The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Not One More Winter in the Tipi, Honey

By: Michelle Nijhuis | July 14, 2011

iStock_000015393408Small — What is it about modern homesteading that drives so many women mad?

There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people — myself included, but I’ll get to that in a minute — go on a carbon diet by purchasing some cheap land, rigging up a few solar panels, and getting off the grid.

Most of these people are well-educated, well-meaning, and idealistic, determined to build and garden their way toward some version of a better future. But after living here for more than a decade, I’ve noticed a disturbing susceptibility among these modern homesteaders. I’ll call this recurring disease Not One More Winter In The Tipi, Honey (NOMWITTH).

Here’s what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather’s good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.

But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person — inevitably XX — splits town for a fully-furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream.

I’ve seen many couples, and carbon budgets, fall prey to NOMWITTH, and the predictability of its gender roles has always bothered me. Women may have different strengths than men, but we don’t lack for toughness — we demonstrate that in feats ranging from mountain-climbing to childbirth. So why does NOMWITTH always seem to strike women first? Continue reading →

Drawing the Line Somewhere, Part 2

By: Richard Panek | July 13, 2011

(This post is the second in a two-part series. I adapted it from a keynote address I delivered in the summer of 2010 at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, where I teach in the MFA Writing program. The essay is part of a collection of talks by Goddard writing faculty that have been collected in Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing. Part 1 appeared yesterday.)

Over the decades, Niels Bohr’s examples of complementary relationships became more and more philosophical: “In the great drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.” He found applications for the concept in “wider fields,” far beyond physics—psychology, biology, history, the arts. I don’t think he would have objected to applying it to the act of writing—to the relationship between the writer and that thing the writer has been working on.

Whatever you’re writing, and at every moment you’re writing it, you face a virtually infinite number of choices. You can choose among hundreds of thousands of words, you can put them in any order you wish, you can punctuate them senseless or sensible, you can break them up into chapters, stanzas, scenes, sections, lines, acts, paragraphs.

And there’s more. You have a universe of choices. But you have to draw the line somewhere.

Continue reading →

Drawing the Line Somewhere, Part 1

By: Richard Panek | July 12, 2011

(This post is the first in a two-part series. I adapted it from a keynote address I delivered in the summer of 2010 at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, where I teach in the MFA Writing program. The essay is part of a collection of talks by Goddard writing faculty that have been collected in Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing. Part 2 will appear tomorrow.)

During the final faculty meeting of the residency*, we always discuss ideas for the theme of the following semester’s residency. Last semester someone suggested “The Spirit of the Thing.” The response around the table was instantaneous: That’s it! The vote was swift and unanimous. Then we all laughed. We’d never seen such a response to a possible residency theme. A theme that, we might have noticed if we’d thought about it at all, consisted of two abstractions. If a student had written that phrase, any one of us would have scrawled “vague!” in the margin. I don’t remember now who suggested “The Spirit of the Thing,” but I doubt that she or he would have been able to say what it meant. I doubt that any of us could have said what those two nouns in that combination meant. But they sounded good together, and sometimes that’s enough.

It was for me, anyway. Even as the program director asked if I would be one of the keynote speakers, I knew the topic I wanted to address. Earlier in the week, another faculty member had invoked the Heisenberg uncertainty principle during her own keynote address, and I’d been thinking about it all week—or thinking near it, anyway: its less famous but, to my amateur-historian-of-science way of thinking, more profound corollary.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Coming of Age in a Trash Forest

By: Emma Marris | July 11, 2011

My friend Taya and I were out at her parents’ country place, about twelve acres in the western foothills of the Cascades. I was maybe eight, visiting for the first time. Taya was taking me on a tour. We were struggling along, as short-legged people do through dense, early successional Northwest forest. She stopped and took hold of a small sapling. “This,” she said, “is the difference between our land and a park.” And then, shockingly, she stepped on the sapling until it was bowed in two and then snapped it with her boot, killing it dead. Or maybe she ripped it out of the ground with her two hands—she was a very strong girl, I remember. I don’t remember the details of the act. But I do remember that she killed a tree and also the sensation of my mind being blown right out my ears. (Taya’s childhood arbor-cide didn’t presage sociopathy or anything close to it. She’s now a vet.)

I was a city kid, so well schooled in the “leave no trace” ethos of wilderness preservation by school and camp that the idea of killing a tree…it wasn’t that it was wrong. It was that I had never even considered the possibility. Nature was, to me, inviolate, unchanging, ancient and pure. Pristine. It was better than God—less judgmental, more fun to play in, but just as serious and Big. Continue reading →

The baby brain revolution arrives – not a moment too soon

By: Erika Check Hayden | July 7, 2011

When you hear that someone has had a stroke, what type of patient are you likely to picture? Probably an elderly person with an illness, such as heart disease.

But the patient might be a lot younger than you’d think: after the elderly, babies around the time of their birth are next most likely to suffer a stroke – a disruption in blood flow to the brain that kills cells by starving them of oxygen. Most babies who survive a stroke develop lifelong problems with speech, hearing, learning, and movement; stroke is the leading cause of the incurable movement disorder cerebral palsy.

Yet despite the emotional and financial cost of caring for these children, few researchers are looking for treatments for them. That’s perplexing in light of the past decade’s revolution in neuroscience: researchers have realized that the brain, once thought incapable of repairing itself, can grow new brain cells, or neurons. They’re investigating how to harness that ability to treat conditions that afflict adults, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. But few researchers are studying how this astonishing flexibility could be enlisted to help children with brain diseases.

