Guest Post: The Unknown Grizzly

By: | March 7, 2013

Grizzly skull bullet-sideIn the mail yesterday I received a grizzly bear skull from an acquaintance and taxidermist in Soldotna, Alaska. Expertly cleaned down to chalk-white bone and glistening, thumb-sized canines, it was the size and general shape of a football, and as smooth as sanded wood. My friend had apologized ahead of time for there being a bullet hole.

Lifting the skull from its packaging, I expected to see a neat-dime-sized hole, a clean kill straight to the brain. Instead, there was a ragged gap as big as a fist through the left eye, pieces of jaw and skull exploded around it. Little flecks of bone salted out as I turned it for a closer look.

The angle of the shot looked like it could have been head-on, the bullet fired from only slightly to the side. But this wasn’t the shot that dropped the bear. This bullet had not actually penetrated the brain case. It had been stopped by exploded muscle and bone.

I wondered, had this been a charge, all slobber and paws? Or a curious 350-pound grizzly turning to study an intruder with a gun, then taking it right in the eye. I knew nothing about this bear. The only identification was a plastic tag looped through its one remaining zygomatic arch, which read, AK BGR 0202873.

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Floating Domestic Object, Unidentified No Longer (part two of two)

By: | March 6, 2013

flickr user Leni McPoopies_ 6254354522_f75fbb332c_oTwo weeks ago, Erika posted about a new addition to our household — no, not our adorable children, but rather some viscous blobs lurking in menacing fashion at the bottom of a long-ignored bottle of apple juice.

Said juice jug was purchased in early April, 2012. It was offered to guests, who declined. The bottle sat unopened in a dark, room-temperature pantry until mid-December, when we again offered it to guests. They too declined, but the thing was in the refrigerator by that time and taking up valuable space. In desperation I started trying to consume it myself. But we’re not a big juice house, and it was nearly two months more before Erika discovered the blobs.

What were they? The comments on Erika’s original post are well worth a gander — they’re a classic instance of the general principle that LWON’s readers are more insightful, resourceful and eloquent than LWON’s writers. The comments include hard information, informed speculation, personal anecdotes, suggestions for further investigation, and even a solid citation. Continue reading →

Redux: Survivor Woman

By: | March 5, 2013

Heather posted this on July 16, 2010, a time when we had probably 13 readers so apologies to all 13. She’s referring to a post Ann wrote about being dead wrong about some science. She also testifies to the physically horrifying life of an archeology writer.

Where I’d love to stay while doing fieldwork

Yesterday, my colleague Ann Finkbeiner fessed up to one of the great travails of being a science writer. So today in the spirit of full disclosure I thought I’d fess up to another pitfall, one that I should have anticipated before I became an archaeological writer, but didn’t. So here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: tagging along with scientists in the field often requires fortitude, real fortitude–not to mention pretty good footwork.

Before I give you an example, let me put all my cards on the table. I’m not a particularly athletic person. I rarely go hiking for recreation and I loathe camping. (I like my beds comfortable with at least two good pillows, please.) I don’t like spiders, scorpions, centipedes, leeches, cactus spines, stinging nettles, or poison ivy,  all of which I have encountered in the field. And I cower when it comes to bears and poisonous snakes. I don’t relish squatting to pee in the woods: I hate doing it in the desert where there is no cover. And I completely lack essential survival skills. I have no sense of direction whatsoever, and I never learned how to read a compass.

In other words, I am an archaeologist’s worst nightmare. But I never let on about any of this, maintaining what I imagine to be a kind of “hail fellow, well met” manner. After all,  I love seeing archaeology on the ground and wouldn’t trade my job for anything. And most days my bluffing works. But there are moments when I can’t quite rise to the occasion, and the carefully constructed mask comes a little unglued. Continue reading →

Cry the Beloved Porcupine

By: | March 4, 2013

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In 2001, fresh out of college and yearning for adventure, I moved to South Africa. My recollection is that I had seen Cry the Beloved Country and The Power of One several times and decided that I had to go to Africa to intern at the University of Cape Town and write bad poetry. I’ll admit, the entomology professor I called to inform that I would be volunteering in his lab was a bit confused but when I told him that I wouldn’t cost him a cent (or a rand, in this case), he said fine.

