Kids will put anything in their mouths. My aunt, who lived briefly in Hawaii, once found my cousin gnawing on a dead lizard. My childhood tastes were less exotic. I loved dirt.
Eating dirt was forbidden. I was old enough to understand that. But I could. not. help. myself. My mother would often find me next to a houseplant, black streaks covering my mouth and hands. “Have you been eating dirt?” she would ask. I would solemnly shake my head. The perfect crime. Except for that telltale black ring around my mouth.
For me, eating dirt was a phase. I grew out of it. But years later I still felt like a freak. I shouldn’t have. Turns out dirt eating is pretty common. In fact, there’s even a scientific name for the practice: geophagy. Continue reading →
The first time I heard about bacterial photography, I thought, “Wow, that’s so rad! I’m not sure what they’re gonna use it for, but anyway, it sure is cool!”
The bacterial photography project involved transplanting a light sensor into an Escherichia coli bacterium so that it could take “pictures” in Petri dishes. It sprang from a field called synthetic biology, in which scientists engineer biology to perform new functions.
Here is a sampling of some of the other things that synthetic biologists have done since the bacterial photography project: they’ve made cheese from the bacteria that grow on human skin. They’ve engineered yeast to make lysergic acid, the precursor of the psychedelic drug LSD. They’ve made plants whose leaves change color when they detect explosive chemicals, and bacteria that digest the pesticide Atrazine.
Poughkeepsie, sweet home on the Hudson. iStockphoto.
A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, cheese doodles, Wal-Mart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the Hudson River town of Poughkeepsie, New York, he perked up.
“Oh!” he said, sounding as if he’d almost cracked a smile.
If you know Poughkeepsie at all, chances are you don’t ache to return. The name is Wappinger for “the reed-covered lodge by the little-water place,” though a friend of mine translates it as “place of many strip malls.” We once made a decent living making hats, brewing beer, and shipping stuff up and down the Hudson, but those glory days are long over. (One of our most successful industries was whale rendering.) With a chronically lackluster downtown and boring burbs, we have neither urban sophistication nor rural charm. As Hudson Valley folkie Bill Ring puts it, “It’s bigger than a village, but it ain’t quite a city/ and it’s not a place a lot of folks are itching to go.” I love a lot of people in Poughkeepsie, but honestly, I prefer to meet them elsewhere.
Please welcome Michelle Nijhuis, the newest Person of LWON—and, given her street address, the one least likely to be stalked in the physical world. Michelle seems to spend a great deal of her time winning awards and fellowships, but that’s not why we like her. Rather, it’s because of the moments she sets aside to write evocative, heartfelt stories about conservation and global change and, as often as not, people who are trying to do something good—and perhaps a little nutty—for the world we all share. And that’s just part of why we think she’ll fit in so well.
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Image: Perhaps Michelle’s closest neighbor? From an abandoned house in Foote Fields, Colorado. Photo courtesy of JT Thomas.
I’m not a big fan of conferences. I loathe spending vast stretches of time indoors, especially if it requires planting my butt in uncomfortable chairs and wearing clothes with buttons and shoes that aren’t flip flops. Yet I continue to attend meetings, because they offer opportunities to interact with smart people who are thinking about interesting things.
Earlier this month, I attended two conferences in a single week, and the stark contrast between them got me thinking about why conferences so often suck and how to make them better.
This is what Christie does for fun. Truly. And, yes, that is actually Christie.
Today I have the pleasure of introducing the latest addition to LWON: Christie Aschwanden (ASH-wand-un), a writer who shares not only my fondness for the term “bull honkey,” but also my intense dislike of liars. Yes, we are two peas in a pod. Except Christie, a serious athlete and professional ski racer, is really buff. You should see her biceps. They are really impressive.
Christie, a contributing editor at Runner’s World, is also one hell of an accomplished writer. And that’s why we’re so happy she has agreed to join us. Her articles—including an award-winning story about an Agent Orange remediation project in Vietnam’s central highlands—have appeared in more than 50 publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Men’s Journal, Slate, NPR, Mother Jones . . . I could keep going. Instead, I’ll let you get the full scoop by visiting her Web site.
Among a small circle of freelancers, Christie is known not only for her phenomenal writing, but also for the incredibly odd press releases she receives—press releases with titles like “Breasts, Buttocks and The Big Brain” or “NASA Threatens NASA Scientist.” And we all know that bizarre press releases make great fodder for blog posts. (Hint hint.) Welcome, Christie!
Erika wants to know about the state of autism research. “How is the field doing in terms of rigorous science?” she asks. “What is the most promising theory about how autism develops?”
The first question’s easy to answer: pretty damn well. In 2008 (the last time a good survey was done), autism research reaped $144 million in tax dollars and $78 million from private funds. That’s a helluva lot of interest in a disorder that is diagnosed in 1 percent of the population. In no small part because of this investment, autism science is constantly making headlines. In just the past month, seven gangbuster autism papers have come out in the likes of Nature, Nature Genetics, Science Translational Medicine and Neuron.
The other question, about smart theories of autism, is one I’ve been trying to sort out for awhile.* No answer is wholly satisfying, but I’ll tell you a bit about recent findings and how I see them fitting into a bigger picture. The short version: autism can begin with one of hundreds, if not thousands, of different glitches during fetal development, all of which eventually result in a similar kind of abnormal wiring in the brain. It’s like roots, separate yet impossibly tangled, which, with water, sun, and time, give way to an awesome, immutable tree. Continue reading →
Today, I’ll wrestle with a question that Ann posed during our birthday celebration: People have been living and building things in North America for tens of thousands of years, the same tens of thousands that they’ve been in India, China, Egypt, Mesoamerica, Europe; so why do we know comparatively so little about North American paleolithics? My numbers could be off by a factor of 10 or 1000.
I’ve often wondered this myself, Ann. Why do most of us know so much about ancient Egyptians with their stone sarcophagi and their pyramids and mummies and Book of the Dead. And why do we often draw blanks when it comes, say, to the Mississippian peoples with their Woodhenge and their Black Drink and their towering, millennium-old earthen mounds?
Are archaeologists slipping up on the job, moving more dirt and gleaning more data in place like Egypt, Europe or India than they are here in North America (which I am defining as just the United States and Canada, in keeping with the spirit of Ann’s question)? Continue reading →
