When is it time to revise our story?

By: | January 26, 2012

Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote:

At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?”

Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even as evidence for it accumulates in their own backyards.

But my mind has circled back to Paolo’s question because it touches on so much more than just rainfall in the Southwest. It’s also about the scientific process, the line between data and interpretation and the role of story in science. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: The Sliver of Perception

By: | January 25, 2012

That vertical axis — the electromagnetic spectrum which is science-talk for light — actually goes from something like 3 x 102 to something like 3 x 1024 (in the same units), which is from radio waves, through microwaves, to infrared, to the visible (that tiny rainbow window there), to the ultraviolet, to xrays, to gamma rays.

The horizontal axis — sound — I know less about, except that for some reason we don’t divide sound up into wavebands the way we do light.  No matter.  Animals can hear and see both above and below the waveband ranges that are allotted to us hapless humans.

So what’s out there, way beyond the visible and audible?  Would we be surprised? would we be delighted? would we be frightened?

 

Six Million and Counting

By: | January 24, 2012

Last year, I wrote a story for Smithsonian about white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that’s killing cave-dwelling bats in the eastern United States. Researchers told me about watching sick, confused bats flutter out of caves in the middle of winter; about entering caves literally carpeted with bat carcasses; about picking bat bones, as slender as pine needles, out of their boot treads.

When I reported the story, scientists and wildlife managers estimated that a million bats had died since the epidemic began in early 2007. Baseline data were scarce, and the number was acknowledged to be little better than a guess. Now, after a long process of soliciting expert opinion and extrapolating from existing data, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced a new estimate: between 5.7 and 6.7 million bats have died from white-nose syndrome — some 85 percent of all cave-dwelling bats in infected areas.

Agency director Dan Ashe called the roughly sixfold increase “startling new information.” But for most of us, it’s not. A million is a big number, and six million is a bigger number, but our minds aren’t very good at grasping either of them. Like the gazillion-dollar federal debt, the bat death toll is just big. And that makes it very easy to ignore.

Continue reading →

Dry Spells

By: | January 23, 2012

In the spring of the year 73, thousands of Roman soldiers raided Masada, a fortress on top of a cliff in the Judean Desert. For seven years, the Jews had tried, unsuccessfully, to split from the Roman empire, and Masada was the last holdout. According to the ancient historian Josephus, when the Romans breached Masada’s walls, they found 960 dead bodies of Jewish extremists, called Sicarii, who had killed themselves to avoid the inevitable enslavement. Because of Masada’s remote location and harsh, dry climate, nothing much happened to the site for the next 2,000 years, until archaeologists started digging it up in 1963. They found attack ramps and siege towers (some of the best examples we have, apparently, of Roman war technologies), palaces, cisterns, swimming pools, 27 human skeletons and, deep under the rubble, a handful of seeds.
Continue reading →

The Problem with Patient Zero

By: | January 19, 2012

On a hot and humid day in October, a man wandered through the city of Mirebalais, Haiti. He was naked, but his neighbors didn’t pay much attention. The man had always been crazy. In fact, townspeople called him “moun fou” — lunatic or fool. He headed toward the bank of the Latem River, where he was often seen drinking water and bathing. Soon after, he came down with a nasty case of diarrhea. Less than a day after his diarrhea began, he died. A report in this month’s American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene suggests that this 28-year-old mentally ill man may have been the first Haitian to contract cholera during the recent outbreak, which began in 2010 and has killed roughly 7,000 people and sickened 500,000.

Of course, the researchers can’t be sure. By the time public health officials recognized that a cholera epidemic was underway, the man had been dead for a week. No one took any samples. The team writes, “We believe he is the first or among the first cases of cholera in Haiti during the current epidemic.” (The italics are mine).

In the press, however, this man became patient zero. The New York Times article, titled “Cholera Epidemic’s First Victim Identified as River Bather Who Forsook Clean Water,” begins like this: “The first Haitian to get cholera at the onset of the 2010 epidemic was almost undoubtedly a 28-year-old mentally disturbed man from the town of Mirebalais.” Perhaps the researchers expressed more certainty when the reporter interviewed them. Or perhaps the reporter just told the narrative we all want to hear. Everyone loves the story of patient zero, especially when it involves a mentally ill Haitian who likes to walk around naked and drink dirty river water. Continue reading →

Night terrors

By: | January 18, 2012

This is how it happens for me: I’m completely asleep, and then something terrible creeps across the room, reaches spindly, pincer-like fingers for my hand, and pinches. That pinch is what wakes me up in terror, gasping and whimpering and trying desperately to pull my arm under the covers. But I can’t. I can’t do anything because no matter how I struggle, I can’t move a muscle. The light in the room is slanted so wrong it makes my skin crawl and all I can do is feel that thing hovering there, grinning horribly just beyond my field of view. I’ve tried to scream but my voice doesn’t work either. The only sound I’m capable of is a dog-pitched whine. The thing doesn’t leave until I lose consciousness.

I didn’t know this the first couple of times it happened, but my experience is by no means unique. It goes by many names, known variously as night terrors, the incubus, witches’ pressure and Old Hag syndrome. It happens when a few important wires get crossed in your brain and you accidentally wake up in the middle of dreaming. Old Hag syndrome is usually explained away as an evolutionary hiccup, a terrifying but harmless side effect of a mechanism that evolved to protect you. But the story might be a bit more complicated than that. In one case, those night terrors may have led to a series of deaths. Luckily, if you’re like me and the Old Hag plagues you, there are ways to fight her off.  Continue reading →

Making a Renaissance

By: | January 17, 2012

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one above: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls,   making a continuous low roar. When the Arno does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Scientist in the Garden

By: | January 16, 2012

I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted. Continue reading →