Life Keeps Walking

By: | October 23, 2026


My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade. She said feel free to poke ahead and when I did, within eyesight of her I found a panel of ancient fossilized ripple marks on a boulder half the size of our house. The way the boulder landed when it fell from surrounding cliffs, what was once flat was like a painting on a wall, 90 degrees to what is currently flat. Set along the face of this late Triassic boulder at the base of Wingate Sandstone, western Colorado, was a trackway of a four-legged dinosaur the size of a hippo. 

I started calling back to her, and I’ve got to say it sounded like mansplaining because for good reason she didn’t want to climb the boulder choke that was required to get here and I needed to convey a scene that was unfolding: a four-legged animal had walked across a mudflat leaving four or five impressions around 210 million years ago, maybe a smaller, long-necked predecessor of the sauropods. Looking at each print, you might think it was a bulged concretion or some other geologic oddity (they were convex to the rock, reverse impressions, also known as negative tracks), but when put together the walking pattern was clear to the eye.

Looking up through the crack I had climbed, she could see what I was talking about from fifty feet away, and maybe had a better view of the canvas from a distance, pointing out features I couldn’t see, branch-like impressions as if from vegetation.

After half an hour of back-and-forthing, I said I was going to keep on and see where our route went and I’d be back in half an hour. Where it went was nowhere, the canyon steep and so full of giant geologic debris I understood why there was no trail. Nobody comes up here. My wife and I specialize in places like this, poking into nowhere lands, and we’ve found dinosaur environs before, mostly plant fossils, sometimes the porous patterns of bone sticking out of a rock, and footprints now an then. There’s so much dinosaur-aged rock lying around—cliff walls and ten thousand boulders at a time—that you can’t help recognizing the existence of other ages.

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A Sestina for Songbirds

By: | October 21, 2026

Recently, while working through Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy with my mom, I encountered a new-to-me poetic form: the sestina. 

Jaouad’s book is a collection of creative enticements from writers and artists, musicians and teachers, and we’d come across Ann Patchett’s prompt, “The Mouse Sestina,” in the midst of a particularly hectic time. It was still winter, the radiant heating in my upstairs loft had sprung a leak and flooded the carpet, and I found myself replacing our flooring while my partner was on the other side of the planet. I responded to Patchett’s prompt, “Pick out a poetic form and give it a try,” by writing a haiku and calling it a day. I did not have the bandwidth to engage with a poetic form that she calls “ridiculously complicated.”

A sestina is, indeed, a complicated form—six stanzas of six lines each, where each line ends in one of six words that appear in a bewilderingly specified arrangement. Assign each ending word a number, and the arrangement looks like this: 

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My Neighbor, Me, and a Grand Principle

By: | October 19, 2026

The other week I was trudging through laps around the court I live on, and a neighbor yelled across the court, first “HI” and I yelled “HI” right back and then he yelled, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR!”

So I asked why it was the best day of the year, and trudged a little closer to hear him better even though he was still yelling, “BECAUSE IT’S THE DAY THE CHEMISTRY NOBEL IS ANNOUNCED.” I’ve known this neighbor since he first moved here, buying his first house, he and his wife having their first baby, starting his first real job, which — relevant to our discussion — was as a young professor of chemistry. Chemistry has always seemed to combine the idiosyncratic rats’-nest of biology and the rigorous theology of physics, and I stay away from it. But I’m a science writer and professionally obliged to be curious, so I trudged a bit closer and asked who won the chemistry Nobel. My neighbor was still yelling. “KAGAN AND SOAI,” pronounced so-aye, “FOR HOMOCHIRALITY,” he yelled, which, I haven’t a clue. And because he’s a scientist to his bones, every atom of him is scientist, he was pleased to tell me, unasked, what homochirality is and how it happens and I went over to where he was standing by his car and listened hard.

