Science Metaphors (cont.): Tidally Locked

By: | June 18, 2014

near sideI’ll go home tonight, I’ll open the front door, I’ll yell, “Hey sweetie, hi!”  Then Sweetie will yell, “Hello, young Ann.” I’ll look at the mail, then I’ll yell again, “Did you pick up the salmon?” And he’ll say, “Yep, it’s in the refrigerator.”  And then I’ll look over the mail and start to throw away the junk and he’ll come downstairs and say, “Don’t throw away anything with my name on it,” and I’ll say, “But it’s junk and it just sits around for days,” and he’ll say, “I want to look at it.” So I’ll put it on the hall table where it will sit around for days, and then I’ll go into the kitchen and start dinner, and I’ll say, “Can you come peel some onions?” And he’ll come peel the onions, and I’ll say, “How was your day?” and he’ll say, “Fine. The replacement brakes haven’t come in yet.”  And I’ll say, “I wrote New Scientist again about getting paid.” Then he’ll go into the living room and read his book, and I’ll get the rest of dinner because I like good food better than he does, and we’ll sit down at the table and I’ll say, “God I’m tired,” and he’ll eat salmon.  We do this every night – bar the salmon — and I’ll guess with a high degree of confidence that a high percentage of all people who live together do exactly the same.

Astronomers would say we’re all tidally locked. Tidal locking means one side of the planet always faces the star, the other side always faces away.  The moon is tidally locked to the earth and not until 1959 did anyone on earth see the moon’s other face. Continue reading →

Feet, Defeated

By: | June 17, 2014

640px-ConverseFields(byIlhamRahmansyah)Right now, there are a bunch of people in Brazil—and a bunch more following along on television–who are paying very close attention to one particular body part: fast-moving, feat-making feet. But most of us don’t give our feet much thought until they start complaining. Continue reading →

Unbroken Water: Following an Intact Hydrologic Cyle in Patagonia

By: | June 16, 2014

Baker 1

Where it bursts through the gates of the southern Andes in the rugged interior of the Aysén region of southern Chile, the Rio Baker is a kicking horse. The most voluminous river in the country, it has been on the chopping block for several years, part of a 9-billion-dollar dam construction project that until last week had been feeling inevitable.

Last Tuesday, the Chilean government struck down five dams planned for two remote rivers, one of them being the Baker, the other its largest tributary, the Pascua. For the environmental movement in Chile the defeat of this multinational project, backed by the majority of the country’s public opinion, is a surprising step forward. One of the of the last sparsely-populated temperate regions of the world, the Aysén of northern Patagonia, was about to be descended upon on an industrial level, including a 1,200-mile-long high tension power line that would have been required to get the hydroelectricity out of there. It would have the longest single power line in the world built into the isolated heart of the Aysén, and the region would have been suddenly open to extraction enterprises, namely aluminum smelting.

Patricio Rodrigo, executive secretary of the Patagonia Defense Council, was quoted in Time Magazine calling the decision “the greatest triumph of the environmental movement in Chile.” Rodrigo said, that it “marks a turning point, where an empowered public demands to be heard and to participate in the decisions that affect their environment and their lives.”

I traveled on the Baker a few years ago, part of a film crew out for three weeks crossing glaciers around the Northern Patagonian Icefield, then switched from crampons and backpacks to kayaks and rafts to run the Baker from source to sea. The film was one of several made around that time, all of them trying to get out the message about these potential dams. The purpose of our journey was to complete the hydrologic cycle on a river. We would follow it from beginning to end, something you can rarely do on major rivers in any country. More often, you are stumbling over high dams that hold back water and sediment, changing the nature of everything downstream. In this case, our journey would be seamless, undammed. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 14, 2014

teotihuacan_la_ventillaJune 9 – 13, 2014

This week Michelle convinces us that cryptozoology has never known a stranger — nor more adorable — creature than the moose-like hugag. It is the creation of William Cox, and surely the ancestor of the heffalump.

Richard kickstarts a memetic phenomenon with the phrase, “telling the fire by its ashes” as a task faced by evolutionary biologists and, indeed, most scientists.

Stones of the salivary gland are a thing, according to Cassie. A painful ordeal of a thing for which “passing” one simply has to wait.

Uncomfortably close to the Earth’s dynamic nature, Christie spends the week re-assessing the mountains around her house, the largest of which recently calved, killing three men.

And just when you think you know your hieroglyphs, Erik introduces you to the cartoonish, interlocking balloon letters of Mesoamerican epigraphy and the as-yet undecipherable doodles made by the Teotihuacanos.

Image: Karl Taube

What’s in a Word?

