The last few days in Washington have been beautiful, springlike. Soft breezes, temperature in the 60s and 70s.
Which would be fine, if it were spring. But it is February, and it is not fine. This weather is making me angry. I try to enjoy it, because it’s what we have, and it is, objectively, lovely. Sometimes I can succeed for as much as an hour at a time. But Sunday I had to turn my air conditioning on.
Here’s a throwback to a post from two years ago, when we were having proper winter in the mid-Atlantic. (Full text is below.)
The first snow of the year, and the first noticeable snow of this winter, fell here in D.C. on Tuesday. Yes, we know that our reaction to snow makes no sense. No, we don’t have enough snowplows. No, we don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re very clever for noticing, People Who Live In Consistently Snowy Places.
A few inches of snow wreaked the usual havoc. Screenshots of the traffic maps this morning showed red spaghetti. Schools delayed, then closed, or didn’t close and earned their very own trending hashtag (#closeFCPS). Some find the chaos profitable–“body shop weather,” an acquaintance who manages such a business called it. Many, I gather, find it annoying.
With no car to keep out of the ditch or kids to worry about, snow still holds that joy of childhood for me – the promise of a special day, just because the moisture and the cold collided in just the right way in my part of the world. Even though I don’t get days off for meteorology anymore, because I work for a company headquartered in a place that gets serious snow. But a snow day still feels special, a cold, white present from the sky, a literal gift from above. Continue reading →
On Friday, January 27th, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven countries from entering the United States. And in the wake of that executive order, there have been a continuos stream of reports that people trying to enter the United States (whether from those countries or not) have been subjected to a variety of questions and searches.
Over the past few weeks I’ve seen story after story about how to secure your digital information online, and others wondering if it was even possible. I’ve also had a lot of friends asking me, both rhetorically and literally if they plan to try and travel outside the United States, what the rules are about this kind of thing. Can the US Customs and Border Patrol demand your phone’s contents? Your social media information? Your passwords?
All this got me thinking about something that a legal scholar told me a while back, about how the law treats phones. I preface all of this saying that I am very, very, very much not a lawyer and this should not be construed as legal advice of any kind. I just thought it was interesting.
Rose loves watching people dance (check out her favorite YouTube videos). This paper about women dancing? She does not love it so much: Oh, so, the paper here isn’t really asking “which woman is a better dancer” but rather “which woman would you rather sleep with?” That is… a completely different question than asking who’s a better dancer.
Jenny might have been a paleontologist if, as a fifth grader, she had found a weird fossil like Saccorhytus coronarious, a wrinkly mouthed sac that is also one of our ancestors: Its form, at some 540 million years old, proves that we vertebrates have been pushing around our greedy mouths to stuff our faces, and letting fly the excess, for a really long time.
America has been great before, says Craig, in the Ice Age: Ours has been a country for refugees and far-flung travelers since the beginning. . . To survive far northern conditions within shooting distance of the land bridge, people had to invent portable architecture and tailored clothing, represented by the advent of stone microblades for precisely cutting skins, and eyed sewing needles fashioned out of mammoth ivory found in both Siberia and Alaska.
Michelle writes about a tree that weighs as much as 10,000 grizzly bears. It’s a quaking aspen named Pando, and it’s in trouble: For Rogers, the clone’s slow but increasingly visible desistance is a sign of larger human failings. “When something that’s so big, and has been around so long, just starts to fall apart,” he says, “that points the finger back at us.”
This idea to cut out the middleman between pharma and consumers? Been there, done that, says Erik: The masses are good at many things. Finding planets, for instance. Or driving the world’s car markets to ever-better quality and efficiency. Or proofreading Taylor Swift’s Wikipedia page. But . . . we are not great at picking effective drugs.
I can’t help but notice that placebos have crept into the political news in recent weeks. Okay, maybe they aren’t in the headlines but they’re there, just below the surface. That’s because when you see a headline about the Food and Drug Administration, you should immediately start thinking of placebos.
The Trump administration hasn’t named an FDA head yet, but they have laid out their priorities. Namely, to clear away the impediments between drug companies and end-users. In December, it was whispered that Trump might pick Jim O’Neill, who believes that the market should dictate which drugs get to the shelves, rather than a faceless bureaucracy. Which is a great idea when it comes to tennis shoes and sports cars, but an absolutely catastrophe when it comes to drugs.
But, you say, information wants to be free, people should feel they are in control of their own health, and life-saving drugs should be available as soon as possible. No. When it comes to drugs, this is absolutely wrong because – oddly enough – of the placebo effect.
How do I know this? Because we’ve been down this exact same road before.
On the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, in the mountains of central Utah, is a tree that weighs an estimated 13 million pounds—as much as three giant sequoias, or 55 blue whales, or 10,000 grizzly bears. (Hey, I just thought you might like to imagine a pile of 10,000 bears.) This tree is the most massive living organism in the world, according to most of the people who argue about such things, and while estimates of its age have varied wildly, from a few hundred years to more than a million, it certainly predates any of us. Some twenty years ago, a trio of Colorado scientists nicknamed it Pando, Latin for “I spread,” and the name has stuck.
