Snark Week: The Great Horny Owl

By: | June 28, 2016

halloween and owls 041

Owls. Little downy Ewoks. Fat and fusiform with big round eyes, legs feathered like miniature pilot pants in a stiff wind, perhaps a pair of droopy tuft ears. What is more trustworthy than droopy tuft ears? They appear as if they will take your deepest secrets to the grave. Perhaps this is why owls decorate a wide variety of hipster girl paraphernalia.

But beware, because owl tufts are not really ears. And this is where the treachery begins. Instead, owl ears are clandestine, twisted caverns, buried out of sight on either side of the bird’s sinisterly rounded skull. Worse, one is high, and one, low – an asymmetry that allows owls to triangulate on the exact location of sounds. Sounds made by things they will snab with their razor sharp talons and eviscerate with weird, hooked little nose-job beaks. Things like…YOU. Continue reading →

Snark Week: Guest Post: Warning: A Slow and Silent Menace in the Trees

By: | June 27, 2016

This is the first post in LWON‘s 4,729th annual Snark Week, a tribute to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, filled with what we hope is an equal amount of truthfulness, credibility, and creativity.  If you happen to notice we’ve written about sloths before, you may consider the following a timely and urgent update — less a blog post than a tornado warning.

IMG_6926The National Safety Office (NSO) is issuing a Code 2 advisory covering all species of sloths (class Mammalia, order Pliosa, families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae). This alert level indicates that the animals pose a significant risk of injury, illness, and death for travelers, forest workers, and other individuals who may come into contact with them.

Sloths are arboreal herbivores that inhabit parts of Central and South America. Their benign, almost friendly appearance belies their ferocious nature and encourages foolhardy behavior, such as attempts to pet or cuddle these dangerous animals. At the very least, touching a sloth exposes the individual to the large number of bacteria and fungi that inhabit its fur, including potential pathogens. Because a sloth’s pelt is often coated with algae and provides a home to numerous ticks, mites, and other arthropods, contact with it has been reported to trigger nausea, vomiting, and expressions of disgust. Immediate hand washing may reduce the odds of developing these symptoms, but to prevent contamination the NSO advises individuals who have handled a sloth to promptly immerse themselves in surgical disinfectant. Continue reading →

Public Service Announcement: SNARK WEEK!

By: | June 26, 2016

Snark Week2016 -2Every year, some media entity terrifies the nation with a Shark Week.  We here at LWON feel strongly that sharks, while terrifying, look scary and live in the ocean and therefore are pretty easy to recognize and avoid.   Much harder to recognize and avoid are the innocent-looking, furry, feathery animals that under the pretense of going about their lives, are out to murder and mayhem you.  So as a public service, we devote this week to stern, even frightening, warnings of several of these animals.  In the past, we’ve had to issue similar warnings and have thereby saved innumerable lives, every one of which was worth saving.

And you can trust us, we’re science writers: every word of these posts is true.  Read, Heed, and Hide.

The first Snark Week post follows on Monday; it reveals the true nature of a creature that — no, I just can’t say it, I can’t.

The Last Word

By: | June 25, 2016
In this 2003 photo, a Twin Otter flies out of the South Pole on a previous medical flight.
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June 20 – 24, 2016

I start researching for a story and you know how that goes, rabbit hole, branching rabbit hole, another branch, another, and pretty soon I’m so far into Ballykilcline and Texas I’m never coming home.

After a day in which we, for the first time in history, forgot to post anything, Helen goes to a Dutch museum in which she sees an old friend, sort of, whom she’d seen before he died and got stuffed.

California has the Santa Ana, France has the Mistral, North Africa has the Simoon, Iraq has the Shamal, and Michelle once again wishes that Oregon would call its local wind something besides “wind.”

Sometimes, says Cameron, when you’re about to graduate or when you’re sick and stuck in the Antarctic or when you’re Shackleton and it’s night and freezing and you’re lost on top of a ridge, the only thing to do is get on the toboggan and and go.

