The Children’s Hour

By: | October 11, 2011

There is something rare and elusive on the ceiling of Rouffignac Cave in southern France, something that at first looked like etchings of undulating snakes or bending waterways or even strangely shimmying humans, but that now turn out to be something far more ephemeral and wondrous to my eyes—works of art by very young apprentices: giggling, squirming, skittering Ice-Age children.

Rouffignac’s dark fingering passageways extend more than five miles into the limestone bedrock of the Dordogne region. Thirteen thousand years ago, Paleolithic humans held torches aloft as they penetrated deep into the cave,  exploring its dark twisting passages and chambers. In the flickering light, these ancient cavers saw the raking claw marks of cave bears on the walls and stepped over scatterings of animal bones and gleaming flint nodules on the floor. Continue reading →

From Freud to Feynman: Curious Thoughts of Curious Minds

By: | October 10, 2011

I wonder why. I wonder why.

I wonder why I wonder.

I wonder why I wonder why

I wonder why I wonder!

 The poet: Richard P. Feynman. The occasion: an undergraduate philosophy term paper at MIT. A great work of poetry? Perhaps not. An example of profound thinking and the ability to render a complex process in a way that is engaging, easy to follow, and evoking of an I could do that, too feeling? Absolutely. And that, in a nutshell, is the great man’s genius.

Richard P. Feynman was the physicist who could, it seems, also be anything else he chose to be: a musician (who played the frigideira in a Brazilian samba group and even performed during Carnaval), a composer (who co-wrote and performed music to an award-winning modern ballet), an artist (who, as Ofey, had a one-man show), a specialist on Mayan hieroglyphics (who lectured on the codexes of the ancients and could spot a fake before the experts themselves)—and most of all, always, a profound thinker, who wondered not only about the world around him but about the him the world was around. Who not only wondered why, but then immediately, why he wondered why, and then, why he wondered that. How did his mind work? How did it get to wherever it traveled, and could he find a way to trace it? Continue reading →

Dr. Jim Beam, DDS

By: | October 7, 2011

 

One of the advantages of working at home is that I have more opportunities to talk to my neighbors, who often stop by with interesting news. The other day, a bear got into someone’s chicken coop; not long before that, a stray bull was wandering around in the adjoining field. But the most intriguing recent tidbit came from a neighbor who told me that he gargles with bourbon instead of mouthwash.

“You what?” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I was looking at the mouthwash in the store a while ago, and I thought, ‘Hey, this stuff is basically expensive alcohol with a bunch of weird additives. Why not just buy a bottle of whiskey and be done with it?’”

Now here was an appealing proposition. First of all, how often does one get to combine the pleasures of hard liquor with virtuous feelings about personal hygiene? Secondly, as the overcommitted parent of a toddler, the prospect of drinking while accomplishing something else sounded like the highest form of efficiency.

I should say that my neighbor has a Ph.D. in biology and is, as far as I can tell, eminently sane. He’s also a teetotaler, so he spits out the bourbon. (Seeing my disappointment, he added, “But I don’t see why you’d have to.”) And he doesn’t rinse in the morning, especially if he has to talk to other people. (“Wouldn’t make a good impression.”) He figures his nightly swishes beat mouthwash on several counts: cheaper, no weird additives, and as good or better at killing bacteria.

Sounds too good to be true. Is it? In our efforts to serve you better, the Last Word On Nothing Consumer Affairs Division decided to investigate.

Continue reading →

Breast Cancer’s false narrative.

By: | October 6, 2011

Here we go again. Another October, another flood of pink ribbons. Don’t get me wrong. I hate breast cancer. I want it gone. Three of my aunts have breast cancer, and the disease killed a dear friend of mine. So it pains me to see the science of breast cancer so often misreported by the media.

The problem starts with the basic narrative. As I wrote last year in Miller-McCune:

For years, women were taught the necessity of early detection for breast cancer based on the notion that breast cancer is a relentlessly progressive disease that will inevitably kill you if you don’t remove it in time. That story about breast cancer — call it the “relentless progression” mind model — is easy to grasp, makes intuitive sense and offers a measure of comfort: Every cancer is curable as long as you catch it in time.

But it turns out that this mental model of breast cancer is wrong. Science has shown breast cancer to be far less uniform than the relentless progression model suggests, says H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Lebanon, N.H., and author of Should I Be Tested for Cancer? A more accurate description might be called the “uncertain future” model. Instead of starting small and gradually growing and becoming more dangerous, cancers can behave in a variety of unpredictable ways.

Continue reading →

Science vs. Tradition

By: | October 5, 2011

After more than five years in the Canadian North, I’m preparing a move south to Toronto, before the next winter descends. Writing about science up here has been the best gig of my career – there’s just so much science here and so few science journalists.

In my research in this part of the world, one issue has nagged me throughout, and I hesitate even to write about it, because I have yet to get a firm grip on it. The question is what role, if any, the traditional knowledge of local aboriginal people should play in scientific inquiry.

Continue reading →

Local Food: Appetite for Infrastructure

By: | October 4, 2011

You notice the colors first. The crisp orange of carrots, the lustrous reds of tomatoes, the brilliant yellow of peppers and lemons, and everywhere, the thousand shades of green that seem almost to sing the word: fresh. Forklifts and hand trucks whir past crates of asparagus, long beans and onions; shouts ring out in English and Spanish and Chinese. It’s 2 AM, the air is nearly as cold as the walk-in coolers, and the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, all 25 acres of it, is alive with the sights and sounds of bustling commerce.

Wholesale produce markets like this are the missing link of the fresh, local food supply chain, providing the crucial connection between producers and the people who live near by. If you don’t have one near you–and you probably don’t–then chances are that you’re paying too much money for produce that was grown too far away. Continue reading →

WWGD?

By: | October 3, 2011

 

Dear WWGD:

I am a postdoc working on an important scientific problem, one that I find rewarding and challenging. But a month before the end of the funding cycle, our team had a budget surplus, at which point my supervisor suggested that I find a way to spend it. Otherwise, he sighed, we’ll never see that kind of money from the NSF again, and he’ll have to eliminate a research assistant.

So I went out and bought the department a 3D photocopier. This purchase, as you might expect, has made me the heroine of the department—not just because I’ve saved an RA’s position, but because I’ve given us all access to a 3D photocopier. Could be cooler? Not much. Continue reading →