First comes love, then comes the rubella test?

By: | December 21, 2010

Once upon a time, in a far off land, a boy and a girl courted and fell in love. Although they lived in the big city, they decided to tie the knot in Montana, where the boy’s parents live. But before the state would recognize their union, the girl had to have a blood test.

Pre-marital blood tests came into vogue in the mid-1900s as a way to stem the dramatic increase in syphilis. But by the 1980s, however, they had lost their appeal. Many states found that they weren’t cost effective. The number of cases detected was minuscule compared to the money being shelled out to test all the excited young lovers hoping to wed. When Massachusetts repealed its blood test requirement in 2005, officials said the test was outdated and an economic burden to the state and to couples, according to the Associated Press.

Today, only two states require blood tests before marriage: Mississippi and Montana. Continue reading →

Tonight: Blood Moon

By: | December 20, 2010

UPDATE:   I woke up, looked at the clock, then looked out the window at the moon — no eclipse.  “They must have gotten it wrong,” I thought.  I looked at the clock again, saw I had misread it, and realized with a little shock of joy, they never get this wrong.  Other phenomena of nature — snowstorms, earthquakes, tornadoes, visits by relatives, hurricanes — are unpredictable and easy to get wrong.  Eclipses are more like sunrise and sunset:  ancient physics and beacons of certainty in this uncertain world.  The eclipse went as predicted.

Tonight:  11:41 p.m. Pacific time, 2:41 a.m. eastern time, toward daybreak in Europe, the earth will begin to completely eclipse the moon.  I know this only because I got a press release from Sky & Telescope, a magazine for highly serious amateur astronomers.  The editors at Sky & Tel are also highly serious — they wear t-shirts with comets and have asteroids named after them —  and this press release is full of passion and poetry. Continue reading →

BMJ’s Bizarre and Boisterous Christmas Issue

By: | December 17, 2010


Scientific articles published in prestigious medical journals don’t usually begin like this:

A Little Red Hen lived in a university hospital where she took care of the sick animals in the different wards. She did this under the overseeing eye of her wise and learned mentors. There was the Cow, who had a degree from a prestigious overseas university. There was the Pig, who had led mergers of several high standing hospitals in the country. And there was the Sheep, who had an outstanding treatment record with almost no animal morbidity and mortality.

But it’s almost Christmas. And each Christmas, the 170-year-old British Medical Journal puts out an issue packed with articles that are funny, quirky, and downright bizarre. “The essence of the Christmas BMJ is strangeness. It’s our left brain issue. We want everything to be not as it seems,” wrote the journal’s editor, Richard Smith, in 2000. The above excerpt, for instance, comes from an article about the challenges of collaborations in medical research. The Little Red Hen in this tale does all the work and gets little of the pie she baked. (In the classic folk tale, of course, Little Red Hen asks for help turning wheat seeds into bread and receives none. But at least she gets to eat the bread!). Continue reading →

An Astronomer and a Theorist Walk Into a Bar

By: | December 16, 2010

One of the campuses where I teach is haunted. Everybody says so. They hear noises in the night. They encounter cold spots. They come to work in the morning and find a seemingly immovable file cabinet in the middle of a hallway. My role, you might not be surprised to hear, is that of resident skeptic.

The role isn’t one I cultivated, but it’s one I easily acquired. The faculty member who reported seeing lights in the windows of a room that, when she entered the building, she found to be dark? I walked her back outside, asked her where she was when she saw the lights, and offered an explanation. The path was icy; she would have been walking with her head down. When she did look up to see where she was going, she would have no more than glanced in the direction of the building. The windows of the room in question would have caught the reflection from the streetlamps along the path, and the windows of the next room over were in fact lit up. At a glance, the combination of lights could easily give the illusion of emanating from a room that was dark.

She said she now understood that what she’d seen could easily have been an optical illusion, and she thanked me, and then she went back inside and told the rest of the faculty that she’d seen a ghost. Continue reading →

The Art of the Insect

By: | December 15, 2010
'bee veins' by Barrett Klein

Earlier this week I was tickled by a study about dancing insects. European honey bees perform a rump-shaking ‘waggle dance’ in order to tell their hivemates where they’ve found food. The new research showed that when the bees don’t get any sleep, their dance moves become spasmatic and repellent; they clear the floor like a drunk uncle at a wedding (see a video here).

I suspected that the lead researcher, Barrett Klein, would be an interesting guy just based on the URL of his website — www.pupating.org — and I was right. He not only comes up with clever experiments to test Apis social interactions, but is an illustrator, sculptor and expert in ‘cultural entomology’: the study of how insects inch into human culture.
Continue reading →

Buried Violence: the Ouachita Sleepers

By: | December 14, 2010

I swear, you could get a good start at being a practicing geologist, just from looking at maps.  These lovely looping patterns are a satellite’s view of some mountains in southeastern Oklahoma.  They are the Ouachita, pronounced Wachita and mispronounced Wichita. I’m fond of the Ouachita – they’re sleepers. And given what went on underneath them, we’re probably glad we weren’t around when they were awake. Continue reading →

Emperor Hadrian and the Boy He Loved

By: | December 13, 2010

Last Wednesday night, in a swanky hall at Sotheby’s in New York, auctioneer Hugh Hildesley opened bidding for a sculptural masterpiece from the Roman world. Art collectors knew this statue as A Marble Portrait Bust of the Deified Antinous, and Hildesley and his staff expected that it would sell in the two- to three-million dollar range.

That didn’t happen though.   Continue reading →

Spooks, Wikileaks and Archaeology

By: | December 10, 2010

Like many other journalists, I’ve been following the reports this week about Julian Assange, editor-in-chief at Wikileaks. I like whistleblowers and others who shed light on dark places, and I hoped that Assange would find some way of slipping through the fingers of all those Interpol inspectors. Of course it wasn’t to be. As of last report, British authorities are holding Assange in a segregration cell in Wandsworth Prison in South London, the Victorian-era penitentiary that once housed Oscar Wilde.

I wish there were more such whistle-blowers out there, particularly in a field that I know fairly well: archaeology. As I have discovered, intelligence agencies have a particular penchant for recruiting archaeologists as spooks.   Continue reading →