Pando, which is a quaking aspen, doesn’t look like a single tree. Like many plant species but only a few trees, aspen usually reproduce asexually, by sending out horizontal roots which then sprout new stems. Over its long lifetime, Pando has sprouted around 47,000 genetically identical stems from a single root system, creating one organism that covers more than 100 acres. Quaking aspen do occasionally reproduce sexually, and each clone’s flowers are either all male or all female. Pando, as it happens, is a boy. One 13-million-pound boy tree. Continue reading →
We were great in the Ice Age. Big weapons, big animals, big land.
While parts of the world were crawling with hominids for a million years or more, this side of the planet was off limits. Getting here was never easy, not in the late Pleistocene, not now. The Americas are bookended by the world’s two largest oceans and occasionally connected by an Arctic land bridge. For most of human history, this country was vast, open, and unexplored, and anyone who arrived had to either really want it, or they were terribly lost.
As a new assault rises against refugees and a freshly minted president tries to keep the door open for some and close it for others, it is time to consider the longer history of this place. Continue reading →
Our microscopic relative might have looked like this.The fossil, waaaaay bigger than real life.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Mouth. Anus. Reproductive bit in between. Isn’t that all one really needs to get by?
I’m oversimplifying, of course. Lungs are helpful if you live on land, for example.
But check out our newly discovered really ancient fossilized ancestor. Saccorhytus coronarious, unearthed recently by paleontologists in sedimentary rock in the Shaanxi Province of central China, falls into the group of bilateral creatures known as deuterostomes. (Here’s a nice description of that group.) Hardly an exclusive club, the deuterostomes include critters like starfish and urchins, but also giraffes, naked mole rats, and humans. All vertebrates, in fact. This particular animal’s body was a little more than a globular bag. It had a supersize wrinkly maw-anus combo (decluttering is not a new concept). Its form, at some 540 million years old, proves that we vertebrates have been pushing around our greedy mouths to stuff our faces, and letting fly the excess, for a really long time.
I’m truly amazed by how much paleontologists can figure out from microscopic lines left in stone. Having examined this millimeter-long creature under an electron microscope—without which the thing appears to be a grain of black rice— the scientists can say with some confidence where the animal lived (on the sea bed), how it moved (by wriggling and nestling between sand grains), and what its peculiar parts were for (e.g., lateral slits probably let it flush out excess water (precursors to modern gills), while mouth folds let it open extra wide when prey was bigger than predator’s head).
The researchers also know what the animal lacked: an anus. It had no dedicated release valve. No clearly marked exit. Apparently, butts aren’t mandatory after all. For some animals, a mouth or other opening does double duty. (See what I did there? Of course you do.)
So, here is the common ancestor of whole host of species, for now the earliest known knot in the evolutionary net that stretched to humans hundreds of million years later. (I’m testing out a new analogy for the tree of life. Apologies.)
Such analyses make me feel pretty small. To discover a miniature rock imprinted with what is clearly an alien face with four chins and maxed-out lips, and then to figure out aspects of the ancient animal’s physiology and behavior, life history, and its relationship to humans, well, that’s quite a thing.
I’m not sure whether my much younger self would have been as impressed. When I was in 5th grade we kids had the chance to go to work with someone who had the job we thought we wanted when we grew up. There were few marine mammologists hanging around Chicago, so I opted for my second choice. I hopped into a pickup truck at dawn with a soft-spoken bearded paleontologist and traveled to a site in Wisconsin where an excavation was in progress. I don’t remember what we were looking for there; I just know I was hoping for skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons.
I recall the tidy square pits, some sunken like 1970s living rooms, and spray-painted markings in the dirt. Students with tremendous patience, in wide-brimmed hats, knelt on the hard ground sifting out tiny nothings from the dust. I was given a couple of tools and shown how to very carefully scrape away the earth around objects and brush away the excess. My digging experience limited to building drip sand castles, the area I was given to work was no doubt insignificant. If memory serves, I spent several hours gently freeing a stick from the soil.
This was what I envisioned unearthing during my day as a paleontologist. No such luck.
Memory definitely serves when it comes to the pain. The sun was a fireball stuck under my hat, and the ground punished my knees. My back was quickly drenched and sore and the edges of my ears turned an angry red. I hobbled around the next day as if I’d fallen into a well. It was the most tedious work I’d ever done, and by then I’d diagrammed a lot of sentences. Where was the grinning skull, the bony hand, the eerily crooked spine rising from the grave? I probably cried at some point that day.
Now, a day poking around in the dirt, even sans skeletons, sounds like a good time. (Being an adult has its perks, including enthusiasm over geeky things that don’t come easy.) If only that scientist had lied to me, telling me that somewhere under my bruised knees lay the imprint of our earliest ancestor’s absurd “face,” a find that would fill a gap in the fossil record so vital it would change everything we knew about everything. (A little drama makes all the difference in 5th grade.)
Just that little fib and maybe, just maybe, I’d be a happily sunburned paleontologist today.
Last week, researchers published a paper about dancing in the journal Scientific Reports. And the internet was really into it. The little dancing lady GIF was all over the place, and Shakira jokes washed over us all. But after I made my own jokes, I had some questions about the study. So, being a journalist, I read it. And hoo boy, does it make a whole lot of assumptions! Let’s talk about them.
The first snow of the year, and the first noticeable snow of this winter, fell here in D.C. on Tuesday. Yes, we know that our reaction to snow makes no sense. No, we don’t have enough snowplows. No, we don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re very clever for noticing, People Who Live In Consistently Snowy Places.
We were great in the Ice Age. Big weapons, big animals, big land.
