Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrhithrix. 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. pyrrhithrix. 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. pyrrhithrix (below).
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.
Grief is a persistent little bugger. It never really goes away, just changes shape. Well after my last book came out without the fanfare I’d hoped for, I’m revisiting a version of grief that I hadn’t known existed, and that’s still with me. It’s no long a dart; I’d say it’s more a smattering of dust motes. But there it is, still hanging around.
This is how I thought about it when it first hit me.
My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych 101: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These five were originally proposed by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and while they were derived unscientifically and are clearly massively oversimplified, I have found truth in them. As my father was declining, I’d first denied his trajectory by posing unrealistic plans that required him to have a future (e.g., turning my husband’s workshop into a little apartment for dad, never mind all the nursing care he required). I experienced deep anger at people who didn’t see worth in healing his various ailments, and I begged any higher power who was listening to keep him whole until I could find solutions to unsolvable problems. Eventually, I sat in darkness knowing there was nothing I could do to adjust his heading. I slid in and out of each of these feelings, in various orders, numerous times as he lay dying. By the end, acceptance was all that was left.
My friend Laura provided me an instructive moment of delight yesterday when she confided that she’d just opened a jar of 2007 “Plum Yum,” a jammy concoction made of Italian prune plums from my orchard. She said she’d been trying to break her lifelong habit of saving special things for special occasions. “Trying to drink the fancy tea, use the fancy soaps, eat the meaningful jams and preserves,” she told me, while reporting that that the 2007 vintage is still delicious.
Her dispatch made me reflect on how much better it is to enjoy things than to save them. For the longest time, I kept the embroidered quilt Grandma Friesen had made for me stored in a closet, because it was so special. After many years and several moves, I thought what’s the point of having it, if it’s always stored out of sight? So I started using it on the bed, and it now has a few stains but allowing it to be part of my everyday life is the very thing that makes it so special. With it in my living space, I get a chance to think of Grandma every time I see it. I missed those opportunities when it was hidden away in a box.
I think of the kitchen table that Dave hand made for me out of cherry wood for our 10th anniversary. It’s our everyday table and it has accumulated so many stains and scratches, and I love it so much more than if it were in a special dining room we rarely used. (We don’t actually have a formal dining room, but still.)
Dave is a winemaker and people often tell him they save his wine for a special occasion. That doesn’t make him as happy as they might think, and not just because he’s got another bottle to sell. He crafts the wine to be shared. He wants it to be the thing that makes you feel special, no matter how ordinary the day.
Coming home from ScienceWriters2026 earlier this week, I rewatched the classic 2004 film Sideways. (It aged well!) In the movie, Paul Giamatti plays Miles, an aspiring novelist who is depressed about the state of his life. (I had remembered that the scene where drinks from the spit bucket had been provoked by angst over his love life, but in fact it was sparked by his despair over learning that his novel was rejected by publishers.)
For Miles, that special occasion happens at a fast food joint, where, in a moment of despair, he drinks the wine out of a paper cup. It’s a sad scene in the movie, but in real life, I think that’s exactly right. Really, there’s no better time to pull out that special thing you’ve been saving than a moment when life isn’t feeling special at all.
Image: drinking special wine on the front porch on an ordinary evening.
Over the last week I was lucky enough to spend several days communing with science writers in Oregon. I love going different places and seeing how different things are. This time I particularly enjoyed the difference in vegetation – ferns and mossy rocks everywhere.
I have a soft spot for lichens, and friends send me pictures on their travels, so here I am: sending you, friends, a picture from my travels. I see a lot of lichen around here in my East Coast home, but mostly they are pretty flat, plastered to the substrate, maybe just a curly edge poking up. It’s a rare treat to see the kind that stands up and branches. The lichen above caught my eye outside my hotel in Corvallis. Look at it! Being so good and lichen-y!
Your average frog loves a good meaty fly. But to this amphibian predator, a stationary fly might not register as something worth nabbing, if it is seen at all. “[A frog] will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving,” wrote the authors of a 1959 paper in Proceedings of the IRE [Institute of Radio Engineers]. Only when the fly takes off does the frog’s eye-brain messaging system kick on and suggest tongue action. The movement itself (actually, the resulting change in the intensity of light) transforms fly into food. Or really, nothing into something.
Wild how that works. I highly recommend you read through the paper linked above for a detailed explanation of the frog’s eye-brain connection. It’s delightful reading (minus the part about what the frog went through).
Now. I’m looking for an analogy here; I’m sure there must be one. Is it this? That we, like the frog, can be blind to things that aren’t making a fuss, that aren’t yelling at the top of their lungs like the Whos down in Whoville, “We are here! We are here!” Even things that are crucial to our own survival? I mean, if the frog registered the un-moving fly, the frog would feed freely. But no movement, no nothing.
Or there’s this: Are we the fly, hiding in plain sight, knowing that being noticed is risky? That it’s best to stay quiet and still no matter how important the message is we’d like to project? And that, at just the right moment, rather than fight the best move is to flee?