That’s partly because neuroscience research on babies and children is difficult – with good reason. Kids can’t give their own consent to be test subjects; their parents are reluctant to let doctors do anything that might harm their children, or add time and stress to their lives; and it’s hard to study babies’ brains in any meaningful way. One of the major ways that scientists study the brain is by collecting samples from deceased patients, but parents who have lost their children are often understandably too distraught to agree to donate their baby’s tissue to a brain bank.

David Rowitch, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, is trying to change this. Rowitch is not only a neuroscientist; he’s also a pediatrician who specializes in treating the most fragile infants. In 2008, Rowitch and other doctors at UCSF opened one of the world’s only infant intensive care nurseries focused on preventing and treating newborn brain injuries. He has also developed a pediatric brain bank – a collection of brain tissue from 100 deceased babies and children, some of whom died before birth.

The brain bank is small, but uniquely designed to explore the development and ailments of the youngest brains. Its tissues are collected soon after death and are better preserved than brain tissue in other pediatric brain banks. The tissue includes regions where neurons are born before they migrate elsewhere in the brain. Tissue banking is controversial and unethical when tissue donors don’t realize that their cells are being studied in research. But Rowitch’s team always explains to families what this brain bank is for and how it will be used. And while it is heartbreaking to think of babies dying, and may seem macabre to collect tissue from them, it’s essential if researchers want to find treatments for the ailments that have claimed their lives.

Rowitch has just showed this in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience. Drawing on the brain bank, he and his colleagues examined samples of brain tissue from babies who died after suffering brain injuries due to lack of oxygen. He found that patches of damaged tissue in their brains expressed a certain gene found in cells that make a protective substance called myelin. But the cells weren’t making myelin, and the brain tissue surrounding them had died. Rowitch thought he knew why: the gene affected in the myelin-making cells is part of a molecular developmental pathway – the so-called Wnt (pronounced “wint”) pathway – that seemed to be stuck.

Rowitch wondered what would happen if he coaxed this Wnt developmental pathway to restart itself. So he treated mice with similarly damaged brain cells with a drug designed to do that. The brain cells started making myelin again, effectively repairing the damage.

Rowitch needs to do a lot more work to show whether drugs could help human babies – not just mice – with brain injury. But the paper is a hopeful demonstration that baby brain injuries might one day be repaired. And it’s part of a growing movement among pediatricians and neuroscientists to look again at childhood conditions such as cerebral palsy that are caused by brain damage. Maybe they aren’t untreatable, as has been thought for so long.

The brain regeneration revolution is finally trickling down to the littlest among us. It’s about time.

***

Image: A newborn takes her hearing test. kandinski/flickr.

Voyeurism and Facebook

By: Cassandra Willyard | July 6, 2011

binoculars — I spy with my little eye . . .

Several years ago, my mom decided to move from Grand Forks, North Dakota — a city of 50,000 — to Lakota, North Dakota — a town of about 700 people. She had grown up in small towns and had no desire to return to one. But Lakota happened to be the midway point between her job in Grand Forks and my stepfather’s new job in Minnewaukan. So my mom began house hunting.

At one house, the owner was watching television. But the show didn’t look like a regular television program. It seemed almost like a home video. My mom asked the woman what she was watching. She replied, “Oh, that’s the camera down on Main Street.” Lakota, North Dakota, has a video camera planted at one end of Main Street. The footage from that camera ends up on TV, allowing residents to get a real-time, birds-eye view of the town’s tiny business district. No lie.

Why on earth would anyone want to watch what’s happening on Main Street? Because we are natural-born voyeurs. Given the opportunity to peer into others lives, most of us will grab the binoculars rather than closing the shades.

Facebook, like Lakota’s Main Street camera, encourages our voyeuristic tendencies. “People can peruse the profiles of various users, read about other users’ interests, read their friends’ comments on their walls or view their friends. People can even scroll through a user’s photo albums and see all of the pictures that that user has uploaded of themselves and all of the pictures that other users have uploaded with that user in it. Profiles can link to other, sometimes more personal, Web sites about the user. Some profiles link to other photo albums or to online journals,” wrote Brett Bumgarner in a 2007 study. Dozens of my Facebook “friends” are high school classmates I haven’t spoken to since graduation. I friended them to be polite. But that doesn’t explain why I read their status updates and flip through pictures of their kids’ little league games. Facebook has turned me into a busybody. I am the homeowner watching the Main Street camera channel. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Math Doesn’t Suck

By: Ann Finkbeiner | July 5, 2011

AG’s little mouseover says, “. . .except algebraic geometry. Algebraic geometry pretty much sucks.” I’m going to have to take his word for it, I’m profoundly innumerate. Moreover, if AG hadn’t added the caption, I would have said this cartoon was about physics. Physics is the science, the knowledge; math is just the language — or at least that’s what physicists tell me. Could physicists be wrong?

Also: AG’s hidden title for this cartoon is “my favorite Danica,” and after some determined googling, I discovered Danica McKellar and her book about math written to encourage teenaged girls: when girls are children, their math scores are pretty much the same as boys’; but when girls become teens, their scores lag behind. The subject attracts considerable scholarly literature but I haven’t the heart to read it. I’ll make it up instead. Continue reading →