It was during this odd sort of internship that I signed up for my great porcupine adventure. It seems that occasionally documentary films draw from grad schools for cheap labor tracking and tagging animals that they will be following for a show (if you truly love nature documentaries and believe they are all spontaneous, stop reading now before I shatter your illusions). Many documentaries send able and moronic young people into the bush months beforehand to implant tracking devices into animals to make them easy to follow and habituate.

I’ll get to “habituate” in a second, but first we had to catch the little bastards. I was hired by a company doing a BBC documentary on aardvarks and the animals that live in their burrows (thrilling, right?). Our focus would be the porcupine. Continue reading →

The last word

By: | March 2, 2013

25 February to 1 March

This week, Ann blew all our minds with the story of the Farm Hall tapes, the greatest-ever lesson in counterfactual thinking.  Also, just off the cuff, who else thinks a dubstep group called “Hitler’s Uranium Club” lurks in our future?

Cameron says no one does austerity quite like the people who lived through the Depression.

Why is it so funny when people fall down? Christie investigates.

Whether it’s science journalism or photojournalism, getting the good stuff means there are no shortcuts. No matter how much the internet makes it seem like there are. Erik makes the convincing case that the media outles that really understand this will have the last laugh.

And this week, Michelle made what I suspect will be a lasting contribution to the field of science writing, demonstrating that the plight of the science writer is nowhere more apparent than in Dr. Watson’s painful dealings with prototypical source Sherlock Holmes. According to Michelle, Watson deserved the equivalent of the Purple Heart for science journalism.

Farm Hall: the Fall into Failure

By: | March 1, 2013

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You probably know this.  In August, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to the American government.  German scientists had announced that the energy holding an atom together could be released – in fact, 2.2 pounds-worth of uranium atoms would equal 10,000 tons of TNT.  Einstein said this implied a new kind of bomb that Hitler’s government was surely building.  In December, 1941, the American physicists figured out how to build one themselves and coalesced under the auspices of the Manhattan Project.  The feeling on the Manhattan Project, wrote one physicist’s wife, was, “You’ve got to get it done; others are working on it; Germans are working on it; hurry! hurry! hurry!” In August, 1945, American atomic bombs flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a couple hundred thousand people died.  One Manhattan Project scientist said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

You might not know this.  In April, 1945, the Alsos mission run by American scientist/spies scooped up the German atomic scientists, imprisoned them for six months in an English country house called Farm Hall, bugged their rooms and taped their conversations.  Turns out the German scientists had never gotten anywhere near a bomb.  In 1992, the transcripts were made public.

Dear God, somebody get hold of those transcripts and write a play! Continue reading →

Teach Your _____ Well

By: | February 28, 2013

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When I was a teenager, my dad installed a timer on my bedroom light. After 45 minutes, the light would flash a few times. Then, darkness. My dad was tired of me falling asleep with my light on. It was such a waste of energy. This, he said, was the perfect solution.

I started thinking about this light and my dad’s many quirks after reading a recent study about how knowledge about conservation passes among generations. In the current issue of Environmental Research Letters, researchers looked at how environmental education aimed at kids influences parents, too.

In what researchers report as the first controlled trial of environmental education’s reach, parents and kids in the Seychelles completed questionnaires about local wetlands and about their family’s water use. If kids had participated in a wetlands conservation program through a Seychelles wildlife club, the adults in their homes knew more about wetlands and also said they used water more efficiently—taking showers instead of baths, for example. And parents, the researchers say, weren’t aware of having learned about any of this from their children.

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The Adventures of Dr. Watson, Science Writer

By: | February 27, 2013

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Sherlock Holmes is having another cultural moment, and as usual, I’m all in. I was raised on the original stories — thanks to a family friend who was a Baker Street Irregular — and this winter, I’ve treated myself to another trip through the canon.

This time, though, my sympathies aren’t so much with Sherlock as with the stories’ chronically underrated narrator, Dr. John H. Watson. For my dear Watson is, in many ways, a science writer like me — and he’s dealing with (not to mention living with) the world’s most exasperating source. For his equanimity in the face of withering insult, and his calm insistence on telling the human story behind the scientific solution, Dr. Watson deserves our profession’s equivalent of the Purple Heart.

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