Buds

By: | May 24, 2013

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“Did they ever meet?”

I got the question all the time. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say a book about Einstein and Freud, and then would come the question.

Same thing with my next book. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say a book about dark matter and dark energy. Figuring these words were more foreign than Einstein and Freud, I would add, “Maybe you’ve heard about this,” or, “I don’t know if you’re familiar with these terms.”

“So it’s like…black holes?”

“No,” I would say. “Scientists actually know what black holes are. But dark matter and dark energy are parts of the universe that are totally unlike anything else we’ve ever encountered. We know they’re there, and we know they make up 96 percent of the universe, but we don’t know what they are.”

A month later, maybe two, I would run into the same person at a party or on the street. And then, inevitably, would come the question: “Hey, how’s that book of yours going—the one on black holes?”

Continue reading →

The Crash

By: | May 23, 2013

I did a big run on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I stuffed my face, had a welcome beer after a training dry spell, and felt glorious. Sunday morning I spent in bed, reading the New York Times in a puddle of pure contentment. Sunday night, I went to an epic dinner and felt the opposite of hangry.

Then Monday came. I hid from my kids in the bathroom, I cried when I dropped my mom off at the airport, I almost fired off several barely-civilized email responses (luckily, my phone died before I could hit send). In the afternoon, I yelled at my older son when he picked one too many blueberries on our way home and then I collapsed on the couch with a pillow over my face. What happened to my post-run halo? Continue reading →

Fasting: The New Fad Diet?

By: | May 22, 2013


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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a beautiful rural home that belongs to my parents’ friends, a slim and sophisticated couple who enjoys bird watching and international travel. I was meeting this pair—let’s call them George and Marsha—for the first time. I’m inherently nosy, so while the rest of the group chatted, my eyes scanned the room. On the fridge, I noticed a slip of paper that looked to be George and Marsha’s weekly dinner menu. That night they’d be having polenta and pork roast. The other days had meals written next to them too, all except for Monday and Wednesday. Next to those two days, Marsha (or George) had scrawled “Fast.”

Fast as in not eat? Marsha and George didn’t seem like the type to fall for juice cleanses or fad diets. My parents said the couple had probably seen the same documentary they had. The show follows Michael Mosley, a BBC journalist and former physician, on his quest to become slimmer and healthier through fasting.

I’ve never heard of Michael Mosley, but I’m not sure how I missed him. Lately Mosley is everywhere — on the BBC, on PBS, in the news. In January he launched a bestselling diet book co-authored by journalist Mimi Spencer. Here’s the approach they’re advocating: To lose weight and improve health, dieters should fast two days each week. On fasting days, women should consume no more than 500 calories. Men are allowed 600. The other five days dieters have no restrictions. Continue reading →

Guns on the brain

By: | May 21, 2013

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I recently witnessed one of the kindest, gentlest people I know fly into a momentary rage over a parking space. Such transformations used to baffle me, but after writing a Discover story about embodied cognition, I’m starting to understand why normally mild-mannered people can become uncharacteristically aggressive behind the wheel of a large automobile.

The big idea behind embodied cognition is that thoughts and perceptions are not confined to the brain, but extend to the body too. As a result, our bodily states affect how we think and our perceptions are fundamentally shaped by our ability to act.

Get behind the wheel and suddenly the world looks different. You’re protected by a big chunk of metal, and you’re navigating the world with the power of an internal combustion engine. You not only see the world differently, you may behave differently too, as my friend’s moment of road rage demonstrated.

“We think of perception as providing us with this geometrically accurate picture of the world,” says Jessica Witt, a psychologist at Colorado State University. But while we may believe that we see the world as it really is, Witt’s research suggests that our perceptions are guided by what we’re doing with our bodies.

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance last year, Witt and her colleague James R. Brockmole at the University of Notre Dame performed a series of five experiments that asked college students to look at photos of people holding something and then indicate whether the object was a gun or something neutral like a ball or a shoe. When the participants held a plastic gun, they were about 30 percent more likely to deem the object a gun. Continue reading →

Redux: What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage?

By: | May 20, 2013

 

If you were one of the 14 (a made-up number) people who read this back when LWON was publishing wonderful posts but was otherwise just a baby staggering around on inept little feet, we apologize for repeating ourselves.  Anyway, you probably weren’t.  One of the 14.

Several superb posts on one of my favorite blogs, Elfshot, got me thinking recently about the attire of the earliest migrants to the Americas. Despite all the festering debate over exactly when these hardy travelers set foot in the New World, most evidence suggests that they landed here during the last Ice Age, somewhere between 20,000 and 13,500 years ago.  And many researchers think they took a coastal route,  nudging gradually along the Pacific Rim from Asia by boat or canoe.

And this leads to an interesting question.  How did they manage to stay warm in the water, avoiding hypothermia in the Ice-Age cold? Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 18, 2013

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It’s spring! Except in London, where for the past two months, the weather has been stuck in a kind of sodden cold amalgam between spring and winter that’s probably best described as splinter.

But back to spring. Among many other eye openers you’ll learn in Ann’s post, men’s reproductive hormones peak in June, as do contraceptive sales and sexually transmitted diseases. And you’ll never feel okay walking through a cloud of gnats again.

But where Michelle lives, the spring is false and the fruit is dead.

And Cameron wraps up Spring Break with a post about the least welcome rite of spring — the frantic scramble to wash off the poison oak.

So many assumptions rest on the behavioural manipulation of toddlers and what we can extrapolate about the human condition. This week’s guest poster, Kendall Powell, reports on what happened when she sent her kids to participate in these experiments.

And Erika advances a new theory about why Henry VII had so much trouble having children.

Oh, Spring

By: | May 17, 2013

runningOutside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again.  They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around.  They’re going flat-out on long skinny legs, hair flying and completely silent.  Sometimes they’re playing tag, but mostly they’re just running, they hardly touch earth, they’re all but airborne. What is it about spring?  Continue reading →

The Darling Buds of May

By: | May 16, 2013

2012 Bloomin' OrchardsThe poets tell us that spring is for love. Tomorrow, Ann will tell you it’s for running, jumping, and giving in to hormonal chaos. Where I live, spring is for gambling.

I live in the fruit basket of Colorado, in a valley famous for peaches and cherries, and every spring the local orchardists keep a close eye on the thermometer, wondering if their luck will hold this year. Cool weather makes the fruit sweeter, they say, but a freeze at the wrong time means no fruit at all. Whenever the temperature drops close to the danger zone, the growers are up all night, running fans to keep the cold air from settling, building bonfires between the rows of trees, even hoisting giant mesh curtains over entire orchards.

Continue reading →