On Beavers, Nature’s Perfect Tech Analogy

By: | August 9, 2018

a brown beaver with some grass

If you know anything about beavers, it’s likely that they build dams. Natures engineers, they’re called. Eager beavers are up and at ‘em, ready to build complex structures with the simplest materials in just the right spot to stop a river from flowing. In fact, engineering schools across the country — MIT, Oregon State, American River College to name a few — use the beaver as a mascot for this reason. What better animal to represent future engineers than one that builds?

Well, I recently read a book called Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge by Ashely Shew that made clear that beavers are in fact the perfect mascot for technologists in Silicon Valley, but not in the way they might like.

Continue reading →

Fleeting impressions of Puerto Vallarta

By: | August 8, 2018

I pack four books and a magazine for a three-day trip. Then I buy more at the airport. I forget to pack a change of trousers. This will come back to bite me when I vomit on a boat.

The first thing I do when I land is get hoodwinked by not one, but two time-share salespeople in quick succession. I just want a taxi. Finally I find someone who not only promises but also delivers the taxi. When I arrive at the hotel, the concierge assures me I paid an order of magnitude more than the regulated tariff. I am not cut out for places that require assertion of will.

Lightning plays over the ocean as I lie down. In the middle of the night it wakes me and I figure out the curtain situation. Still at 5am the storm is raging. Aren’t storms episodic by definition? Don’t clouds run out of friction when they rub themselves raw? The morning ocean pretends it never happened.

Two dolphins take turns hopping out of the water outside my hotel window. I’ve never seen a dolphin in the wild. I rush out on my balcony in my underwear and annunciate, “Oh my GOD,” alone, atheistically. And then 15 seconds later I decide I’m done watching dolphins and it’s time to return to my Chinese homework. I did the exact same when I first saw the Northern Lights—exclamation, balcony, underwear, early-onset apathy and all. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Forgotten Stories

By: | August 7, 2018

Every science journalist has a mixed portfolio. Some stories go viral. Others feel as if they’re read by five people including your parents. Our pieces also have a spectrum of meaningfulness. I’ve published articles to pay the bills that I hardly remember writing — I stumble across them sometimes, years later, and am shocked to see my byline — and I’ve written stories I will never forget. Maybe the reporting blew open my mind, wasn’t what I expected. Maybe what I discovered inspired me to see the world differently. Maybe it was just plain fun.

Sometimes, the axes of visibility and meaning intersect in a sad way. The stories my robot self wrote end up #3 on Reddit, while the ones I pour my heart into get ignored. I mourn these forgotten stories. I feel like I’ve created new life, and when I finally get to release my precious being into the wild, instead of flapping its wings and soaring it flails and crashes headfirst into my car windshield.

This post is a eulogy for these stories. Many of us have them. I know because I’ve reached out to a handful of science writers and they’ve told me, oh yes, we mourn these stories, too. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 4, 2018

A satellite map of smoke wreathing the west coast of the USA

July 30 – August 3: Climate, sex, and death edition

Everyone is getting nervous about the climate these days, or the weather, or the fires, or the droughts, or all the opaque but undeniable links that bind them. Emma is not so much nervous as she is furious. We’ve known about climate change – and the small and big ways it would mess with our lives – for so long. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Why did we do nothing?

If all this talk of the climate apocalypse is stressing you out, distract yourself. Consider, for example, the sheer awesomeness of dinosaurs – as Michelle does with her young daughter who has just discovered the joy of them. On the other hand, if thoughts of extinction are a bit too “on the nose” this week, why not go for a walk, suggests Helen. It will cure what ails you. If that fails, you can’t go wrong with Cassie’s story about worm sex. Fornicating worms – is there anything more distracting, especially when they climb onto your sidewalk by the hundreds, writhing and groping with their pointy little heads?

If all else fails, pray for rain. “With each passing week, the sun grows more intense, until its rays feel like a curse. Grasses and flowers shrivel. The ground crackles like a piece of kiln-fired pottery. Every living thing is thirsty,” writes LWON guest Krista Langlois. Then, the skies open and the North American monsoon season comes like a climax.

 

 

Guest Post: Downpour in a dry land

By: | August 3, 2018

It’s July, and I’m sitting in a backyard in Flagstaff, Arizona, when I feel something wet hit my arm. It’s the first drop of rain that’s touched my skin in months, and the pleasure is exquisite. Not just the pleasure of water touching my moisture-starved body, but the sight of thunderclouds after weeks of uninterrupted blue skies. The smell of rain hitting dry pavement. The building drumbeat of a summer storm.

Except this isn’t an ordinary summer storm. It’s the start of monsoon season in the American Southwest.

Although the word monsoon—from the Arabic “mausim,” meaning season—conjures images of tropical downpours in places like India and Southeast Asia, the North American Monsoon is equally prolific. Each summer, high pressure sitting over the southern plains circulates moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into Mexico and the Southwest, where it gathers into powerful, cyclical storms that strike most afternoons from July to September, dropping up to half the region’s rainfall. What makes the monsoon so physically satisfying, however, isn’t just the water. It’s the long, slow build up that starts months earlier, with the onset of spring. Continue reading →

Redux: My Daughter, the Dinosaur

By: | August 2, 2018

In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear. My daughter stood next to the disembodied T. rex skull and peered delightedly into its mouth, ready to climb in. “Holy cow!” she said.

As we left, she was quiet. And then she said, to no one in particular, “I don’t know whether to eat or be eaten.” Continue reading →

Redux: What’s So Great About Walking

By: | August 1, 2018

Walking: It’s always a good idea. For me, anyway. Please enjoy this post about walking from Sept 20, 2017. 

a worn-out rose

The other afternoon, at work, I suddenly got stuck thinking about a couple of things I’m worried about–and which I’m going to do, even though they make me want to hide under the covers. I expect my medal any day now. By the end of the day, I was jumpy and exhausted from pointless worrying, and I just wanted to go home.

I took off the sandals I’d worn to work and put on the socks and grubby old sneakers that live in a hidden corner of my cubicle. Grubby old sneakers, cute work dress, and all, I walked down the stairs of my office building, went out the door by the loading dock/community urinal, and pointed myself toward home.

Continue reading →

We were warned

By: | July 31, 2018

A satellite map of smoke wreathing the west coast of the USA

I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will likely spend the entire week indoors, since there is so much wildfire smoke in our area that the air is designated by the EPA as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy,” depending on the time of day and the wind.

There have been so many wildfires in our area in recent years that Smoke is officially becoming the season after Summer and before What Happened To Fall. This increase isn’t random. It is due to climate change–climate change that we humans have known about since at least 1981 and have done next to nothing to stop.

As the Sacramento Bee put it: “This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat.”

We were warned. And yet here we are.

Continue reading →