assassin bug while sleeping outdoors in Utah, as usual. He uses his instincts to treat the bite.

Ann writes about puberty, in grandchildren and robins. And when I say writes, I mean writes.

What can island biogeography tell us about lung infections? I talk to an experimental evolutionary biologist investigating one of the banes of cystic fibrosis.

 

Image: Daiva Chesonis

Your Body is a Microbial Archipelago

By: | April 28, 2017

When Charles Darwin compared the beaks of his finch specimens from the Galapagos, he saw that each had been shaped differently by evolution, depending on the natural history of the island on which that finch made its home. Many evolutionary biologists see life through this natural history lens, and while they are right to declare conclusive the evidence for evolution by natural selection, some of evolutionary theory remains untested in an experimental sense.

That’s because animals like finches live for years, and multi-generational studies are expensive and arduous. To make evolution predictive and useful, you need to look at it on the microscopic scale.

“Evolutionary theory can make predictions, say, about how genetic variation will be distributed along a gradient of latitude or of moisture, and those can be observed as snapshots,” says experimental evolutionary biologist Rees Kassen. “What we get to do is actually watch the evolutionary process happening in real time.” Continue reading →

Redux: the Springtime of Robins

By: | April 27, 2017

The robins are BACK, they don’t intend for you to miss them, flying like bats out of hell, tearing up the mulch, yelling at everybody and stalking around, sticking their tummies out. Wherever they’re going, they need to get there fast so they take a shortcut through my porch.  I was out one morning trying to get robin poop off the porch floor and the local 2-year old came over to find out what I was doing. “Why do robins poop?” she said, and at this point I said I had to go back in the house.

This earlier expose of robins and sex first ran on April 13, 2012.

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Photo by gardener41

Litterbug

By: | April 25, 2017

On Saturday, Earth Day, I went for a run. About a mile in, I came upon a bald, middle-aged man. He wore a leather jacket and a Bluetooth headset. I was perhaps twenty feet from him when he chucked a crumpled plastic bag on the ground. Then he got on his bicycle and started peddling away.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The man wasn’t moving very fast. I had time to yell. I imagined myself saying, “Excuse me! Sir! You dropped your bag.” This made his action sound like an accident, but I what else could I say? I wasn’t looking for a confrontation. Continue reading →