I’m thinking this is not an either-or situation.
We can be the frog when our brains refuse to acknowledge what’s happening around us (or perhaps more at a distance in our case—war, poverty, disasters far afield, cruelty to dogs—TO DOGS!!). We can’t take it, our brains are overloaded, so we see nothing at all unless it comes into fashion to care about that thing (the fly flies), and suddenly we all want to focus on that thing, to take it down and make it stop. At least until we’re sated again.
And we’re the fly when we refuse to speak up for fear of being smacked down by the sticky tongues of our own kind. Shhhhhh. Sit tight, someone else will deal with the problem.
I mean, I get it that sometimes there is no fight in us, that fleeing is the only recourse. That’s why it’s called fight OR flight, people. (It’s hard to look cool fighting while fleeing. Think about it.) Big frog with sticky tongue, small fly with no weapon. Know when you’re beat.
WTF, evolution, the fly might ask? Why hasn’t the fly evolved a toxin or nasty taste to thwart take down? What are the fly’s chances without any option but to dash into the sky? Immobility is a defense, but that can’t be enough.
Clearly the fly registers the un-moving flog, with some deep understanding that there is a piece of soft sticky flesh marinating in that thing’s foul mouth that is apt to do serious damage. Poor fly.
Then there’s this: Does the fly that flees the frog (phew!) feel free in flight just before feeling the phlegm of the frog? And what if the frog (the fly’s foe) fumbles the fly and the fly flies far, free? Face facts: Flies are everywhere. Frogs are fumbling every day.
With apologies to everyone: Flee Fly! Frogs Fumble.
Since writing a book on the night sky (The Wild Dark), I can’t help looking up. I’ve slept outside most nights since the end of February, more comfortable falling asleep under stars than in a bed. The other night, I woke startled at the brightness of the Millky Way, thinking it was a wildfire. The nights that drive me inside are some of the best, hauling in my sleeping bag and pad and falling back to sleep to the sound of rain on the roof. Which brings us a post I wrote in 2021, looking up and hoping for moisture in a dry land.
I’ve been traveling from town to town in Colorado giving outdoor stage talks at night, telling stories about drought and wildfires and raging thunderstorms. The moon and stars passed over our open-air venues. A poet came up to read her version of a rain prayer at each performance, and she wore a flowing dress, her palms held to the sky. A crown of flowers in her hair was illuminated with tiny wire lights to get the attention of the clouds. Good, old fashioned pagan stuff.
I don’t know if prayer works, but it’s worth covering bases when it’s this dry. Getting clouds to come to us and drop their loads is no small or even possible task. Scientifically, there’s no way it could be true, based on something only in your head. Why would a cloud come toward you at your calling, then be convinced to disgorge its rain? In dry country, everything hangs by the taut string of precipitation. You imagine all sorts of things are possible.
One of our performance spaces was on a mesa top where we built a stage out of wooden pallets and brought in festoons of stage lights, a sound system, and images projected against a screen. As rain stories came up that night, drops began falling. I could see them through the stage lighting, silver streaks diving into a field of chairs and faces. I called to the rain as it fell, holding up my hands and feeling the cold sting, like diamonds poured from a freezer.
It is fall, and even though not much changes here, the light becomes low and golden. I feel like every season is my favorite time of year when it arrives, but this time, I really mean it. Here is a beautiful tree of gold from a trip to Japan, and here’s a post I wrote about that tree, another moment of golden light.
I fell in love in Japan. He was older, and so very tall. There was a glow about him, warm as sunshine. I could have sat and watched him for hours. Even though we didn’t have that much time together, I knew I would never forget him. He was so present, so grounded. Resilient after years of living, marked by all of the storms, both meteorologic and political, that he had weathered.
And so alone—not just on that path near Nijo Castle, but in the world. He had no living relatives. On a family tree, he would sit on a distant, dangling branch, separated from his kin by millions of years. And there was something about this solitude that was irresistible, too.
The ginkgo tree is an island in the arboreal world. Ginkgo flourished during the Cretaceous, with five or six species growing in the Northern Hemisphere. But as time passed, the number of species shrank to a single species with fan shaped leaves. It disappeared from Europe and North America. The survivors found themselves in China, where, years and years later, humans began to protect and cultivate them, and ultimately, bring them elsewhere—to Japan, to Korea, to Berlin and Central Park. There is even one on my street, growing out of the planting strip, coming up to my shoulder.
Ginkgos are known to be resilient, thriving in urban areas that cause other trees to wither. In Hiroshima, ginkgo trees began growing new shoots in the days after the atomic bomb killed 70,000 people instantly. People would continue to die in the months and years that followed, but the ginkgo trees unfurled their green fans again the next spring. They still do. About 170 trees, known as hibakujumoku, survive today.
But none is so appealing than my dear tree, thousands of miles away now. I’m not sure what drew me to him above all other ginkgos. Perhaps he was the first one who helped me feel the deep time of a tree that extends further backward and forward than I can ever imagine. Time that feels like golden autumn light.
