Guest Post: the Monsters of Navajoland

By: | November 21, 2011

A few weeks ago, driving across Navajoland in northeast Arizona, I stopped to see some dinosaur tracks just west of Tuba City. As I pulled into the parking area, on the north side of highway 160, a Navajo man got up from a group sitting in lawn chairs by a hand written “Dino Tracks” sign.

“Hi, my name is Denny,” he said. “Would you like to see the dinosaur tracks?” I said yes and asked if there was a fee and if my dogs could come and he told me he worked for tips, and assured me the dogs were welcome.

The trackway started a short distance from the parking lot: dozens of deep, three toed tracks neatly printed in red sandstone. Dinosaur tracks often look nothing like anything, often just a mud smear solidified in rock. As a lifelong dinosaur buff and an avid traveler in geology, I had visited a lot of tracks all over North America and these were striking, the clearest I’d ever seen, with toes and talons clearly preserved. Continue reading →

Krill Thrill: ‘Happy Feet’ and the end of woodland dominance

By: | November 17, 2011

As far as obscure ecosystems go, the outer edge of expanding sea-ice sheets has got to be near the top of the list. Not algae-living-in-sloth-hairs obscure, I suppose, but then the algae that grow inside the sea ice have a significantly greater impact on just about everything else in the world, other than sloth hair. Sea ice represents a fascinating bit of physical structure in the otherwise largely structure-less surface of the polar seas. And it’s more complex than many people realize. It’s riddled with cracks and fissures, and honeycombed with channels and pockets of super-salty brine, left behind as seawater freezes into largely salt-free ice. For organisms smaller than an inch or two long, the ice edge is a terrain as rich and varied as a coral reef or a tropical rainforest.

For three or four years in the 1990s, I was obsessed with the structure of growing sea ice, and especially with the life that structure supported. My first job in grad school was to figure out a way to capture images of the microbial communities living inside the brine pockets and fissures of Antarctic sea ice—and my last was to plant my feet on that sea ice with a coring augur, and bore down into it to collect samples. I spent countless hours learning about the ice and the organisms that lived in it, and months running thought experiments, tinkering in the lab and racing frostbite to capture untainted samples of the ice’s underside, where all the biological action is. I even deployed plankton nets, many times, with the express purpose of capturing not the giant Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, but its feces.

I immersed so far, I might as well have been living in a brine pocket myself. But I’d never really seen what goes on at the ice edge until Warner Bros. showed me. That’s right—the trailers for Happy Feet Two, opening now, feature what must be the world’s first-ever animated krill. I suppose this is how the clownfish people must have felt when Nemo broke big.

Continue reading →

Lung Cancer: Replacing the Blunderbuss with a Stiletto

By: | November 16, 2011

Van VanderMeer is about to celebrate an anniversary that he’d probably rather forget.

In December 2009, VanderMeer thought he had caught his annual winter cough; for a few years in a row, he’d developed a chest cold around this time of year. But this one lingered. VanderMeer was competing in a mixed doubles tournament in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he lives, when he realized that he was too short of breath to continue the match.

His wife convinced him to see his doctor. An x-ray showed that VanderMeer’s left lung was almost entirely filled with fluid, prompting this observation from his radiologist: “This could be something not good.”

Continue reading →

Milwaukee Ads Condemn Co-sleeping

By: | November 15, 2011

The city of Milwaukee is not a good place to be an infant. For every 1,000 babies born there, more than 10 die before their first birthday. Among black families, the number is even higher — 14 out of 1,000. The national average is about 6.5. So it’s no wonder the Milwaukee Health Department is pulling out every tool in its arsenal to curb the number of infant deaths . . . even scare tactics.

Would you put your child down for a nap next to a giant butcher knife? No? Well, why would you let your child sleep with you? They’re equally risky, the ad says. The message is clear: Choose to share a bed with your infant, and you could be risking your child’s life. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Tempus Edax Rerum

By: | November 14, 2011

Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you.  It just got me confused.  Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help.

John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black hole,” wrote the textbook on gravitational physics, and happily went down the rabbit hole of the anthropic principle.  As a physicist, he was part poet.  He was friendly, gracious, and deeply unpredictable.  Several years before he died at age 96, he said, “This is the most interesting world I’ve ever lived in.’

That’s no help either.

_____

http://abstrusegoose.com/407

 

The Guys Talk

By: | November 11, 2011

About an hour into a long interview, the scientist relaxes, stops using words that might look good on a funding application, and starts saying things like: “Here’s a picture of our immediate neighborhood.  Here’s the Milky Way, that’s us.  Here’s the Andromeda Nebula, that’s our nearest friend.  And there are a bunch of little guys in our immediate vicinity.  The whole shooting match is winging off in this direction.”

This particular scientist, Princeton’s Jim Peebles, talks about galaxies as though they’re folks he knows personally.  This is anthropomorphising and it’s strictly against scientists’ union rules.  But they do it anyway – not all of them, just certain ones – and they do it regardless of field, almost unconsciously, and with joy. Continue reading →

Do readers grasp nuance?

By: | November 10, 2011

When my editor at Slate asked me to look into the link between statins and violent behavior, I thought the idea was crazy. But as I dug into the issue, I decided that there was an important story there. I’m still not entirely convinced that statins cause aggressive or violent behavior in some small subset of users, but after looking into the evidence, I’m convinced that the FDA system for tracking drug side effects is not equipped to tell us for sure.

The story I ended up writing ran with the headline “Lipitor Rage” and the dek, “If statins carried a rare but serious side effect, would we ever find out?” (In some contexts it was headlined “Lipitor Rage and the Problem of Rare Side Effects.”) The story wasn’t really about statins, but about whether the FDA’s current surveillance system can detect rare drug side effects, such as the purported one between statins and violence.

Continue reading →

Making a Better Heart

By: | November 9, 2011

This fall, I did something that I’ve done only once before in three decades of writing: for two whole weeks I booked off work and took a real vacation. Freelance writers can rarely afford half-month-long holidays. But I had spent a good part of 2010 in cardiac wards, tending to my visibly failing father and watching his fellow patients shuffle down the corridors clutching small oblong pillows to their chests. The pillows reminded them of the incisions from their open-heart surgery, and hence their physical limitations. My father, too, hugged one of those pillows. But open-heart surgery could not fix what was ailing him.

After his funeral, I realized that I needed to take time off and go somewhere far away from the haunted faces of those corridors. So I chose a destination that seemed to brim with joie de vivre, a kind of anti-cardiac ward—the small medieval town of Lucca in Italy. It didn’t hurt that Lucca lay in one of the heartlands—so to speak—of the Mediterranean Diet. I was interested in that diet. A family history of early heart disease increases one’s risk. Continue reading →