2011 Houdini Awards

By: | December 22, 2011

I always thought of Harry Houdini as a master trickster, fooling his audience into believing something had happened when, in fact, it had not happened. That’s not true. Houdini’s tricks — like escaping from a locked packing crate after it had been thrown into New York’s East River — were real. His “magic” was that nobody could figure out how he pulled them off.

In the November 1925 issue of Popular Science, Houdini wrote an essay describing his obsession with the other kind of mystifiers: those who claim to have supernatural powers. Every day of his 35-year career, Houdini wrote, he had been thinking about psychics who supposedly communicate with the dead. He visited dozens of them and, as described at length in the essay, uncovered all of their lazy tricks. To give just one fun example, Houdini showed how mediums, during pitch-black seances, used trumpets controlled by their feet and mouths to produce voices that their audience believed to be ghosts.

Houdini did not consider himself a skeptic, but rather a public servant.
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The Science of Mysteries: Watch Where You Fall In

By: | December 21, 2011

One day on Twitter, certain science bloggers (see below) who began life on the dark side, in the humanities, happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers.  We thought we might write a series of posts, all on the same day, about the science in mystery books.

Mine is by Josephine Tey, “To Love and Be Wise,” and in it, an eerily-handsome young man, a photographer, disappears while camping near a river with an author who is presumed to have pushed him in.  The problem is, the river won’t give him back. Continue reading →

Absinthe and the Corpse Reviver

By: | December 20, 2011

In 1930, the legendary bartender Harry Craddock prescribed a popular cure for revellers who stumbled into London’s Savoy Hotel for breakfast and complained of throbbing hangovers. Craddock had fled Prohibition in the States in 1920 and found work at the American Bar in the Savoy, and he knew a thing or two about the ailments of his customers. To ease their pain, he invented a classic cocktail with an unforgettable name—Corpse Reviver #2. Then he published the recipe in a book that bartenders still cherish today: The Savoy Cocktail Book.

This cocktail is a particular favorite of mine—with its pallid greenish hue, its ingenuous blending of slightly tart ingredients, and a name guaranteed to warm the heart of any archaeology writer. But how wise is it to down a drink whose ingredient list includes absinthe, a herbal concoction first blended by a French physician in 1789 as a tonic and later condemned and outlawed by legislators in Europe and the United States as a poisonous social evil? Absinthe, after all, contains oil of wormwood, Artemesia absinthium. Its active ingredient, thujone, is a known natural insecticide. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Oldest Rocks Could Weigh A Man Down

By: | December 19, 2011

“It’s not your usual rock that you would find,” says Jonathan O’Neil, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. It’s a bit of an understatement because O’Neil is referring to what he believes is the world’s oldest rock, a funny-looking basalt embedded in the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in northern Quebec. The rock itself is brown and speckled with pink garnet dots. But there O’Neil runs into a problem.

Dating methods for really old rocks (say the 3.8 billion year old variety) use relative geochronology, which involves dating Rock A using Rock B. Usually, the dating rock, the timekeeper rock, is zircon. “If you’re studying zircon you’re studying a second hand rock, you’re studying something from the melting of an older rock,” O’Neil explains. But what if, like O’Neil’s, your rocks don’t all contain zircon.  Then what do you do? Continue reading →

2011 Science Quiz: The Answers!

By: | December 16, 2011

There’s only one thing more exciting than science, and that’s a science quiz! We’ll announce the winners in this year’s LWON Science Quiz in just a moment — remember, it was one prize for the best additional question submitted, and one for a random drawing from all the 100% correct answers. But first, a big thank you to all the many participants! The results were very interesting: almost all entrants scored 7, 8 or 9 correct answers, but only one entrant got all 10 answers correct.¹ We suspect this person is either  a genius, or somehow managed to hack into the LWON Science Questions Database. Either instance is worthy of a prize, and all entrants are to be celebrated. And with no further ado, here are the correct answers: Continue reading →

And the Winners Is

By: | December 15, 2011

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was, in a way, a foregone conclusion. The 1998 discovery by two teams of scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—under the influence of something that scientists have shruggingly come to call dark energy, which later studies have revealed to comprise 72.8 percent of the universe—was one that everybody assumed would win the Prize. It was only a matter of when.

Only somewhat less foregone was who would receive the Prize for the discovery. The leaders of the two discovery teams—Saul Perlmutter, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Brian Schmidt, of the Australian National University Mount Stromlo Observatory—were shoo-ins. As the lead author on Schmidt’s team’s discovery paper, Adam Riess, a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, at the time of the discovery (now an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University), stood perhaps—perhaps—slightly less of a chance, but the difference was in the nature of a four- versus a five-sigma result.

Even the allocation of the award was more or less foregone. Perlmutter would get half of the 10 million Swedish kroner ($1.44 million) prize, and either Schmidt would get the other half or he would split it with Riess. The latter scenario—50/25/25—is indeed what the Solomons of Stockholm decreed, and this past Saturday the three new laureates received their medals from His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

Yet in the two months since the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Prize, on October 4, many members of the discovery teams have found themselves experiencing what one astronomer described to me, via e-mail, as “a bag of mixed emotions.”

The problem isn’t that the wrong persons won. The problem is that the right persons didn’t.

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Guest Post: the Nature of Octopuses

By: | December 14, 2011

There is an old story about a scorpion and a turtle. Variants abound, but the basic tale revolves around an unusually talkative scorpion that asks a turtle for a lift across a river. The turtle refuses at first, fearing the scorpion’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. The scorpion insists, the turtle relents, and the two get halfway across before the scorpion predictably stings the turtle. As they sink to their mutual deaths, the turtle asks, “Why did you do it?” The scorpion simply replies: “It’s my nature.”

This story is similar, except an octopus plays the role of the scorpion, and no one talks. Continue reading →

Autopsy of an Aspen

By: | December 13, 2011

In the rural Rocky Mountains where I live, we disagree about a lot of things — politics, religion, water, Tim Tebow — but we all agree on aspen. We love them, especially when they turn blaze-yellow in the fall, and we’d like them to stick around. So in 2004, when aspen throughout the Rockies started dying wholesale, the public reaction was fierce. What the heck was happening to our trees?

Since 2008, the dieoff has slowed, but so-called sudden aspen decline, or SAD, has hit nearly one-fifth of the aspen stands in the Rockies. It turns out that the aspen decline was driven by drought — namely a prolonged, region-wide dry spell that peaked in the early 2000s, and is thought to be a harbinger of the more frequent and severe droughts expected as the climate changes. In a grim sign of the times, though, it’s no longer enough to know why the trees are dying. In order to predict future die-offs, it’s important to know how.

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