Work Stoppage

By: | September 6, 2010

Even though Heather is Canadian, Josie and I have prevailed and Last Word on Nothing is having a holiday today, the American Labor Day during which labor is celebrated but nobody works.  We’ll be back on Tuesday and we hope that before then you won’t have gotten discouraged and quit.  Please, come back.

Actually Labor Day celebrates the Labor Movement, and this picture is one of the reasons why.

Photo caption:  “A little spinner in the Mollohan Mills, Newberry, S.C. She was tending her ‘sides’ like a veteran, but after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, ‘She just happened in.’ Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that ‘just happened in,’ or ‘are helping sister.’ Dec. 3, 08. Witness Sara R. Hine. Location: Newberry, South Carolina”

Photo credit: Lewis W. Hine for the National Child Labor Committee

Bug/Blog/The Bunfight Continues

By: | September 3, 2010
Cinnamon Buns

Buns are flying across the airwaves of The Last Word on Nothing: currant buns, sticky buns, cinnamon buns, steamed buns, hot dog buns–all kinds of buns, but thankfully no buns of steel (yet). The bunfight began several weeks ago with an exchange between myself and my esteemed colleague, Ann Finkbeiner, on the benefits and burdens of bugs. Now I have discovered two fascinating ant stories to add to my armamentarium.

The ants in question don’t eat sticky buns, though some species, like the odorous house ant, are very fond of sugary sweets. No, the first type of ant is a leaf-cutting fungus farmer living in Trinidad and Tobago. Acromyrmex octospinosus grows and feeds on a fungus called Leucoagaricus gongylophorus,  “which it cultivates on a medium of masticated leaf tissue” (thanks, Wikipedia).

Scientists led by Matt Hutchings and his Ph.D. student Joerg Barke of the University of East Anglia in the U.K. have discovered that these ants use multiple antibiotics as weed killers to maintain their fungus gardens. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Sublime

By: | September 2, 2010

1089px-Dry_ice_in_cupSublime:  you don’t hear it much except as an adjective meaning really, really good, used the way “divine” or “glorious” “wonderful” are used, just another adjective, nothing to do with divinity or glory or wonder.   But really, sublime describes something that takes you beyond the ordinary — Glenn Gould plays Bach sublimely —  something transcendent, exalted.  It’s a lovely word, a word that inspires love. Continue reading →

The Latest from Expedition Titanic

By: | September 1, 2010

Hurricane Danielle and its 40-foot-tall waves drove Expedition Titanic back to port on Monday, but not before crew members recorded this haunting HD video of the RMS Titanic on August 29th.  Each time I watch this footage, I feel a sense of awe and emptiness. So much silent, eerie, lacy beauty, so much spooky preservation–all under the immense, inexorable pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.  How much more can the Titanic endure before it collapses?

The expedition’s principal investigator James Delgado, a nautical archaeologist of my acquaintance, yesterday described the ocean floor as the world’s largest museum. As a non-diver, I doubt that I will ever roam its wrecks myself. Thank you, James and your fellow crewmembers, for showing us the Titanic at its most frail and wondrous.

The great ship now looks almost human to me.

A Glorious Year for Crop Circles and Crop Rectangles

By: | August 31, 2010

Remember that billowing cloud of ash from Iceland that floated over Britain and other parts of northern Europe this past spring, shutting down airspace from London to Hamburg and filling airports with fuming travellers? It wasn’t all bad, I discovered yesterday. In fact if you were an archaeologist, particularly a British archaeologist, that plume of frozen magma had a real silver lining. It created, in concert with one of the driest springs in recent memory in England, almost perfect conditions for the discovery of cropmarks.

Until yesterday morning, I had never heard of cropmarks. But it turns out that I’ve been missing a lot. Cropmarks are very cool phenomena–a vast green geometry that signals the presence of buried archaeological sites. Think circles,  rectangles,  squares, and other patterns created by vegetation lying atop buried ruins, from Bronze-Age causeways to Iron-Age tombs. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Make a Wish

By: | August 30, 2010

I’m not exactly sure what this is a picture of — I’ve seen it somewhere, maybe a graphic picture of noise? some computer thing? — but given his title, Abstruse Goose clearly means us to think of it as stars.

#1.  It looks real.  #2.  Abstruse Goose, if you’re out there, can you tell us what that picture really is? please?

http://abstrusegoose.com/20

IVF: A Great Investment

By: | August 27, 2010
3.5 million children have been born worldwide following treatment with assisted reproductive technologies (ART)

Last summer, I wrote an article for the magazine New Scientist about a bold new initiative to provide low-cost in vitro fertilization—for as little as $300 per cycle—to poor women in developing countries. The article, entitled Cheap IVF offers hope to childless millions, described initiatives by the Swiss-based Low Cost IVF Foundation and the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) to offer IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to women in Africa and elsewhere who cannot afford the the procedures. The need is great: some ten to 30 percent of African couples are infertile, often as the result of untreated sexually-transmitted diseases or post-delivery pelvic infections. Childless African women are often branded with a terrible stigma, facing public ridicule, abandonment or divorce.

My biggest surprise lay not in reporting the story, which was inspiring, but in reading the online comments after the article was published. Many of them were vituperative, asking why women in Africa, a continent with a high birth rate, deserved such technologies. Those were the mild remarks: others were outright racist. (In fact, the United Nations predicts that the number of children per woman in Africa is predicted to decline to less than three by 2050.) Continue reading →

Making a Really Big Galaxy

By: | August 26, 2010

This is how astronomers think giant galaxies form super-massive black holes (the adjectives are the astronomers’).  Way back at the beginning, maybe a billion years after the birth of a 14 billion year old universe, enormous galaxies a hundred times bigger than the Milky Way were born, pulling themselves together out of clouds of stars and hydrogen gas into spirals.   Neighboring spirals swirled into each other, swooped back out leaving long plumes called tidal tails, fell back together again, over and over, until they couldn’t pull apart any more and gradually merged into a single galaxy.  During the merger, the bright gas was pulled by gravity toward the center into a more brilliant central disk, and inside the disk, finally, no one knows how, gravity won entirely and the gas collapsed into a single point so massive and dense that light itself was caught in a black hole.  Or at least, that’s the story.  It’s probably true, though observations of the young universe are hard to make.  So to help observers know what to look for, theorists make computer simulations.  This is a simulation. Continue reading →