New Person of LWON: Jennifer Holland

By: | April 17, 2015

two dogs look out of a windowI got to know Jennifer Holland when I started working down the hall from her at National Geographic. My tenure there was brief and deskbound. Jenny, on the other hand, is the kind of writer who travels the world to get up close to adorable nudibranchs and terrifying dragons. Then she puts the words together all nice and makes everything sound pretty. She’s also written a string of bestsellers about animals who are best friends; the first was turned into a series of wall calendars. But what she really likes, I gather, is chilling at home with her dogs (left) and husband (not pictured).

You may remember Jenny from her guest posts about living with pain (ow) and the pre-colonoscopy experience (ew). I’m thrilled that she’s joining us and can’t wait to see what she writes next. Her first post as a Person of LWON will appear on Monday.

 Photo: Jennifer Holland

Guest Post: We Gaze at Dogs, Dogs Gaze at Us, Is It Love?

By: | April 17, 2015

15282278241_d6c048c20b_kYesterday, scientists reported that dogs have found an unusual way to steal our hearts. When we stare at our human infants and they stare back, we both experience a rise in the hormone oxytocin, which has been linked to trust and maternal bonding. Now it appears that dogs have hijacked this hormonal response, causing our oxytocin levels to rise when they stare at us, and vice versa. The researchers claim that this behavior may have played a critical role in dog domestication, but is the study all it’s cracked up to be? Judith Lewis Mernit (editor at High Country News and animal watcher) and David Grimm (editor at Science and animal writer) hash it out.

Judith: David, you’ve written a thorough and super-engaging book about our relationship with domestic animals,  Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, and you often write about the science behind domestication. What do you make of the findings of Miho Nagasawa, et al in their study, Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds? Do they make a strong case that humans and dogs get an oxytocin rush as they gaze into each other’s eyes? In your book you have an experience of meeting wolves where you’re instructed not to stare at them. But as you also go on to show how dogs have evolved in ways that set them apart from wolves, ways that allow them to coexist amicably, for the most part, with humans. Is the “oxytocin-gaze positive loop” these researchers describe another example of that co-evolution?

David: Hi Judith, I think it’s an intriguing study, though I think it’s heavy on speculation. Continue reading →

There Goes the Sun

By: | April 16, 2015
TSE1999Europe
That’s me in the Black Sea, lower right, waving. (You might have to squint.)

During a total eclipse of the sun, the landscape darkens. But you knew that. What you might not know—what I didn’t know, anyway, when I observed a total solar eclipse on August 11, 1999—is that the experience comes with a lot of other sensory overload.

I found myself thinking about that total eclipse while reading about the one that was visible last month—visible, that is, if you were among the few eyewitnesses in the high northern latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1999, though, the path of totality cut across the heart of Europe and the abdomen of Asia, ranking it among the most-watched total eclipses of the sun in human history. I myself saw it from the deck of a cruise ship in the Black Sea, courtesy of a magazine that paid all expenses—round-trip air to Athens, cruise passage, ground transportation—in exchange for an 800-word article. (Plus the fee for writing the article.) (Those were the days.) While I clearly remember the sight of the moon’s disk slipping in front of the sun’s—somewhere I have a tape recording of my on-the-scene musings, which, as I recall, consisted mostly of “Wow”s—I also can conjure, just as vividly, memories of what I didn’t expect. Continue reading →

A Sense of Many Places

By: | April 15, 2015
Two women sniff a fruit tree.
Two of the People of LWON investigate a fruit tree.

In the past half year, I’ve traveled a lot.

I’ve always traveled a lot. Until recently there’s been a heavy emphasis on longer trips: going to live in a foreign country or hang out on a ship for a few weeks or months. In the five and a half years I was freelancing, time was basically limitless, but money was tight. Now, thanks to a steady office job with an employer that is friendly to the idea of three-day weekends, I’ve been able to start taking short trips to visit friends around the country.

I have a love-hate relationship with travel. There’s the expense and the packing and all that time squeezed into a sardine can with wings. Also, I love home so much, it’s hard to leave it.

