Debunking Hollywood: The Gordian Knot

By: | February 8, 2016

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I’ve often wondered who was the first person to tie a knot. Who was that ancient ancestor 10, 20, 100 thousand years ago who first wrapped a strip of animal skin – or maybe some fibrous vine – around itself and realized that it could hold itself together, even hold a person’s weight.

Or hell, after seeing the incredible skill Nemo the orangutan demonstrated building her own hammock, maybe it was a lot earlier than that. But whoever or whatever it was, they struck on one of the great unsung innovations of our species.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 6, 2016

A patch of ground around a tree in the snow.

February 1-5, 2016

After digging out from Snowzilla, Ann recalled the last time her Baltimore neighborhood was buried under unreasonable quantities of snow, and how outraged she was at her poorly behaved neighbors.

What are the chances of a giant supernova happened nearby? Slim. Or the chances of a Voyager-like probe from somewhere else coming to our galaxy? Also very slim. Rose wondered why people particularly enjoyed these episodes of her podcast.

Cassie’s dog eats everything. Like, everything. Diapers and garbage and poisonous-to-dogs quantities of vitamin D. She discovered that everyone’s dog does this…and the comments section backs her up. Don’t miss it.

Craig wrote something beautiful about the passage of time, and how archaeology provides a real, emotional connection to the past, and my summary can’t do it justice. It’s really lovely.

Have you thought about where animals go in the snow? Cameron has. For at least some, it’s a cozy, sheltered place called the subnivium.

Photo: Helen Fields, in Kiruna, Sweden

Redux: Snowbound and Murderous

By: | February 5, 2016

20160124_093531The Great East Coast Snowstorm of January 2016 That Singled Out Baltimore left around 30 inches of snow, turning cars into snowhills and pausing civilized life as we know it.  In the last big snowstorm, the the worst incivility was perpetrated by the neighbors themselves, this time it was by outsiders: two different jackasses parked for over 24 hours in two different parking places that they did not themselves shovel out.  Jackass outsiders are easier to hate than jackass neighbors, but somehow the hatred is less intense.  I don’t know what I’m going to do about this; I’m no further in my thinking or moral judgment or revenge plots against breakers of social contracts than I was two years ago, the last time this happened.

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That’s an honest-to-God, non-stock photo of the view out my window.

Nobody Likes Sad Futures

By: | February 4, 2016

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On Tuesday, the podcast that I host and produce started its second season. The show is called Flash Forward, and it’s weird and fun and surprising. Every episode takes on a possible future, from the terrifying likely (antibiotic resistance) to the completely absurd (space pirates drag a second moon to earth). Every episode starts with a little radio drama, a trip to the future we’re looking at. These range from future commercials, documentaries from the future, scenes from labs, conversations between space pirates, voicemails and more. (Many of these voices are actually recorded by fans who volunteer to act out parts each week). Then we talk to experts about how that future might really go down. Those experts include historians, engineers, scientists, futurists, anthropologists, science fiction authors and more.

The second season is going to be fun, but I wanted to take this chance to reflect on the first season. Together, we traveled to twenty three different futures, everything from artificial wombs, to drones, to robot UN secretaries banning weapons, to an evil mega company building so many wind turbines that they actually alter the climate, to the discovery of an alien probe that is almost exactly like the Voyager probe humans sent out in the 1970’s.

Some people really like our dark and scary episodes: we talked about an end of antibiotic effectiveness, and about what it would be like if we applied life-extension technology to prisoners. Other people preferred the sillier ones, like what might happen if we had a second moon, or if the Earth stopped rotating around the sun, or a supernova consumed us.

But here I want to talk about the four most popular episodes, and what I think made them work. Yes, this is shameless self promotion, get over it. Continue reading →

The Misadventures of Garbage Dog

By: | February 3, 2016

11703581_10153494374632095_8252310565867126931_oPerhaps there was a time when our dog, Bea, didn’t eat everything. If so, I don’t remember it. At first, we thought it might be a puppy thing. But this month she turned two, and it seems clear that her insatiable appetite is a permanent part of her personality. Dogs aren’t known for their discriminating taste, but most dogs will balk at . . . well . . . something. Not my garbage dog. She is happiest when her mouth is full. Continue reading →

Getting Out of the Jail of Time

By: | February 2, 2016

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Time is a jail that we’ve built for ourselves, I think as I look at the clock and realize this post is due by some daunting hour of the morning. How could this day have been contained by a big hand and little hand on the face of a clock?

Sometimes, or some places, the clock flies apart. Human footprints 3,000 years old were discovered in Arizona recently during a road project north of Tucson. Archaeologists came upon what had once been a layer of wet clay marked by the tracks of passing adults, children and even a domestic dog. The impressions were left as if they’d just walked through yesterday. An article in the Arizona Daily Star described the find, an archaeologist brushing away sand and dirt, revealing “the impression of a heel, then toes and finally a complete set of human footprints.” The archaeologist who made the discovery said, “The closer I came to the toe I started shaking.”

This is what it feels like to step out of time. We break from cell walls made of seconds, hours, days, centuries and millennia. Somehow we think we’ve got a better grasp on time than the average Stone Age hunter-gatherer whose language likely had no past or future tense. I think otherwise. I believe we lost something. It’s why we start shaking when we make contact with the ancient past. We realize that it’s actually real. Our language and its many tenses has turned the past into an abstraction. We start to believe that because the photos are black and white, history was colorless. Finding a footprint from thousands of years ago, color comes flooding back in.

Continue reading →

Redux: Below the Snow

By: | February 1, 2016

IMG_1600Right now, the meteorological event that some are calling Winter Storm Kayla is on its way across the U.S. While people may be curled up inside with a quilt by the fire, another group of creatures is finding shelter outside, under a cold, white blanket. This post about that unique below-the-snow spot, called the subnivium, originally ran in June 2013.

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When I think about winter, I mostly think about all the fun things that take place on the snow’s surface. Or all the fun things that take place inside: hot chocolate, eating, reading by the fire. Once spring comes, when the world outside is buzzing (and boing-ing), there’s no excuse to stay inside with a good book.

I’m not the only one who needs a winter retreat. In snow-covered spots food can be scarce; the wind-chilled open air is brutal. But for creatures that aren’t able to curl up with cocoa, the snow itself forms the insulation for a shelter under the snow.

This below-snow retreat is such a wintertime ecological haven—for everything from freeze-resistant invertebrates that can supercool their own bodies to martens and weasels that stalk prey and snooze in this space–that a paper in this month’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposes that it should get its own designation: the subnivium. Jonathan Pauli and Benjamin Zuckerberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues have gotten interested in the dynamics of this sub-snow world—and what will happen to it as winters warm up. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 30, 2016

a sage-green lichen on a gray tree trunk
As we creep up on Valentine’s Day (yes, still a couple of weeks away–don’t panic), we found ourselves writing about subjects having nothing whatsoever to do with love. Instead, it was a week about crimes, population, medicine, and lichens. Oh my.

Rose Eveleth discusses what makes a copycat crime, and why defining that term matters.

I ponder the problem with overpopulation and wonder aloud whether we can address it two by two.

Helen Fields scrapes away at the mystery of city lichens in a two-part series (part 1, part 2) that will have you peering closely at urban tree trunks.

And Jessa Gamble considers the fourth dimension…in medicine. Will circadian rhythms ever be taken seriously in medical treatment? When?