Science Writers on Twitter: Comforted By the Dying Universe

By: | October 21, 2019

@nattyover: I turn for comfort to “A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects” https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9701131.pdf

@nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta.  “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years.  The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the whole universe will change “over time scales which greatly exceed the current age of the universe.”  That is, take the present planets, stars, galaxies, and universe and fast-forward them into the far future, farther into the future than the Big Bang was in the past, in fact, all the way to the end. It doesn’t end well. The paper starts small, though, with stars.

@shannonmstirone Replying to @nattyover: Today is one of those days when I’m comforted by knowing that one day our sun will die and our galaxy will merge with Andromeda and there’s no escaping, this is all temporary.

@shannonmstirone is Shannon Stirone, and she is also a science writer. The sun — after it blows up like a balloon and fries the earth along with most of the solar system — will shrink back down into a barely shining cinder. Our galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are going to collide and merge and become an entirely different galaxy. Our cosmic identities are temporary, change is inescapable.

@nattyover: Nothing more soothing than the thought of a neutron star sublimating

I read this and had to go look it up, and oh my goodness. Sublimation is when a solid goes straight to gas, no liquid melting in between; dry ice is solid carbon dioxide sublimating. Neutron stars are a stage in the deaths of stars much bigger than ours, so big they don’t shrink down to cinders but keep shrinking until their atoms are all jammed into nuclei, no atoms any more, just mostly neutrons, a billion tons in a teaspoon of degenerate solid neutron star. And then their neutrons decay, as neutrons do, into other particles, which decay farther until the stars have evaporated. They’ve sublimed.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the galaxies turning redder and redder until they finally blonk out. 

Stars live by burning gas and when the gas runs out, stars turn red; so when galaxies full of stars also run out of gas, they also turn red. Eventually all the gas in the universe has been used up as fuel and has pretty much dissipated, and no stars ever form again, neither do galaxies. What’s left is the black holes that had been at the centers of galaxies, and finally, via Hawking radiation, even the black holes evaporate.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the heat death of the universe.

Meanwhile, the universe which has always been expanding, keeps on expanding. In the end the warm, moving, shining universe is cold and still and dark.

@shannonmstirone: Deep-death-time makes me happy.

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Window Tree

By: | October 18, 2019

This is an update to a guest post that ran on December 12, 2018.

A few days ago, I found the following letter from my grandfather, Donald Pearce, in my parents’ bookshelves. It was tucked into a copy of Medea which he sent to me when I was a high school sophomore. ( I was precisely the kind of teenager who loved Medea.)

Grampy taught English literature at UC Santa Barbara, but always said he had more fun teaching at the local adult education center. I think he found the students a little more varied in their life experiences, and more interesting.

As you can tell from this letter — all those em dashes and exclamation points! — Grampy didn’t just read. He dove into texts headfirst and swam around in them, splashing about with glee. He spread his infectious enthusiasm right up until his death, which occurred about a year after he sent me this letter.

These days, the longing I feel for my grandparents feels less like waves, and more like a wellspring. The window tree in my backyard is showering gold again, so thought I’d repost what I wrote after my Nana died in 2017. Cheers, honey. Read on!

The Window Tree

All year long I’ve been haunted by a poem. When I sit down to work or go for a walk, it drifts into my mind: 

Tree at my window, window tree
My sash is lowered when night comes on
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

There she is, wearing the tattered yellow paisley bathrobe that used to hang on my grandfather’s broad shoulders. Her silvery bob is a little wild, static electricity from her slippers raising stray hairs into a halo.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

It’s been almost exactly a year now since my grandmother died, but I still sometimes wonder if the snatches of verse in my head are a message or echo – from her, from somewhere.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

Let me explain. When I was in my twenties, I lived with my grandmother for about a year. She didn’t sleep well. One morning, after a particularly rough night, she padded into the kitchen carrying a book of verse and opened it to Robert Frost’s “Tree at my Window.”

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Old Art, Older Animals

By: | October 17, 2019
Dinosaur curator Matthew Carrano, paleoartist Jay Matternes, and museum director Kirk Johnson talk art, fossils, and lizard predation.

When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The museum used digital photography to capture them in such detail that they could reprint them at full size, took them off the walls, rolled them up, and put them in storage.

The museum also got in touch with the artist, Jay Maternes, a very influential paleoartist. He’s in his 80s now and he still lives in the D.C. area, so earlier this week they invited him to the museum’s auditorium to talk about his art, animals, and the process of painting the murals.

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Fig of My Imagination

By: | October 16, 2019

When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the trees were, and they’d say things like, “Oh, we planted that last year!” I would come home and make puppy dog eyes at my little fig tree.

And then—BOOM! Five years ago, August came, and the figs were there. I’d battle it out with the birds to get the fruit first. We got a net to protect the figs. The birds figured out how to get into the net, although sometimes they needed help getting out. I would curse the birds as I peeled the net away—they’d fly off and I’d feel happy, but slightly miffed that they’d gotten something I wanted. Then a year came when we had to have friends help pick it because there were too many. There were even figs left after the birds got in and out of the net.

This year, there were so many figs that the birds couldn’t keep up either. We never put the net up. Every day, there are more figs, sitting on their stems like purple jewels. The ground below is littered with ones we haven’t gotten in time. In the morning the air around the tree smells sweet; in the height of the day when the sun beats down, it smells like the morning after a fig wine bender.

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Montana’s Buffalo Conundrum

By: | October 15, 2019

This post originally ran April 3, 2014. I’ve added a brief update at the end.