He started by telling me all the molecules of life — all the molecules of life? so, everything that life is and does? I didn’t ask — had a handedness, which chemists call chirality. Pretty word, ancient Greek, means “hand,” I sort of knew what chirality meant: the way the molecule twists itself, spirals toward the left or right, I pictured a snail shell, a DNA molecule, a helix. He was getting ahead of me already. Turns out that all the molecules of life — whatever they are — have the same chirality, homochirality, “homo,” also ancient Greek, means “same.” Every amino acid in every protein in every cell twists toward the left, they are all left-handed. But chemical reactions — which are what? I didn’t ask — in the lab, create both left- and right-handed molecules. I wasn’t following his argument 100%, more like 50%, and I know from these links I’m inserting that it’s not this simple. But I did get the bottom line: if both chiralities are created equal, how come we’re all molecularly left-handed?

The Nobel Prize winners figured that out and did the experiment(s). In experiments, it turns out — and this is thoroughly above my pay grade — they could do some magic that life must also have done: they could prejudice the outcome just the least little tiny bit toward the left-handed. And then they could take that outcome with the tiny prejudice and repeat — something or other that’s repeated — and by the time it all comes out in the wash, those tiny prejudices toward the left have added up and accumulated and pretty soon life is only left-handed. The word I’m thinking of is “propagated,” used the way physicists use it: one thing leads to another. A tiny difference in a reaction that gets repeated and repeated just gets bigger and bigger. The prejudice propagates and accumulates.

At least, I think that’s what my neighbor was saying. I didn’t ask because 1) I wouldn’t have understood him without a lot more brain work and I hadn’t had breakfast; and 2) I was interrupted by a blinding epiphany. Which was this ⬇️:

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A Village to Feed a Fawn

By: | October 14, 2026

I recently came across this bucket at one of our local coffee shops — a common drop and collection point for free goods, from books and magazines to excess zucchinis and figs. The bucket and its sign reminded me how much I like this dusty little town and its inhabitants, human and wild. So I called Jeff and asked him if I could write a blog post about the acorn collection program. He obliged with an enthusiastic rundown, emphasizing that I should really call the folks at the zoo and rescue. We chatted long enough to discover that, like everyone around here, he knows my dad. 

A few weeks later, Jeff posted on our community listserv, passing along an email from Kelly Garner, the fawn program director at Sierra Wildlife Rescue. She shared photos of fawns feasting on the donated bounty, thanked the community, and reminded us to use only grocery-sized bags or 3-gallon buckets, as “anything larger can be tough for our volunteers to lift.” Kelly recently took over as fawn program manager from Dave Cook — a legend in the wildlife rescue field who, over the past two decades or so, grew Sierra Wildlife Rescue from an essentially one-man operation into one of the leading fawn rescue operations in California, rehabilitating dozens of fawns a year. 

It was Dave, Kelly told me, who established a relationship with Jeff and Barbara Lee, and got them to help him recruit the community to gather acorns. In addition to leaves and other types of forage, the acorns that shower the ground here in late summer and fall — some dark and shiny as roasted espresso beans, some mahogany or pale yellow — are a staple food source for the convalescing fawns, who also need to eat 10-15% of their body weight in leaves per day. 

During fawn season, from mid-May through late July, the wildlife rescue gets hundreds of calls about fawns that appear to be abandoned, but usually aren’t. Many of these calls are about fawns that have just been left alone for a few hours, but this typically isn’t cause for concern, Kelly said — even when it’s tiny and weak, a fawn’s spots camouflage it well from color-blind predators, who see only dappled light against a dappled background. Unlike mature deer, very young fawns also do not emit scent that predators can detect: they have only one scent gland in their tiny hooves, which produces a chemical their mothers can follow. “Does are excellent mothers and keep their babies well fed and groomed,” Kelly added — if a fawn is alone, mom is often just delayed.

Photo credit: Sierra Wildlife Rescue/Kelly Garner

Seeing or hearing signs of distress doesn’t necessarily mean a fawn is an orphan, so when someone calls in, Kelly and her team ask them to keep an eye on it for a while, in case the mom comes back. If a fawn is orphaned, however, the youngest get bottle-fed formula by a single volunteer, so that they don’t get used to more than one person and lose their fear of humans; the goal is always to get rescued fawns back to the wild, Kelly said.

