The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Redux: The Other Signs of Fall

By: Helen Fields | October 24, 2016

The other day I saw the fall crocuses and remembered that time last year when I learned that fall crocuses exist. Read on for my other signs of fall. What are yours?

The "most normal looking picture we managed" says my college friend Cameron, on Robert's first day of second grade and Max's first day of kindergarten. (The chicken has completed her formal education.) — “The most normal looking picture we managed” from college friend Cameron on Robert’s first day of second grade and Max’s first day of kindergarten. (Gladys the chicken has completed her formal education.)

The equinox is past. At last, fall has come to the northern hemisphere.

Some of the ways the new season shows up are obvious. The sunset creeps earlier and earlier as we race toward the winter solstice. The air cools. Pumpkin spice is in every product imaginable.

Others are subtler. There’s the spooky Halloween decoration store that opened near my office, and the equally scary specter of potential government shutdown.

Here are some of the nicest ways that the world has let me know we’re tilting away from the sun.

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The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | October 21, 2016

$lyapunov-fractal$ October 17-21, 2016

Craig opened the week with a brave personal and scientific exploration of sexual assault’s effects on the brain and the psyche.

Revelations about Trump’s history with women warrants a revisit to Christie’s post on why harassment goes unreported.

Michelle plays detective in the extinction of an Australasian rodent. She finds that sometimes climate change as a cause of extinction is also an excuse that hides more proximal human causation.

Time travel is a recent thing to think about, says James Gleick, who has just spent more than four years writing a book about it. The idea of it, he concludes, is ultimately about eluding death.

Guest Brooke Borel, editor of a book on fact-checking, still finds herself tweeting first and asking questions later. Let her save you from the mistakes she has made.

Conversation: James Gleick in the Fourth Dimension

By: Ann Finkbeiner | October 20, 2016

May I introduce James Gleick? He’s been on staff at the New York Times, and has written seven books, including Chaos and Genius (a biography of Richard Feynman), for which he’s won impressive prizes. And he’s just published Time Travel, which Joyce Carol Oates called “another of [his] superb, unclassifiable books.” It’s a compendium of all the explanations, implications, ramifications, aspects, and generally unpleasant outcomes of traveling to the future or to the past.

Ann: When I look at your book-tour dates and places, I see that you’ve mastered time travel yourself, or at least you’ve managed to get from one place to another in unlikely intervals of time. Are you exhausted?

James: Oh, well, I’m fine, thanks, though space travel—the mundane kind, as opposed to the rocket-ship kind—can occasionally feel as disorienting as we imagine time travel to be. After all, jet lag is a kind of time sickness. At least I didn’t cross the International Date Line. I did have an uncanny moment at the Seattle airport when I wondered if I had slipped into a bygone era and was about to board a biplane: Continue reading →

Who Killed the Bramble Cay Melomys?

By: Michelle Nijhuis | October 19, 2016

This summer, the Bramble Cay melomys, a reddish-brown rodent that resembles a large mouse, made international news. In mid-June, the Guardian reported that the melomys, last seen in 2009, had been confirmed extinct in its only known habitat, a tiny, isolated coral outcrop in the narrow strait between Australia and New Guinea. “First mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change,” the headline read. The story, and the declaration, were picked up by publications around the world.

Climate change certainly dealt a blow to the melomys, and very likely the fatal blow. In 1998, about ten acres of Bramble Cay lay above the high tide line; by 2014, only six acres remained above the tide, and rising seas had flooded the entire island several times, killing or damaging most of the succulent plants the species depended on for food. The melomys was last seen alive in 2009, and this past June, a report by three scientists to the Australia’s Department of Environment and Heritage Protection concluded that there were no more melomys on Bramble Cay. The last remaining members of the species may have been simply washed away.

But did climate change kill the melomys? Yes and no.

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How Sexual Harassers Get Away With It

By: Christie Aschwanden | October 18, 2016

Donald and Billy on the bus and the sexual harassment and assault allegations against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, including at least 20 lawsuits accusing Trump of mistreating women, have left many people asking why more women don’t report sexual assault and harassment when it happens. I’ll tell you why: it’s a terrible burden to be forced into becoming an accuser, and there is usually little reward and the very real possibility of punishment for doing so. (Fox anchor Lou Dobbs recently doxxed one woman who came forward with a story sexual misconduct by Trump.) Anyone who questions why women so rarely report this kind of abuse or why it can take years for sexual predators to get outed would do well to examine the Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes cases.

On December 19, 2012, I published a post about how creeps get away with sexual harassment, and Trump has made the story as relevant as ever. (Can you hear women across the country getting ready to grab back on November 8?)

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Your Brain on Sexual Assault

By: Craig Childs | October 17, 2016

This recent revelation about Donald Trump and crotch-grabbing has triggered an outpouring of stories and memories. I posted something on the matter on Facebook and people’s deeply sunken tales came out comment after comment. The same has happened on a national scale. People are stepping forward with their stories. A friend of mine, a touring musician, wrote a song, picked up her guitar and put it out there in a video. Down inside our tangled nests of personal denial, self-blame, and fragmented recollections, a sharp twang has struck from many pasts. This is no imagined twang, it has a physical and lifelong component.

In moments of fear or terror, combat or sexual assault, the prefrontal cortex is overridden by stress chemicals. You don’t need your prefrontal cortex to get out alive. In essence, you switch to the reptile brain, which means nuances like hair color, clothing, shoes, or exactly what was said are harder to access. Fine details may be burned into the brain, but many others are cross-wired and even backwards or misremembered. The hormones released during an assault make it hard for the amygdala and hippocampus to work together, meaning information can be encoded incorrectly.

I recall being grabbed myself at an early age by a man in a bookstore. He rubbed against me uncomfortably and I moved away, then he moved in. I had a big book in my hands, I don’t remember the title. I have ever since thought of whamming it into his face, where I know he would have wept and cursed and run away. I see blood, a look of shock. But I didn’t do it. I stood in complete surprise and confusion. In fact, it feels as if part of me is still standing there, frozen in disbelief, a statue of a boy with a book in his hand that does not weather, does not erode, a ghost I left somewhere long ago.

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The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | October 15, 2016

October 10 – 14, 2016

With the de-embargoing of Cuba, Cuban and American geologists can finally talk to each other. That’s a good thing, says guest Alex Witze, because Cuba is a crunched-up (and gorgeous) mess between a rock and an ocean.

Michelle reminded us of Lady Ada Lovelace, an inventor of computer programming, who died young and whom the world needed because, when she was even younger, she wrote “As soon as I have got [a] flying [machine] to perfection, I have got a scheme about a steamengine.”

Guest Olivia Walch once spent a summer in a rat lab, observing them and running tests of their memories. Her hours were long and she filled them with a memory game which she thinks, she hopes, she prays with all her soul, is unobserved.

Assuming pot gets legalized (which, duh), Jessa wonders what the legal pot-buying age should be — drinking age, driving age, marrying age, draft age? Science says yes.

Baby Willyard has some science she wants to share with you and just because scientists haven’t discovered it yet, doesn’t mean it’s not true. Baby Willyard talks like a tiny, cute Marine drill sergeant and if you’re smart, you won’t mess with her.