Yellowstone National Park spans three states and nearly 3,500 square miles, making it one of the largest parks in the US. So when I read that Montana officials are searching for a home for 135 Yellowstone bison living on Ted Turner’s sprawling private ranch, I was bewildered. Why not just put them back in the park? Anyone who has visited Yellowstone knows that it’s prime habitat. You can’t drive a mile without seeing their shaggy hulking forms. Or better yet, let the bison roam free. After all, isn’t that the definition of a wild animal?

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It All Depends Where You Look

By: | October 14, 2019

This post was first published on January 9, 2019

Last month, while on assignment in Cozumel for a story on sponges, I went diving on a beautiful reef. It was stunning – a world of color, dreamlike shapes, and life everywhere I looked. Normally, I would have just swam about, marveled at the pretty nature, and come back to my hotel with a fat grin on my face.

But I just couldn’t stop fretting over all the sponges. You see, my story was on a theory among sponge experts that sponges are secretly, quietly taking over the world. It is … wait for it … The Rise of the Planet of the Sponge. Scary, right? Except just on coral reefs, not the world. And only in the Caribbean Sea. So, I guess it’s The Rise of the Caribbean Reef of the Sponge. Wow, that really doesn’t work as well.

Anyway, the theory goes that huge coral and urchin die-offs have led to a lot of spare real estate and algae on Caribbean reefs. The sponges have stepped in, sucked up the excess sugar pumped out by the algae and filled the now-empty reefs.

And diving in Cozumel, I noticed for the first time just how much of the color on a reef is actually sponge. We all know the big barrel sponges – those giant cannon-looking things hanging off the reef – but I’d never really noticed the encrusting sponges before. These are the colorful flat sponges that sort of drizzle around the reef like splotches on a Jackson Pollack.

It turns out that very little of the life I was looking at on the coral reef was actually coral. When I asked the folks on my boat – some of whom had been diving Cozumel for decades – none of them noticed the dominance of sponge over the coral. Likewise, the dive guides hadn’t noticed it either. How could they not see it? It was so obvious!

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I Reserve the Right to Be a Miserable Old F*$%

By: | October 11, 2019

I’ve begun to wonder if, on one’s 50th birthday, a switch flips that loosens all that was tight and squeezes everything else in a vice grip. It seems that in the middle years basic gestures can cause lasting injuries. Bruises appear out of nowhere. My same-age friends and I compare aches and pains, and we all agree that our physical lives have lurched onto a new bone-jarring path.

A while back I started jotting down notes about my daily twinges, recalling the ridiculous ways I’ve caused myself enough pain to yell “ow!” or some other heavier complaint. Here are 19 of them. True stories, all. Continue reading →

It’s Ok to Opt Out of Mammograms

By: | October 10, 2019
breastcancer

It’s October, which means that my local hardware store is offering a discount to shoppers who wear pink, Allegiant Airlines is selling pink drinks and police officers across the country are donning pink badges, all the name of “breast cancer awareness.” Also known as “pinkwashing,” these pink ribbon awareness campaigns allow people to feel like they’re doing something, without having to think too deeply about the sober facts about breast cancer. Breast cancer screening has failed to reduce the incidence of metastatic disease, and it’s unnecessarily turned healthy women into cancer patients (more on that below).

If you find a lump or something weird in your breast, absolutely get it checked out. In those instances, a mammogram is a necessary diagnostic tool. But screening mammograms — those done when you have no symptoms — have never been shown to decrease overall mortality and may cause tangible harms. For these reasons, I’ve chosen to opt out of mammography, and I based my decision on statistics and science.

For answers to some common questions about the limits of breast cancer screening, see this post I wrote in 2013. I’ve written about the shortcomings of screening for close to 20 years now, and I’m tired of writing the same stories. But since I first wrote the post below in October of 2015, I’ve watched a lot of friends get called back for more tests after a screening mammogram found something that ended up not to be cancer, and those experiences were surprisingly stressful and life-disrupting.

**

Before I begin, a disclaimer: I’m sick of writing about mammography. It feels like groundhog day — I’ve been writing the same damn story, over and over and over again, for nearly 15 years. This is at least the fifth time I’ve written a LWON post about mammograms. (See also: Breast cancer’s false narrative, The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, FAQs about breast cancer screening, and Breast cancer’s latest saga: misfearing and misplaced goalposts.)

So why I am I writing about mammograms again? Because even though I just published a story at FiveThirtyEight explaining why science won’t resolve the mammogram debate and a feature at Mother Jones asking how many women have mammograms hurt? (the answer is millions) the harms of mammography continue to be ignored or mischaracterized in the media. Every time this happens, I get letters from people asking me to please clarify this point again. Just this past week, a New York Times editorial penned by two breast radiologists and a breast surgeon declared, “Let’s stop overemphasizing the ‘harms’ related to mammogram callbacks and biopsies,” while an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about breast cancer” claimed that, “the idea that anxiety is a major harm doesn’t have much scientific support.” (In fact, at least one study has found long-term consequences from a false alarm.)

What both of these opinion pieces miss and what too many women still don’t know is that while 61 percent of women who have annual mammograms will have a callback for something ultimately declared “not cancer,” this isn’t the most damaging problem. Such false alarms are more devastating than they might seem (I can’t think of another recommended medical test with such a high false positive rate), but most women would probably gladly accept this risk in exchange for a reasonable chance to prevent a cancer death.

Here’s the bigger problem: screening mammography has failed to reduce the incidence of metastatic disease and it’s created an epidemic of a precancer called DCIS. The premise of screening is that it can find cancers destined to metastasize when they’re at an early stage so that they can be treated before they turn deadly. If this were the case, then finding and treating cancers at an early stage should reduce the rate at which cancers present at a later, metastatic stage. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happened.

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