By: | June 13, 2014

shutterstock_139799134 (1) Next week, in the July issue of Scientific American, you can read a story I wrote about the fascinating archeological site of Teotihuacan. You may remember it as the Mexican site I wrote about in 2012 with an almost magical ability to draw in hippies. The story focuses on our growing understanding of the politics and culture of the city.

It’s a fascinating place for tourists and the most visited archeological site in North America. But it’s equally fascinating for researchers. That’s because, unlike the Maya to the east, Teotihuacanos didn’t have a proper written language.

“If I could go back in time, that’s the place I would want to go,” says Karl Taube, a well-known Mayan epigrapher (a fancy word for someone who deciphers ancient dead languages like Latin, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and html).

Let’s leave aside the fact that a tall, bearded white dude wandering around Teotihuacan in 200 AD would attract a fair bit of unwanted attention. Taube has puzzled over texts from across the Maya world – some of the most exciting archeological digs in recent history. Yet, if you gave him his choice of any period in history, he’d choose a place without any writing. Why would he do that? Continue reading →

A stark introduction to geologic time

By: | June 12, 2014

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When I was a kid, my mom would measure time for me in units of Sesame Street. During a road trip when I’d inevitably ask, “Are we there yet?” she might answer, we’ll be there in two Sesame Streets. For a kid, two hours can seem like forever.

We imagine the world through the lens of our experience. When you’re six, a day or a month represent a substantial portion of the life you’ve lived so far. When you’re 60, such periods of time are gone before you know it. It’s all about perspective. Things that happen too quickly or slowly for us to see tend to escape our notice. As a result, the vibration of an atom or the formation of a Grand Canyon inspire our awe and wonder, because they exist outside our normal realm of attention.

Slide2A few weeks ago, geologic time made itself visible to me and my community when a massive section of the mountain we call home slid down the hill in an epic display of nature’s brute force. The mudslide happened on Sunday, May 25 near Collbran, Colorado, trapping, and presumably killing, three men. Wes Hawkins, Danny Nichols and his father, Clancy Nichols had gone out to check on an irrigation canal that was likely clogged by the first rumblings of the slide. At a town hall meeting in Collbran on May 29, Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey told attendees,

These are the facts we have: Sunday morning, 7:18 a.m. seismic activity occurred.  Probably that was when the first slide impacted the irrigation of the area, prompting the men to go to the area. At 5:44 p.m. seismic graphs recorded the major slide.  Based on what the experts have provided, event duration was only a couple of minutes.

In that brief moment, an enormous slab of the Grand Mesa — the world’s largest flat-topped mountain — came tumbling down. Initial estimates measured the slide at four miles long and two miles wide, reaching 250 feet in depth. At the town hall meeting, Jeff Coe of the USGeological Survey told the crowd that the event is classified as a “debris slide” because it’s a mixture of soil, rocks and trees. Witnesses said that it sounded like a freight train, speeding down the mountain. Continue reading →

This Too Shall Pass

By: | June 11, 2014

 

mouthpain

María Juan’s pain began eight years ago, at lunchtime. She was dining with her parents when suddenly she felt a sharp jab under her tongue. “Like an aguja,” she says — a needle. Each time she tried to swallow, she felt another poke. After the meal ended, the pain subsided. At dinner, however, it returned. And now the right side of her neck was a swollen. A couple of days later, María decided to see a doctor.

The doctor stuck one finger in her mouth and placed another finger on her neck, probing. He could feel something in her salivary gland. Something hard and strange. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. He tried to pinch it out with his fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. There was nothing to do but wait. María left with some pills to make her salivate, and orders to drink lemon juice — a surefire way to produce spit. Amazingly, the regimen worked. The pain disappeared.  Continue reading →

Repeat After Us

By: | June 10, 2014

wood-ashesI was reading the end-of-semester student essays in the Science as Narrative course I teach when one phrase stopped me. Stopped me as in, I didn’t go on:

“Darwin was happy to be tasked with telling a fire by its ashes.”

Was it an actual thing, I wondered, this “telling a fire by its ashes”? I tried to think if I’d ever heard the phrase. Not that I could recall. So I Googled it. Nothing. I Googled variations on it. Still nothing. I resisted the impulse to email the student and ask if he’d made it up. As much as I wanted to know the answer, I also wanted to hear his peers’ reaction to the question; the seminar consisted of eight students, most of whom were happy to cross-talk at high volume—a teacher’s dream of engagement and passion.

So I waited until Tuesday. When the time came to discuss this student’s essay, I asked him directly: Was it an actual thing, this “telling a fire by its ashes”?

Continue reading →