The Last Word

By: | July 21, 2012

July 16 – 21

So what do we do about invasive species? Exterminate ’em, right? and feel holy about it. And when the invasives are goats on the Galapagos, we still exterminate ’em, right?  Only it doesn’t feel so holy, says Virginia.

Ann, in her obsessive search for the metaphors of science, finds another one:  sub-grid physics, or making it up as you go but not fooling yourself about it.

Guest Erin Gettler loves the old naturalists who observed so closely for so many years so she tries it herself, gets bored, thinks she’s doing something wrong, tries again.

The Colorado River water crisis, says Michelle, might be solved “if water negotiators in the western United States can bring themselves to act like giant tubeworms — even a little bit.”

Richard reads through his inbox the morning after the announcement of the Higgs boson, is on the whole happy, but don’t get him started on “God particle.  And while you’re at it, look at the picture of those people listening to the announcement — have you ever seen a bunch of backs look more intense?

Bonus:   the Galapagos/Judas goat post has a lively comments fight.

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photo by Erin Gettler

Higgs This, Boson That

By: | July 20, 2012

I slept through the Higgs boson announcement on July 4. Whatever the news that the Large Hadron Collider physicists would be trumpeting in the middle of the New York night, it wasn’t going to change by 9 a.m. No, what I would be monitoring throughout the day were the press releases and media coverage. Would they be sensitive to the nuances of science?

As I’ve argued before, confusion in the media about the meanings of “prove” and “theory,” especially when that confusion is fostered by scientific institutions engaging in hyperbole, gives science deniers the chance to claim that one “theory” is as good as the next because, hey, evolution and the Big Bang haven’t been “proved” either. The Higgs announcement promised to be the kind that would penetrate the public consciousness. For many people, it would define what science does and how it does it.

The week hadn’t started well. “Proof of ‘God particle’ found,” read an APNewsBreak headline that Monday, two days before the official announcement.

Sigh. Whatever it is that the ATLAS and CMS researchers found, it wasn’t “proof.” Extraordinarily strong evidence, evidence so strong that physicists everywhere will proceed as if the Higgs exists, but not proof. But because the source was AP, the story as well as the sensibility behind the headline was soon appearing everywhere.

So much for the news coverage, at least in advance of the event. What about the official announcements?

I woke up Wednesday morning to an inbox filled with press releases.  Continue reading →

Learning from the Tubeworm

By: | July 19, 2012

This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River.

I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult life I’ve heard about (and reported on) the bureaucratic battles over the river’s flow. Over the past century, the seven arid states that share the river — “share” being a generous term here — have tried to protect their portions with multiple lawsuits, clever insults, and, in one notorious case, the Arizona National Guard.

So when I recently moderated a panel at the Aspen Environment Forum about the future of the Colorado River, I expected to hear about more of the same. Surely, I thought, drought and population growth are only ratcheting up the drama.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Recycling the Seasons

By: | July 18, 2012

About a year ago, I decided that keeping track of bloom dates, bird arrivals and other natural events would help me grow as an amateur naturalist. “According to my sources and personal records,” wrote a local naturalist celebrity, “this is the best spring for mountain laurel blooms here in the past fifteen years.” I grinned when I read this last May. I had found and identified a stand of blooming mountain laurel for the first time the previous evening. After reading the article, I jotted my laurel observation in a notebook, hoping that recording what I saw, what happened and when, would help me understand how nature marks the passing of a year. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Sub-Grid Physics

By: | July 17, 2012

Science, so useful to our lives in so many ways, also usefully supplies metaphors from which we may find comfort or edification.

An astronomer told me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, was surrounded by a tenuous halo of hot gas.  “How can gas stay hot, out there in space?”  I asked.  “It doesn’t,” he said.  “Either it cools and falls [because cold falls, you knew that, didn’t you] slowly into the galaxy.  Or maybe it’s already cooled and drops like a brick.”

He didn’t know which:  the Milky Way simulated on a computer is too large to show whether things as small as gas clouds were drifting or plummeting.  So the small stuff is estimated and put in by hand.  “It’s sub-grid physics,” he said, “wave your magic wand at a square in the grid.”  Sub-grid physics:  the big stuff you know; but the small stuff,  you just make shit up.   Continue reading →

Galápagos Monday: When Conservation Means Killing

By: | July 16, 2012

Judas knew what he was doing when he double-crossed his friend Jesus. “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” he asked the conspiring priests in the famous Bible story.

The story of the Judas Goat is more tragic. She had no idea that she was leading her friends to their deaths.

Her captors sterilized her first, then coated her with hormones so she reeked of fertility. Then they collared her with a radio-tracking device and cut her loose. Nearby male goats smelled her and sought her out. As soon as they found her, people swooped in and shot them. The hunters saved Judas, though, so they could repeat the set-up again and again.

It was all part of a six-year, $6 million project in which conservationists killed nearly 80,000 feral goats on Santiago Island in the Galápagos. Similar goat genocides had happened on 128 other islands, including nearby Pinta, but never on any as large as Santiago, which spans 144,470 acres. The goats, introduced by sailers hundreds of years earlier, were decimating all flavors of vegetation there, putting ground birds, giant tortoises and other endemic species in danger. So officials — conservationists from the Galápagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation — decided the goats had to go.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 14, 2012
The Beatles were bragging

July 9 – 13

On this week’s episode of Galapagos Monday, Ginny explained how conservation biologists tried to make a gigolo out of a 60-year-old virgin.

Michelle explained Tianamen Sid.

Abstruse Goose raged against the assault of jargon.

Christie told us about the two kinds of thinking it takes to do science

And TGIPF continued with guest poster Jennie Dushek, who explained why ladies are made of sugar and spice and penis bones.

Extra credit: how did T-Rex get down? Find out at the Daily Mail, the UK’s finest news source. Hat tip: Clare.

TGIPF: What the Baculum Said

By: | July 13, 2012

This is the third installment of the occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The first was on banana slug sex; the second on Iceland’s Phallological Museum.
Today we are going to talk about penis bones. The penis bone, or baculum, is the supportive bone in the penises of most mammals. Relax, you didn’t miss anything: humans are among a minority of mammals that don’t have one. Mice, rats and all the other rodents have tiny bacula in their tiny penises. So do bats, shrews and moles; all the carnivores (bears, lions, weasels, dogs, cats); their aquatic relatives the seals, sea lions, and walruses; and nearly all primates, not excepting our close relatives the chimpanzees and gorillas.

The baculum sits in the tip, or glans, of the penis and ranges in size from a few millimeters in gorillas and mice to a quite serviceable 3 inches in larger dogs. And then there’s the somewhat disturbing two-foot long baculum of the walrus. The Internet is rife with mentions of this natural wonder, but nobody says much except that it’s really, really big.

Continue reading →