The Springtime of Robins

By: | April 13, 2012

The granddaughters came to visit for the weekend.  They’re hitting puberty hard.  One of them suddenly has a throaty voice, long magenta hair that she wants to cut all off, just leave the bangs, and is currently grounded for injudicial actions.  The other one’s glasses slide down her nose; she’s wearing white cut-off leggings with a turquoise blue tutu.  They both sit curled on the couch reading, completely inert; and then for no reason, they rocket up and charge around.  I walked with one of them to the mailbox up the hill; by the time we got there, I was out of breath; she sprinted the last twenty feet because she couldn’t help herself.   They’re cheerful, surly, truly helpful, want to be left alone, need to tell you everything they know.  I can’t tell if they’re happy or not, because they’re so intense.

Meanwhile, outside is a Baltimore spring, all pink poufy cherry trees and golden green grass.  The birds are bug-nuts and among the worst are robins.  They’re rocketing around too and if you don’t duck, they’ll smack into you.  They land with more energy than a landing needs; they bop around in the grass, stick out their chests, and act important.  They sing like they want to be heard 40 acres away.  I mentioned all this to a neuroscientist.  “Oh yes,” he said.  “They’re going through puberty.  They do it once a year.”  Isn’t puberty once a lifetime enough? Continue reading →

What’s In a Number

By: | April 12, 2012

“Since there is an infinite number of alternative universes, there must be one in which there isn’t an infinite number of alternative universes. Perhaps this is it.”

No, that speculation didn’t come from the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag. It’s from a reader of New Scientist, courtesy of LWON’s own Sally, who is an editor at the magazine. She forwarded it to me because, she said, “it kind of made my head asplode.” After receiving reassurances from her that her head hadn’t actually spontaneously detonated—this is, after all, someone who is capable of falling into the Thames without any help—I sat and thought and tried to find the flaw in the logic.

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Redux: A Catholic Saint and an Aztec God

By: | April 11, 2012
Santa Muerte

A few days ago, while I was out hiking in southern Arizona’s early morning heat with Jason De Leon and his students, I heard mention for the first time of Mexico’s Santa Muerte, or Saint Death.  Our destination for the day was a small archaeological site hidden away in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, but De Leon, an archaeologist and ethnographer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wanted to stop in first at a small outdoor shrine.

Hollowed out from the soft limestone, the shrine glittered with silvery scapulars, bright rosary beads, and large glass candles. A rough wooden cross leaned against the rock, and beneath it,  pictures of saints lined the lower ledge–gifts from those craving divine assistance in the desert. And as I studied the faces of these unfamiliar saints,  De Leon brought up the subject of Santa Muerte.  She was, he explained, “the patron saint of all things seedy,” a saint loved by the marginal and the criminal in Mexico. Continue reading →

Spoetry

By: | April 10, 2012

It’s commenter appreciation day here at Last Word on Nothing. If you’ve ever wondered why there’s a delay when you leave a note in the comments section, it’s because live human beings monitor them. We reject spam and nastygrams.

But those poor spambots try so hard that today I think it’s time to recognize their efforts. The following spoems are crafted entirely of spam left in the comments section of LWON (and one disconcerting spam I found in my own email inbox). If you doubt the literary nature of spam, consider this announcement from the Spam Poetry Institute:

“Using state-of-the-art spam poetry analysis tools, our staff has determined that some of the spam-embedded poetry that we’ve received actually corresponds to parts of Jules Vernes’ classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. These spammers, working independently, have begun to weave the fabric of one of the greatest works of literature. We will continue to monitor this remarkable phenomenon and will provide updates as we identify subsequent passages from that great book.”

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Hear No Evil

By: | April 9, 2012

When I was in junior high, my family moved to a house in the country. The dining room table sat beneath a vent designed to allow heat to rise from the main floor into my mom’s bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately the vent also served as a conduit for noise. The soft clink of metal spoons against glass bowls as my stepbrother and I ate cereal in the morning drove my mom nuts. So she instituted a new rule in the house. Thou shalt not eat your morning cereal out of glass bowls. Use the plastic ones.

This didn’t seem all that peculiar to me. My mom has always had weird issues with noise. Dinnertime was the worst. Forks scraped plates, mouths slurped, teeth crunched, lips smacked even when they didn’t mean to—something was always bothering my mother. I used to think she was just easily bugged.

But last week my mom forwarded me a New York Times article about a disorder called misophonia. The article begins like this: “For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage.” She added a short note: “I think I have some form of this.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 7, 2012

April 2 – 6

The springtime snails are upon Cameron and she feels guilty about what she does to them.

Michelle asks for poems about women scientists, in honor of Adrienne Rich.

The Great Firewall of China, Heather discovers, has risen up and struck LWON down.

Tom takes the prettiest pictures of the ickiest snails; now I don’t care what Cameron does.

Why it’s harder than ever for us to get our stories straight, Erika explains, and why it matters so much.

 

What the ‘limits of DNA’ story reveals about the challenges of science journalism in the ‘big data’ age

By: | April 6, 2012

As a science journalist, I sympathize with book reviewers who wrestle with the question of whether to write negative reviews. It seems a waste of time to write about a dog of a book when there are so many other worthy ones; but readers deserve to know if Oprah is touting a real stinker.

On 2 April, Science Translational Medicine published a study on DNA’s shortcomings in predicting disease. My editors and I had decided not to cover the study last week after we saw it in the journal’s embargoed press packet, because my sources offered heavy critiques of its methods. But it was a tough choice: we knew the paper was bound to get a lot of other coverage, as it conveyed a provocative message, would be published in a prominent journal, and would be highlighted at a press conference at the well-attended annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Its lead authors, Bert Vogelstein and Victor Velculescu of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, Maryland, are also leaders in the cancer genetics field.

I ended up writing about the paper anyway after it made a huge media splash that prompted fury among geneticists. In a thoughtful post at the Knight Science Journalism tracker, Paul Raeburn asked yesterday why other reporters didn’t notice the problems with the study that I wrote about. Having been burned by my own share of splashy papers that go bust, I think the “limits of DNA “ story underscores a few broader issues for our work as science journalists:

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Snail Season: The San Fran Remix

By: | April 5, 2012

When Cameron delivered the last word on brown garden snails on Monday — great, biblical swarms of the things — I knew I’d have to respond, and visually too, since she said it all so well. I do battle with the demon mollusks a few hundred miles north of Cameron’s besieged garden, as the images above attest. I don’t know whether we’ve got quite the volume of the creatures she gets, but there have been nights when I’ve captured a kilogram’s-worth or more. Like Cameron, I can’t quite bring myself to eat them, though I know they are fed on the finest organic greens and seedlings. But I’m not so gentle as she when it comes to relocation — mine go straight into the home compost pile, so I’m getting their nutrients one way, if not the other.

When I first encountered the snails a few years ago, I was delighted and mesmerized. But as their numbers increased with the spring rains, the shoots and leaves in my garden disappeared and the slime trails on the patio multiplied into superhighways, my joy turned to concern, and concern first to horror and then, finally, to grim deadly determination. I am heartless now in my persecution of the snails — I have become hardened, numb to the brutality I mete out most every night. I have lost a part of my soul, in other words, but I have gained a whole world of salad. We all must live with the bargains we make. Continue reading →