Dreams of Resilience and Bikini Atoll

By: | March 23, 2011

The late-night radio airwaves—the insomniac’s solace, the new father’s companion—have been heavy with war, disaster and calamity for weeks now. How very different are the sounds of bombing runs over Tripoli from the small coughs and cries through the baby monitor, with which they commingle.

The most extraordinary news of the past two weeks, however, does not have a sound, at least not one that can be captured on the radio. It is the grace, strength and equanimity of the Japanese people under the most challenging conditions. It is a demonstration of what poets and social scientists alike would recognize as resilience—that ineffable quality of somehow remaining unbroken in the face of the unexpected and the catastrophic.

Measuring and enhancing resilience in human communities is a relatively new endeavor—one I plan to write about in the coming weeks—and it is perhaps easier to quantify resilience in the ecological than in the human sphere. It seems appropriate somehow that one of best documented and most dramatic recent examples of ecological resilience comes, like Chernobyl 25 years ago and Fukushima Daiichi today, packaged with all the bright futurism and dark paranoia of the nuclear age. Continue reading →

Barcoding Bushmeat

By: | March 22, 2011


I’m beginning to think that my LWON byline should read: Virginia Hughes, the one who writes about obscure applications of DNA testing. First there was the story about the scientist who found a rare DNA blip that could prove that the corpse in Napoleon’s tomb really is Napoleon. Then there was the team that screened DNA from a mouse’s tail to solve an international insurance dispute. And now I’ve learned that DNA tests could help save two wood grouse species from extinction.

The wood grouse, or capercaillie, is a 12-pound bird that was once found all over Europe and Asia. People have hunted them since the Middle Ages, for fun and and for food. Apparently, capercaillies are the tastiest game birds in Europe, with delicate meat that’s “whiter than pheasant“*.

Continue reading →

Seeking clarity for the toughest decisions of all

By: | March 21, 2011

Making decisions about your own medical care is tough. Making decisions about a child’s medical care is tougher still. But making decisions about care for your unborn child? Nothing is harder than that. And these days, there is no end to the decisions that must be made: genetic testing? Birth attendant? With or without medication? Hospital, birthing center or home birth?

These are some of the most agonizing decisions most people will ever make. Especially with a first child, most of the terrain is unfamiliar, opportunities for ghastly mistakes seem to be everywhere, and there’s often surprisingly little solid evidence to go on. Most of us listen to our doctors and ask our friends and family members. We maybe do some Internet research and read a few books, or even a study or two. And then, sooner or later, we make a decision and muddle through as best we can.

Carl Michal isn’t like the rest of us. He’s a physicist who spends his time studying the properties of biological materials like silk and hagfish slime. He’s a father. And he doesn’t seem to have much patience for muddling. Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Erika Check Hayden

By: | March 18, 2011

There’s this idea, and I don’t know who started it, but it’s definitely floating around, out there, that science journalists are disheveled, frazzled, socially awkward and overall, just not very cool.

That nasty rumor, if I ever believed it, was quickly dispelled the day I met Erika Check Hayden. This woman is polished — in her demeanor, her trendy fashion choices and her writing. Even her name is sharp. But then she also likes Hello Kitty, so what do I know.

In any case, I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Erika to our little corner of the interwebs. She writes about medicine, biotech and policy, and her first post is slated for Monday morning.

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Image by Josh Liba, via Flickr

Stop the Presses. Please.

By: | March 18, 2011

The subject line in the e-mail was, “Congratulations, I think….”  The message itself said, “Just read about Dark Matter finally outing itself.”

“Huh?” I wrote back.

“Haven’t you heard??? Dark Matter has been telescopically (is that a word?) observed!”

The message came from a graduate student of mine during holiday break this past December. He meant well. He knew I’d written a book involving dark matter, and he went on to say that he wondered if the discovery of dark matter just a couple of weeks before the book’s publication was good (in terms of publicity) or bad (in terms of obsolescence).

I sighed. Great. Now I had to go do an online search, just in case dark matter had in fact been discovered. Far more likely, though, was that some media outlet had misstated, or some research institution had overstated, a result.

“Dark matter,” I typed into Google. I pressed “News.” Sure enough, there it was: “Dark Matter First Seen by U.K. Telescope.”

Continue reading →

Searching for Jim Gray

By: | March 17, 2011

Re: Heather’s post on people who’d lost people in recent, godawful earthquakes and found them again via Google technologies.   I’d watched another high-tech-mediated search and though it doesn’t really bear thinking about, I’ll tell you anyway.

On February 1, 2007, I got an email from an astronomer named Alex Szalay saying in case I hadn’t heard, Jim Gray was lost at sea.  Gray was a software genius at Microsoft Research whose job was to do whatever he wanted.  One thing he’d wanted to do was Szalay’s project, a digital survey of the sky which had an unprecedentedly large database that Szalay had been having trouble organizing; and after Gray had helped out for free, the database became a world-class public resource.  On January 28, Gray had sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge headed for the Farallon Islands, where he was going to scatter his mother’s ashes, and disappeared. The Coast Guard eventually searched 132,000 square miles of ocean with no luck. Continue reading →

Mapping Baltimore’s Addiction

By: | March 16, 2011
The greatest city in America? Hell yes!

Baltimore has a hard-core drug problem. The evidence is unmistakable. Head down an alley in the wrong part of town and you’re liable to find a discarded needle, some broken vials, and maybe even a shell casing or two. Why, yes. That was a gunshot. See that guy on the corner? No, he’s not tired. He’s high. Really, really high.

My fascination with Baltimore’s heroin addiction began in 2006. I can’t say what drew me to the seedy side of the city, but I quickly became obsessed. I took photograph after photograph of shuttered row houses. I donned a bulletproof vest and cruised West Baltimore with the cops. I sat in the needle exchange van and handed out clean syringes. I watched The Wire. I dropped the F-bomb with alarming frequency. I used pushpins to painstakingly mark the location of every murder on a map taped to my dining room wall. Truth be told, I went a little nuts. I thought getting close to the drug problem might help me make sense of it.

David Epstein at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has come up with a far better way of understanding the epidemic. Continue reading →

Corvid Cousins

By: | March 15, 2011

Ann, I see your crows and raise you ravens.

With a beak like a Swiss army knife and an intellect to match, the raven is an icon, mascot and pest, as mysterious as it is ubiquitous. For me, as for most people up North, these winged scavengers hover just below my conscious radar. They steal balls from our grass-free golf course, mistaking them for eggs.

The common raven is one of the most prevalent birds in the world, found on every continent except South America and Australia, with four million in North America alone. Corvus corax, from the Greek for “croaker,” has been a North American resident for two million years. When humans came over the Bering land bridge, ravens were already waiting for them. Archeologists have found fossilized ravens in the earliest known human encampments in Canada, dating back 10,000 years.

They have a good deal in common with us. We’re both gregarious and family oriented. We both rely on acute sight and vocal nuance, and we recognize individuals of our species, leaning on memory and mental maps for our survival. Far from picky eaters, we both feed from many links of the food chain – hence the term “ravenous.” And perhaps our spookiest shared behaviour is our walk: like us, the raven perambulates with a lordly strut that conveys pride, purpose and curiosity.

Continue reading →