Rescue Us

By: | June 24, 2016

PanoramaOfSouthGeorgiaI love that graduation speeches are now posted on the internet. Listening to them, the good ones, I can’t help but feel a little bit of that helium of opportunity and promise that I once had, in early summer, when I was the one who got to walk across the stage.

One of my favorite speeches came before YouTube, which might be why it seems so perfect in my memory. A local newspaper columnist told the story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition and how he and his men survived two Antarctic winters—one stuck in the pack ice, the other on a desolate island while a few crew members went for help. At the time, I’d never heard of Shackleton, and was enthralled by the long odds and the daring rescue attempt.

I started thinking about the speech again this week as I followed the saga of a medical rescue mission to an Antarctic field station. Earlier this month, officials determined that a member of the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole station had a medical condition that required evacuation. On June 14, two Twin Otter prop planes left Calgary on the first leg of the journey to reach the station. Continue reading →

Update: From Puffball to Predator to Museum

By: | June 22, 2016

A stuffed polar bear in a museum case

Last week in Berlin I saw an old friend. Well, several. My college friend Erika, a historian of science who is wrapping up a sabbatical there, and I visited the Museum für Naturkunde – the natural history museum. And there Erika put me in touch with another old friend: Knut the polar bear. Knut was a media star who spent his life in the Berlin Zoo, where I visited him in 2008 or so. He died young and, it turns out, is now on display in an exhibit about taxidermy.

I realized after I told some friends about it, and posted a drawing of his stuffed hide on Instagram, that many people are creeped out by seeing this celebrity bear lounging casually on a museum rock. Maybe my enthusiastic reaction to this dead bear – oh my god, I know that guy!! – was not normal. Read on for what I wrote about him, and his species, last year.
knut and dorfleinOn December 6, 2005, a polar bear was born in captivity. His mother rejected him and his twin, and his twin died. The survivor was an adorable baby polar bear, but that phrase doesn’t need the initial adjective, does it? A baby polar bear is a little puffball, white with button eyes and perfect and cuddly. Zookeepers raised him. I fell in love. His name was Knut and he was a bit of an international sensation. Continue reading →

Anastomosing Rabbit Holes

By: | June 20, 2016

980534I’m having trouble with a story.  First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both.  You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, heading down the other one, a happy little rabbit.  My behavior so far is appropriate for a science writer.

Then the editor says, “Those two towns, the one in Maryland and the one in Ireland, they’re the wrong towns.”  Given the story she assigned, she’s right.  “But I’m already down here,” I say.  She gives me a pitying look.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her the whole truth:  one of those rabbit holes sprung a branch, and then that branch branched, and I’m now so deep I’ll never see the sky again.  This is definitely not appropriate for a science writer. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 18, 2016

27558753192_40e3e9d4e4_oJune 13-17, 2016

Christie thought she was from nowhere–until an internet quiz put her in her place.

The novel Frankenstein, Michelle writes, “can be read a warning of the perils of human hubris and a brilliantly imaginative response to a global disaster.” Will we take its lessons and inspiration to heart in the face of our own monstrous creation, climate change?

J-Shame: “It hits when your beat is way out of synch with a big tragic thing that’s on everyone’s mind,” says Jennifer.

Right now, detecting gravitational waves is thrilling. Someday soon, it might be a snooze.”That’s how science at its best proceeds,” Richard says. “The outlandish becomes commonplace, the impossible predictable.”

Guest Bryn Nelson writes an ode to a gay bar, and to Orlando: “And if we as a country want to ever begin considering how to put the pieces back together and keep it from happening again and again and again, whether in a gay bar or an African-American church or a Jewish community center or a Sikh temple or a movie theater or a high school or a college campus, it’s important to remember that facts matter. That words matter. That history matters.”

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Candlelight vigil at the Stonewall Inn for victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre, courtesy of Elisa G Schneider, via Flickr.