Evolve or Die

By: | February 20, 2012

Several years ago, on a soggy but majestic mountain afternoon, I hiked into the Yosemite backcountry to meet UC-Berkeley mammalogist Jim Patton. Patton and his colleagues at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology were retracing the steps of renowned naturalist Joseph Grinnell, who surveyed California’s wildlife early in the last century — and obsessively documented his work in voluminous, barely legible field journals. (Fellow archive nerds, see some wonderful examples here.)

Thanks to Grinnell’s tireless note-taking, Patton and his team were able to repeat the surveys, and get a sense of how Yosemite’s wildlife has changed over the past 90 years. Of the 30 mammal and bird species studied by both Grinnell and the modern-day Berkeley team, 14 show no significant change in their range, but 16 have shifted their habitats, with lower-elevation species consistently expanding their range uphill and higher-elevation species — the pika, the alpine chipmunk — retracting the lower limit of their range. The pattern suggests that many of Yosemite’s critters are already responding to climate change, and habitat models developed by the researchers strengthened this conclusion.

But that’s not the end of Grinnell’s legacy.

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The Last Word

By: | February 18, 2012

February 13 – 17

This week, we all showed a bit of ankle to commemorate Valentine’s Day (well, Cassie showed her toes)

Guest poster Sarah Zielinski told us what we’ll find in “Pickering’s Harem”

Richard got punked by Tom Cruise while explaining the differences (and similarities) between show biz and science

Hogan faced Hayden in an LWON Battle Royale (okay, the battle was to see who could be more accommodating and polite but STILL! CAGE MATCH!)

And LWON pal Abstruse Goose demonstrated the plight of an over-specialized molecular biologist

Extra credit: A lifelike horse head mask

See you Monday!

The Woman Who Discovered the Key to Measuring the Universe

By: | February 17, 2012

By the late 1800s, astronomy had moved on from simple human observation to the collection of images of the sky on photographic plates — pieces of glass coated with light-sensitive silver salts. At the time they were made, these plates could be analyzed only through tedious, labor-intensive work. A person had to scan and measure and compare stars in the images before their position and brightness could be calculated and discoveries made.

In 1879, Edward Pickering, head of the Harvard College Observatory, began hiring women to do this work. Paid just 25 to 30 cents an hour for their labors, women were cheaper than men, but Pickering found that they were also better than the male scientists who had done the work previously. The women were more detail-oriented and worked harder. (That didn’t mean they were more respected, however. Today this group of women is often called the “Harvard Computers,” but when they were working they were called “Pickering’s Harem.”) One of the computers was Henrietta Snow Leavitt. Continue reading →

It’s Memorex. Really!

By: | February 16, 2012

The magician Todd Robbins eats light bulbs. For a while last year he practiced his brand of indigestitation in an off-Broadway show on magic and murder, Play Dead. Most of the production was in the tradition of Ricky Jay’s several one-man meditations on the history of hokum. The one exception came early in the show (since closed), when Robbins put a light bulb into his mouth, bit down, and kept biting down until the glass part of the bulb was gone. He asked a woman in one of the first rows if she believed that he’d really eaten the bulb. “No,” she said. He looked slightly crushed, then tried again: He really had eaten the bulb. Really! Now did she believe him? “No.”

I happened to know, through a mutual friend, that Robbins does eat light bulbs. There isn’t a trick to doing it, but there is a technique, and he’s mastered it. (It requires “eating the glass so that it is sufficiently masticated and pulverized to get through his system,” the show’s co-writer and director Teller, of Penn and Teller, told The Wall Street Journal). But how do you convince an audience watching a show full of illusions that the stranger-than-fiction thing they’ve just seen is real?

I’ve been thinking about that light bulb for the past few weeks, ever since I saw a trailer for Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (who says the masses aren’t ready for esoteric, but correct, punctuation?). I watched Tom Cruise cling, katydid-style, to the side of a skyscraper, then rappel down, or up, or sideways, or something. Whatever it was he was doing, I knew he wasn’t doing it. Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) was doing it. Even if Tom Cruise himself sat down next to me in the movie theater and insisted that it was really him rappelling down the side of the skyscraper—really!—I wouldn’t have believed him.*

Yet I believe that humans are descended from primordial sludge, that “empty” space is filled with a quantum froth of virtual particles popping into and out of existence (or “existence”), that the universe is expanding, and that 96 percent of the mass-energy density of the universe is in a form that we as a species have never seen.

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Horgan, Hayden, and the Last Word on Warfare

By: | February 15, 2012

In 2008, I published a book about the evolutionary origins and cultural development of warfare throughout human history. John Horgan, about as distinguished a science writer as one is likely to find, graciously invited me to share my thoughts on war’s deep past and possible futures on a web video show he hosted. It was an extremely pleasant experience, but that, apparently, was just because John is polite. It turns out he disagrees with me utterly about a key conclusion of Sex and War, namely that … oh, but why give it away? We decded to continue the conversation here at LWON, and to help keep the discussion of war from coming to virtual blows, we asked the very peaceable Ann Finkbeiner to referee. A very lightly edited version of the resulting virtual chat unspools below:

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LWOVE

By: | February 14, 2012

Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct of reality, what does that say about how we experience love?

Today, a combination of laziness, other commitments, and the easy excuse afforded by Valentine’s day caused us to ruminate, en masse, on a single facet of how we love. What do we love and why do we love it? What does that tell us about our relationship with that difficult little four letter word?

We’re flashing a little bit of ankle today, letting you into a private little corner of our souls. If you’re feeling generous, we invite you to show us some LWOVE in the comments. What do you love and why ? And what do you think that says about the nature of love?

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Abstruse Goose: 3 a.m.

By: | February 13, 2012

To be honest, I’m not sure whether AG meant this to be about the loneliness of an over-specialized molecular biologist whose best friends are alcohol and a ficus plant; or about the reasons for that loneliness.  If the latter, then he’d need look no further than the recent hoo-ha about research into terrorist viruses, or rather, viruses that terrorists might engineer into terrorist viruses.  Kind of funny, if it weren’t so scary.

http://abstrusegoose.com/426

Trivial Pursuit

By: | February 10, 2012

In communicating, we make decisions — judgment calls about the listener’s own knowledge. It’s something we develop in childhood, the “theory of mind” that allows for imagining the world from another’s point of view and subsequently for meeting people where they’re at. Nevertheless, in covering specialist topics, it can be tough to know what the average reader is going to understand. It’s usually a safe bet to shoot slightly lower and give many of your readers a review of things they already knew before getting into subjects that rest on that basic knowledge.

Ideally there would be some kind of Encyclopedia of General Knowledge full of all the things the average adult knows. Of course this varies hugely with demographics, and the revelation of this variation has even become a form of entertainment – man-on-the-street surveys of Americans on what they know about Canada, for example.

This week, I came across the results of a public opinion survey conducted in each of the Arctic nations, but not in their Arctic populations, in particular (except in Canada, where the research originated). One graph jarred me into questioning my approach to Arctic reporting. Maybe I should be dealing with the most fundamental issues of all – why the Antarctic and the Arctic are different. Why large expanses of mostly ice are not all interchangeable. Why polar bears and penguins do not, in fact, cohabit.

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