The Mix-Up that Ended the World

By: | August 15, 2012

The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán is not the biggest monument you can imagine. In fact, it’s dwarfed by the hills around it that it is meant to reflect. It’s cut into four levels, each of which is about the same as a couple flights of stair in a New York apartment building.

But at 7,500 feet, any climb can be rough. The view at the top is totally worth it – something  unlike any other monument on Earth. No, not the graceful sloping of the topography or the precision lines of a long-dead culture. No, what catches is eye is the endless stream of crystal-clutching hippies clustered around the center point.

Every day, the ancient city just north of Mexico City sees hundreds or thousands of tourists belonging to two camps. One (my camp) is fascinated by an enigmatic dead empire and also wants a shot of the pyramids so astounding all their friends will comment on Facebook. The other hopes to channel the power of the ancients using $5 crystals bought at the bottom of the pyramid

“Could you feel it? I could totally feel it,” said one happy customer the day I was there. Continue reading →

Another Cheater Confesses

By: | August 14, 2012

 

By now, most people who care about these things have read Jonathan Vaughters’s New York Times op-ed, “How to Get Doping Out of Sport,” in which the former Tour de France rider confesses to doping during his professional cycling career.

As an argument for why the war against doping is worth fighting, it’s an exceptional piece. I hope that it will be widely read, especially by those who say that “everyone’s doing it” and therefore the easy solution is to just legalize drugs. The essay is also a powerful counter-argument to those who acknowledge cycling’s dirty past, but insist that it’s time to “just let it go.”

But as a confession, Vaughters’s essay is a self-serving pile of PR—a textbook example of how public figures use the media to cultivate their images and influence the stories that get told. Continue reading →

Guest Post: That Eternal Question

By: | August 13, 2012

One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe for a few monedas. It was dirty pink, a once beautiful Disney Cinderella slipper studded with sparkles and flashing lights. Just ten minutes earlier I had been talking with my friends about a discovery we had made, one that had been recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics last year. Now looking back at me was a little girl who had been crushed by poverty.

I had traveled to Santiago from my home in Texas for a weeklong celebration of Chilean astronomy’s essential role in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. My dinner companions that evening were Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, with whom I had founded one of the teams that, in 1998, discovered the 75 percent of the universe that we now call dark energy, and Chris Smith, a key collaborator on the project. Over the course of the week Brian would give eleven talks outlining the central and pioneering role of three Chilean astronomers—José Maza, Mario Hamuy, and Alejandro Clocchiatti. I was giving a couple of talks myself. The mood over dinner was celebratory as to what we’d accomplished and earnest about the work that still needed to be done.

And then the little girl brought me back to Earth—and to a question that has plagued me my whole professional life: Of what use is astronomy when there is so much suffering in the world? Why spend one centavo on cosmology when little girls are crouching in subway stairwells, begging?

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 11, 2012

August 6 – 10

This week, Cameron channels Derek Zoolander in an epic complaint about turning left.

And I know we’re all about Curiosity now, but Tom’s interview with Mars rover pilot Scott Maxwell made me get a little weepy about poor old Spirit once again.

Heather wonders if archaeologists should dispense with field season.

Ann tells us to read fiction about Tesla.

And finally, real talk, if you’re hung over today, skip this week’s TGIPF. It’s about slug sex — again — and this variety involves penis flowers and “scented slime”. Spoiler alert:  “Then the slugs untwist and go their separate ways, in some cases climbing up the mucus string, ingesting it as they go.”

See you next week.

 

TGIPF: Slug Sex Redux

By: | August 10, 2012

The Slug

Slugs have sex. You probably already knew that. And if you read my last post on banana slugs’ strange sexual appetites, you had the rare opportunity to see a slug penis. So you already know what the organ looks like.

Limax maximus, the leopard slug. (And my hand for scale).

Except you don’t! That was a trick statement. You know what a banana slug’s penis looks like. What about the penis of Limax maxiumus, the leopard slug? Can you picture it?

I’m going to bet 99% of you are picturing something that looks nothing like the real thing. Because the real thing looks nothing like a penis. It looks like a canoe paddle. It looks like a tiny, translucent flower. It looks like a spaceship. In other words, it looks decidedly un-phallic. Continue reading →

Skeletons in the Closet

By: | August 9, 2012

I shouldn’t say this. In fact, as someone who covers the field of archaeology for a living, I probably shouldn’t even be thinking this. But I find myself wondering increasingly whether it’s time for some dirt archaeologists to relinquish one of their great pleasures, namely the beloved rite of summer:  field season.

I say this as someone who loves the field, albeit in the hit-and-run way that journalists favor. Each summer I look forward to stuffing faded jeans, t-shirts and a couple of pounds of steno pads into an old canvas duffle bag—the bag my husband bought at an army surplus store in Edmonton for $3 in the 1970s—and catching a plane somewhere, nervous, expectant, thrilled to be heading off. Continue reading →

SCUBA Diving through the Endless Martian Desert

By: | August 8, 2012

There are a lot of ways to follow the progress of the Curiosity rover as it probes the geological history of Mars. But you could do worse than following one of her drivers, Scott Maxwell, on twitter (@marsroverdriver). Sure, his tweeted celebration of Curiosity’s successful touchdown late Sunday night — “Hey, I still have a job Monday. : D” is a long way from “One small step for a man…” But it’s eloquence of another kind — immediate, funny, and as playfully enthusiastic as a Labrador puppy with a new ball.

During the cold war, we had fighter pilot astronauts. In today’s networked, virtualized world, maybe it’s fitting that our front-line space explorers are Earth-bound joystick jockeys instead. Whatever might be missing in terms of square-jawed swagger is more than compensated for by a knack for humor and emotional presence not often associated with the rocket men of old.

I emailed and tweeted with Maxwell for a story earlier this year, not about the adventures to come with the new probe, but about life at the controls of the previous two. As the Curiosity teams go about testing their systems and preparing to roll out across the Martian surface, it seems like a good time to cast an eye back to some of the successes and heartbreaks of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, with the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Continue reading →

Left Turn

By: | August 7, 2012

I know I’m supposed to be thinking about science, but I can’t stop thinking about bikes. Last month, I was in Copenhagen, and being on a bike there seemed like more fun than it was anywhere else.

Part of it was the bike—the family we exchanged houses with had a cargo trike, complete with a skull design on the cover. Part of it was how protected riding felt—most streets had a bike lane, about as wide as a sidewalk and slightly raised or separated in some other way from the cars.

But if I had to pick just one thing that changed my biking worldview, it was the left turn. Continue reading →