Freeman Dyson: It’s Complicated

By: | January 24, 2011

What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is.  His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes?

Dyson is hard to describe:  he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say.  He’s spent his career and so far, his retirement, in one of the most intellectually-rarified places on the planet, the Institute for Advanced Study.  But he doesn’t have a PhD – he says that doctoral students end up middle-aged, over-specialized, trapped, discouraged, and mentally deranged; and not having a PhD is “a badge of honor.”  He’s extremely smart and the few people smart enough to understand just how smart he is, are generally in awe of his intelligence. His manners are exquisite and never fail; in conversations he’s omnivorously interested and listens with a sort of stunned joy, surely this person is about to say something delightfully original.  He is the subject of profile after profile after profile, some startlingly good.  One of the latest is in The Atlantic, and I’d like to suggest it’s incomplete – an easy shot since every profile is by nature incomplete.  But still. Continue reading →

The Battle Brewing over Tutankhamun’s Treasures

By: | January 21, 2011

It was a great moment, maybe one of the greatest that any Egyptologist has ever experienced. Peering into the newly breeched tomb of Tutankhamun, Howard Carter gazed in rapture at all the wondrous objects lining the pharaoh’s tomb. There were “strange animals,” he later wrote, “statues and gold–everywhere the glint of gold.” As Carter held out his candle, he was lost in exhilaration, lost in a moment he would never ever live again. But just then the voice of reality intruded. The man behind him was getting a little impatient. “Can you see anything?” the voice inquired.

That voice belonged to Lord Carnarvon, a lover of antiquities whose buckets of money and enviable political connections had allowed Carter to trudge up and down the Valley of the King for five years before finding Tutankhamun’s  tomb. Most people tend to forget about Carnarvon, Carter’s generous patron, largely because the British aristocrat died just three months after the great discovery.

But there’s one person who has not forgotten the British aristocrat. Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has just this week declared war on the Carnarvon family, specifically the current Earl and Countess. Continue reading →

Penguin Study Sparks a Tiff (of sorts)

By: | January 20, 2011

As a journalist, I live in constant terror of making mistakes. This anxiety typically simmers just below the surface of my consciousness, occasionally bubbling up to grab me in a full choke hold. But errors are more or less inevitable in this business. And last week, I made one.

A new Nature study showed that the metal bands scientists put on penguins’ flippers to track them are bad for the birds. The authors reported that banded birds had 39% fewer chicks and a 16% lower survival rate than unbanded birds over ten years. (Why would  this be? The bands seem to create drag when the penguins swim, which means they must work harder to go the same distance as their unbanded counterparts.)

When I covered the research for ScienceNOW, I used those figures. Here’s the problem: If you glance at the table where the study’s authors report overall survival, you’ll find that the survival for unbanded penguins was 0.36 and survival for banded penguins was 0.20 (that is, the number of birds present at the end of the study divided by the number of birds present at the beginning). That’s actually a drop of 44 percent, or 16 percentage points. (Don’t understand the difference? Join the club. There’s a nice explanation here and here.) Continue reading →

Lady Crickets Can Be Cougars, Too

By: | January 19, 2011

The term ‘cougar’ — referring to an older woman who pounces on a younger man — used to be an insult. Remember the most famous cougar of the ’90s? Mary Kay Letourneau, the 34-year-old teacher who slept with her 12-year-old student. She went to prison for seven years. (Ok, so Mary was more of a pedophile than a cougar, but you get my point.)

It’s different now. Cougars are everywhere, and not only accepted, but chic (Samantha Jones, Demi & Ashton, Cougar Town). They’re independent, sassy and smart. And this month, they’re finally getting some recognition from the scientific world. Female field crickets, it turns out, prefer the serenades of younger males.
Continue reading →

Unknown Unknowns

By: | January 18, 2011

On June 6, 2002, during a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recounted a particularly difficult episode in gathering intelligence during wartime. “Now what is the message there?” he said. “The message is that there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns.” The snickering started then, in that briefing room, and it hasn’t stopped since.

In my previous LWON post, “The Beginning of the End of Science,” I discussed the dangerous, even tragic legacy of George W. Bush’s unfamiliarity with scientific logic. A friend wrote to me that the nonsensical ramblings of Bush resembled Rumsfeld’s own plunge down the rabbit hole. Not so, I wrote back. Rumsfeld (pause; wince; sigh) got it right.

Continue reading →

Eulogy for Jim’s Camera

By: | January 17, 2011


This picture is what the sky really looks like.  Click on it.  It’s the biggest digital color picture of  the sky, the part called the Northern Galactic Cap, and it’s taken years to produce; it’s a trillion pixels, a terapixel and — says the press release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — to see it at full resolution, you’d need 500,000 high-def TVs.  In it are millions of asteroids, stars, quasars, and galaxies and they’re all free, go download them.  It holds, says an astronomer who worked on it, “one of the biggest bounties in the history of science.”  The camera that made the picture possible, a faithful and delicate and nearly perfect instrument, is now old news; it’s  gathering dust, is out to pasture. Continue reading →

Tempest in a Garbage Patch

By: | January 14, 2011

For decades, the oceans were an overlooked domain when it came to environmental awareness. Extinction, it seemed, was something that happened on land and pollution, primarily anyway, was a fate for air, lakes and rivers. That was observation bias, of course: we spend most of our time on land, breathing air and drinking fresh water, so naturally we noticed those befoulments first.

No longer. Tales of oceanic woe wash ashore with great regularity now, but few can match the media splash made by plastic pollution, most famously in the form of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Imagine: A floating, Texas-sized island of wildlife-choking trash bobbing menacingly smack in the middle of the North Pacific.

The garbage patch media event has already contributed to plastic bag bans in San Francisco and elsewhere, and has both led to and been reflected in the improbable spectacle of at least two different awareness-raising voyages in vessels constructed of cast-off plastic water bottles, complete with a clownish battle over rights to the ship’s name “Plastiki.” Even Oprah Winfrey joined in, calling the Great Pacific Garbage Patch “the most shocking thing I have seen.”

Does it matter then that it isn’t the size of Texas, and isn’t a floating island of trash or even, really, a patch?

Continue reading →

Vikings, Lightning and Bad Portents

By: | January 13, 2011

In the late spring of A.D. 793, British peasants experienced their first taste of Viking warfare, a clash so terrifying that it seemed to be of supernatural origin. “Terrible portents appeared over Northumbria and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky,” noted one scribe. “A little after that, in the same year on 8 June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”

The Vikings,  it seems,  didn’t play by British rules of engagement. Continue reading →