Christie, one of the People of the LWON, has written thoughtfully about staying home. For all of 2010, she stayed within 100 miles of the farm where she and her husband live in western Colorado. If I were to clumsily condense Christie’s message, it would be something like this: Stop traveling so much. Be at home in your place. Get to know your neighbors.

But, if I took her advice, I wouldn’t get to hang out on her farm.

Continue reading →

The Dragons’ Third Stir: the Next Bigge One

By: | April 13, 2015

shutterstock_148606181In keeping with the brave tradition of gullible, single-source reporting, here’s an astounding science news report.  It ran in the News and Views section of the prestigious journal, Nature, a couple weeks ago, I don’t know how I missed it, and it surely deserved more than the brief flurry of attention it got on Twitter.   In brief: global warming will almost certainly trigger The Third Stirring of the world’s dragons.  The report’s authors, borrowing a phrase from Geoffrey of Exmouth, say this will be “the bigge one.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 11, 2015

3536058968_bf7418f169_oApril 6 – 10

Have you ever had to endure the smug cocktail party contention that “biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, and physics is just math” (and so all of life is reducible to math)? Abstruse Goose demolishes that glib noise with a thought experiment that reverses the formula.

Michael Balter’s brontosaurus story has everything. Internecine science-mag warfare! An embargo scandal! Stephen J. Gould! Unfairly maligned stamps! Oh, and a giant thunder lizard.

Michelle and frequent guest Judith Lewis Mernit undertake a closely considered reading of Jonathan Franzen’s climate piece. They dive deep: if you must choose between the climate and the environment, is anything acceptable as collateral damage? Can we really afford to think of anything as expendable?

GM crops are bad, Craig shows us, but not for the reason your crazy aunt thinks they are.

“When a scientific theory comes face to face with new facts, scientists adjust the theory accordingly, and journalists should do the same.” Christie bravely wades into the Rolling Stone rape story fiasco.

See you next week!

Guest Post: Brontosaurus and Me

By: | April 10, 2015

Brontosaurus_Copyright_DavideBonadonna (1)The biggest science story this week was really, really big. Brontosaurus, weighing in at about 16 metric tons, is a taxonomic contender once again, thanks to a 300 page long cladistic analysis in the online journal PeerJ.  (Spoiler alert: Yes, the rest of this piece will include puns, jokes and allusions to classic films just as corny as these.)

Every major and minor news outlet in the world seems to have the story, and it’s no surprise. This is not just a major science story, but also a cultural event of monumental proportions. How do I know that? Simple: even The New Yorker weighed in with a commentary on the paper. That either means the news has very deep resonance for humanity (including New Yorkers), or that The New Yorker is slumming it these days, or a bit of both. You decide.

As pretty much every reporter pointed out, Brontosaurus is an “iconic” dinosaur that lost its wonderful name (“thunder lizard” in Greek) through no fault of its own. The blame can be put squarely on Othniel Marsh, the 19th century dino hunter who—in his greed to discover as many dinosaurs as possible—named one skeleton Apatosaurus in 1877 and then named another, very similar, skeleton Brontosaurus in 1879. Four years after Marsh’s death in 1899, paleontologists decided that they were the same beast and so Brontosaurus lost out thanks to the rules of scientific nomenclature. I don’t need to tell you more because, as a sophisticated, scientifically literate reader of LWON, you will have read at least one if not more of the numerous news stories that relate the tale of the “Bone Wars” in pretty much the same terms. So to refresh yourself on the details, simply click on any of the many, many—no, wait, read MY STORY!

Okay, now that you know this piece is going to be at least partly about me, let’s get shameless. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Fundamentalist Comp Lit

By: | April 9, 2015

nontrivial_subfieldI suppose somebody could actually think these things.  I doubt that person would be in comp lit, though.  I suppose reductionism comes in here somewhere but in spite of having it explained 100000 times, I don’t understand it.  I don’t know, I’m just so depressed that Abstruse Goose seems to have fallen down.  Oh Abstruse Goose, we love you get up.*

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http://abstrusegoose.com/544

*That’s from a poem by Frank O’Hara.