My mother, on the bleeding edge of health care reform

By: | August 15, 2011

Among my fondest childhood memories are the hours my family spent discussing B cells and T cells while cruising the highways on our family car camping trips.

My mother, Irene Check, is a scientist; both she and my father got their doctoral degrees in microbiology, and my mother has a specialty in immunology – the study of the body’s defense against disease. What I remember most from our childhood conversations is my mom’s excitement about science: B and T cells are the main types of cells that do the work in the human immune system, but when my mom talked about them, they sounded like more than mere cells; they sounded like superheroes.

These days, however, my mom is a lot more than a scientist: she works on the front lines of health care reform. My mom directs an immunology laboratory in a hospital, which means that she runs tests to try to diagnose what’s wrong with patients’ immune systems. And while her love of science is what got her there, she now spends as much of her time cutting costs and trying to prepare for health care reform as she does using her scientific knowledge to help sick people.

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Guest Post: Stranger on the Porch

By: | August 12, 2011

Last week my little black dog wandered off into the sloping hillside behind our Colorado home. Fifteen years old, deaf and suffering from congestive heart failure, she appeared to have succumbed to some primordial call to return to the wilderness to die.

She didn’t have far to go. My husband and I live in the foothills of the Rockies, at the quintessential intersection of wildland and suburban living. Houses and ponderosa pines alternately dot the rolling lots; ravines provide the perfect corridors for critters to journey down from higher elevations.

When we bought the house last year, one of the first discoveries we made on poking through local maps was that we were smack-dab in the middle of the local “summer bear concentration.” Next we read David Baron’s chilling The Beast in the Garden, about a mountain lion that in 1991 had killed and eaten an 18-year-old male athlete who was out jogging after a pepperoni pizza lunch. Within view of an interstate highway. Not too many miles from our new house.

Yet over time, we never saw a bear other than its scat or the occasional fur tuft on the barbed-wire fence. Cougars made not a single appearance. One may have made it from the Black Hills to Connecticut recently, but none have figured out how to parse the few miles from the high country to our back yard — at least while we were watching.

What we do, have, though, are foxes. Continue reading →

The Last Word on Nothing Jr. Edition, Part Two

By: | August 11, 2011

Last month, I recommended a few children’s books that I thought reflected the curious, adventurous, and humble scientific spirit of The Last Word on Nothing. Friends and readers have since added their favorite titles to the list — thank you! May these books bring all of you, and the young explorers in your lives, some late-summer reading pleasure.

A Log’s Life by Wendy Pfeffer, recommended by science journalist Jill Adams.

Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies, recommended by Colorado horsewoman and bon vivant Marla Bear Bishop.

The Magic School Bus series, recommended by science journalist Siri Carpenter and by Kim Todd (author of the terrific grownup science books Chrysalis and Tinkering with Eden).

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Correcting Hollywood Science: Rise of the Planet of the Apes Edition

By: | August 10, 2011

I don’t have a problem with screenwriters fudging scientific truths as long as they: are internally consistent with their made-up science; and manipulate the facts in the name of telling a good story.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which came out on Friday, follows the first rule and tries to follow the second (more on that later), so I’m not upset that it gets a few things wrong about gene therapy. Still, I feel it’s my duty to tell you what was not quite right, and describe a few real advances in the field.
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Fungus among us — How I learned to love taxonomy

By: | August 9, 2011


As an undergraduate biology student, I loathed taxonomy. Plant systematics was the only college course I remember absolutely hating. It seemed like nothing more than rote memorization.  I studied with flash cards I’d made on little index cards. Bracts instead of sepals, colored glands that take the place of petals?  Probably a Euphorbiaceae.

I spent hours memorizing distinctions like these, and I considered this kind of knowledge esoteric and pointless. Why did I need to memorize the latin names of a bunch of plants when I could always look them up? Classifying things seemed archaic. I wanted to ponder biology’s bigger questions.

So I’m surprised to find myself making so much practical use of the lessons I learned in that boring class. Continue reading →

On anglerfish, scrub jays, and the menageries of childhood

By: | August 8, 2011

The anglerfish was the iconic animal of my childhood. This eerie creature lives miles under the ocean’s surface and – as you probably know, if you were ever an animal-obsessed kid like me – dangles a fleshy, glow-in-the dark “bait” in front of its monstrous jaws. The dangling bait attracts prey and gives the animal its name. I remember returning to one book illustration of the fish with its jaws agape to reveal deadly sharp teeth over and over again. The anglerfish somehow captured everything mysterious, fascinating, and awesome about the natural world for me.

I hadn’t thought about the anglerfish until very recently, when I had a child of my own and became re-acquainted with the animals of childhood. It’s shocking how much of kids’ literature focuses on animals that are actually quite remote to our lives. Lions, bears, elephants and giraffes feature prominently, as do monkeys, sharks, whales and other exotic animals. Admittedly, these animals are rad, and totally deserve the attention. But most of us will never see them, except possibly in zoos. Sadly, I have never seen a real live anglerfish – not even in an aquarium.

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The Poet Bernoulli

By: | August 5, 2011

I asked my husband, who’s a physicist and a pilot, how airplanes stay up in the air.  A question like that makes him happy.  “It’s the wings,” he said,  “They provide lift.”  “What’s lift?” I said.  “It’s Bernoulli,” he said. “The faster air moves, the lower its pressure. ”  I’m used to these answers that are at a tangent to my questions and I usually get lost in them.  “What’s faster air and lower pressure got to do with wings?” I said.  He loves where this is going and talks louder.  “Wings are airfoils,” he said.  “They’re fatter at the leading edge and thin at the trailing edge.  Air hits the airfoil and splits – think of it as streamlines.  The streamlines that go up over the top of the wing speed up, and that lowers the pressure above the wing.  The streamlines that go down under the wing go relatively slower, and that raises the pressure under the wing.  So the wing is effectively pushed up.  That’s lift.”

Ok, good, fine:  faster air = lower pressure above, slower air = high pressure below, so then lift.   “Is a wing moving through air always lifted?” I said.  “No,” he said.  “It depends on the angle of attack.”  I’m also used to these infinitely receding explanations and I usually get lost in them too.  “What’s the angle of attack?”  I said.  “Just the angle that the wing is at,” he said, and went on to remind me about driving in a car with my hand out the window and when my hand is tilted with respect to the oncoming wind, it gets lifted up.  Ok, good fine:  “so a wing angled for attack always has lift?”  I said.  “Not just lift,” he said.  “Also drag.  The act of creating lift also creates drag.  It’s lift and drag.”

Also life and death, and order and entropy, I thought, so I asked, “could drag ever win?”  “Oh yes,” he said, and digressed off into notable airplane crashes.  I stopped listening. Continue reading →

Bang? Whimper? Whatever.

By: | August 4, 2011

What is the fate of the universe? Cosmologists are converging on an answer, and it ain’t pretty. Or so I gather from people who, hearing that the latest science favors a universe that goes on forever, growing colder and colder, lonelier and lonelier, ask me, “Don’t you find it depressing?”

The short answer is, No. My feeling is, if you need astronomy to tell you that the universe is indifferent to your existence, you haven’t been paying attention. But I have heard the question often enough now that I understand a lot of people would prefer the other possibility: a universe that eventually collapses back on itself in a reverse Big Bang.

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