Kelly went to the same high school I did, we learned as we chatted. We both missed the wildlife here when we lived out of the area. Now, at Sierra Wildlife Rescue, she helps nurse hundreds of fawns back to health each year — working with them in groups of fawns around the same age to try to recreate the natural, matrilineal herds they form in the wild. Although the fawns don’t arrive as a family, the young ones can still form this kind of social structure over time — but that requires keeping the groups together and rehabilitating them for months, which is why they need so many acorns. “It really does take a village to feed the fawns,” she concluded, offering to send me more photos of the fawns munching. Then, after kindly answering all my questions, she signed off to feed some rescued foxes and a ringtail.

Unsound Minds in Charge

By: | October 12, 2026

My mother has forgotten she wants to die. For as long as I can remember she has been, not exactly planning it, but asserting her right to control her manner of death. When our family gathered for an Easter lunch during my freshman year of college, I announced that I had received a full scholarship to study abroad. She announced that she was going to kill herself at 80.

She would have been 48 then. She is 78 now. In the interim, packages have arrived in the mail every now and then from ‘living will’ companies. Advance directives have been stashed in locked filing cabinets. Powers of Attorney have been signed and placed in safe-deposit boxes to which she alone has access (folks, do not do this).

Also in the interim, a long-fought battle for Medical Assistance in Dying triumphed in our jurisdiction and just this month the government announced new legislation to allow advance requests in cases like Alzheimer’s. You no longer have to play roulette with timing—just make the request compos mentis and trust that it will happen once you’ve lost the plot.

It’s a recognition that what someone would want for themselves if they were in sound mind should be, if not automatically deferred to—particularly in something like death—seriously considered.

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Jumping Spider Courtship Is Dazzling, Dangerous Business

By: | October 9, 2026
Habronattus pyrrithrix (Betsy Mason)

Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrithrix. I was introduced to the species while writing a story about the perceptual world of jumping spiders for Science News. I interviewed visual ecologist Nate Morehouse at the University of Cincinnati. He had discovered that that Habronattus spiders can see the color red using a specialized filter, making them the rare arachnid with trichromatic vision. (In fact, they can see the same range of colors we can, plus UV).

This makes sense given the startlingly bright red faces of male H. pyrrithrix. They also have lime green front legs and adorable pompoms on their pedipalps. Despite this flashy get up, Morehouse found that it’s the orange knees on the males’ third set of legs that the females are most interested in. (He discovered this using a jumping spider eye tracker, which is exactly as awesome as it sounds.) He also showed me a fantastic video one of his students made of the elaborate courtship dance of the male H. pyrrithrix (below). 

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Tale of the Tape

By: | October 7, 2026
Icecube01-630

Yesterday Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing the experiment that detected an extraordinarily elusive subatomic particle via an ingenious reinterpretation of the concept of “telescope.” A version of this essay about that experiment originally appeared here on November 26, 2013, following the announcement of that discovery.

The news this past week that the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has fulfilled its mission by detecting neutrinos originating beyond the solar system reminds me of a story I once heard. I can’t reveal the source, though not out of a sense of journalistic responsibility. If anything, my discretion is due to journalistic irresponsibility: I don’t remember his name, and I wasn’t taking notes at the time. I have a good excuse, though: I was loopy.

The IceCube experiment is part of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the United States’s scientific research outpost at the South Pole, which I visited in late December 2008 on a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers program. On the day of my stop at IceCube, I was fresh off a sea-level-to-9000-foot-elevation-in-three-hours plane ride and therefore experiencing the effects of oxygen deprivation. Almost immediately upon my arrival at the Pole I met someone working on IceCube who offered to give me a tour, and not knowing if I’d have another chance, I accepted, albeit hypoxially.

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