The Crow Knows Your Nose

By: | June 29, 2011
Crow diving at a masked researcher in Seattle. Photo by Keith Brust.

Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them.

Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t just remember Roger’s suburban Seattle home and his BB gun. They also seem to remember his face. When he leaves his house, the crows mob him, diving and screeching around his head. (They leave other family members alone.) When this harassment — or retaliation — began, Roger took his campaign into a second-floor bedroom, where he crouched below a windowsill and poked his BB gun through a slit in the screen. But the crows have never forgotten his mug. Years after his last open attack on the noisy neighborhood flocks, he’s still Corvid Enemy Number One.

Now, I have some actual science to bring to our argument. In a paper released today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ecologist John Marzluff and two of his students report that crows are past masters at holding a grudge.

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How to Beat a Closed System

By: | June 28, 2011

Christie wrote a post about the suckiness of power-point presentations and of scientific conferences in general.  Conferences are an occupational hazard for science writers:  walk into a big-city convention center; find Session 425B which is in a narrow, fluorescent-lit room with sliding walls, little chairs in rows, a podium, and a screen; sit down; the speaker opens the power point; the room darkens; a heavy fogbank of boredom moves over your brain; you pass out cold and fall off your chair – it’s professionally embarassing.

I like the smaller meetings, maybe 100 astronomers all together in an academic auditorium, nice lighting, comfortable movie-house chairs, and by the third day, everyone has de facto assigned seating.  Small meetings are personal.  Anyway, Christie asked readers to share experiences so I am.  In the first place, power-points can be entertainment:  in the meeting I just came back from, one projector went black in the middle of a talk on advanced technologies.  Oh, the irony. Continue reading →

Sez Who?

By: | June 24, 2011

In 1992 I wrote an article for the New York Times on body doubles—the performers in movies who substitute for stars who aren’t quite buff enough for close-ups or brave enough for nudity. I cited several examples of stars who have used body doubles, including Kim Basinger in My Stepmother Is An Alien and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. A few weeks later I received a letter at my home address from an admirer of Ms. Roberts. He informed me that because I had impugned her artistry, my family should suffer. I contacted the Times’ security department, which contacted the authorities where this fan lived. The Times then assured me that I needn’t give the episode another thought.

But I do think of it from time to time, when I talk or write about some of the wilder, yet apparently true, concepts in cosmology. During my visit to Antarctica to research a book a few years ago, a National Science Foundation liaison liked to take me around to tables in the McMurdo Station cafeteria at breakfast and introduce me to the non-scientists who worked there. She wanted them to hear this jaw-dropping idea I’d described to her: that the universe consists of 73 percent dark energy and 23 percent dark matter, leaving only 4 percent the stuff we’d always assumed, from the dawn of civilization to the final quarter of the twentieth century, was the universe in its entirety—galaxies, stars, planets, people.

“Sounds like God to me,” one person answered, in a baiting tone. The next morning the response at another table was even more antagonistic: “Why should I believe you?”

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A Royal Pain

By: | June 23, 2011

A lovely young English couple are planning to visit my town in a fortnight, along with 70-odd out-of-town police officers, trucks-full of barricades and a personal hair stylist. As William and Kate’s arrival approaches, I find myself situated as a public servant, so I shan’t venture any opinion at all on Canada’s future with the monarchy. I shall simply offer an objective and, of course, unrelated account of consanguineous unions in European royal history.

All ten current European monarchs — that’s Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg, UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Netherlands, for those who haven’t kept track of republican trends — are direct descendants of John William Friso, Prince of Orange, who died in 1711, ten generations ago. This fact understates their actual degree of kinship, however, because the interconnected bloodlines cross much more recently. Most of the European monarchs are also descended from the grandmother of Europe, Queen Victoria of England and from Christian IX of Denmark, both of whose many respective grandchildren – who occupied their thrones during the First World War – married each other so conscientiously their family tree sports the systematic order of a round-robin badminton tournament. Of course, Queen Victoria and her consort Albert were first cousins to begin with, and Victoria passed her hemophilia down to her far-flung grandchildren.

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Guest Post: Remembering Horace Judson

By: | June 22, 2011

In his several books and many articles in magazines and academic journals, Horace Freeland Judson dared to size scientists up, though he wasn’t one. He died on May 6, age 80. He was my teacher and my friend, and I would like to say a few things about his works both to offer tribute and to explicate some of what was significant about the most original science observer of our time. Continue reading →

Delectable Dirt

By: | June 21, 2011
Dirt. It's what's for dinner.

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 →

Synthetic biology: Parlor trick, or proof of concept?

By: | June 20, 2011

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.

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