This post first appeared more than four years ago, and I wish I could tell you the state of Alzheimer’s treatment had progressed significantly since then. Mostly the change has been for the worse–baby boomers are falling victim to the disease en masse. But Alzheimer’s or no, the words of Sister Mary (see below) are fine words to live by.
For every year since 1840, life expectancy in the Western world has lengthened by three months. Many more of us can look forward to a full retirement and, in the Commonwealth countries, a letter from the Queen on our 100th birthdays. It’s worth asking, though, whether large-scale longevity is worth pursuing if more than half of us will become demented before that century mark. Continue reading →
I’m writing this to be the voice of all the people who have had this winter’s ratty cold and have not written blog posts about it. I’ve had it twice now, so aside from worrying about what that says about my fundamentals, I feel qualified to testify. I testified once before here but this time I’m serious.
Day 1: Scratchy sore throat, I had this three months
ago, I am instantly on guard. I take no
chances. I decline an invitation to come over for drinks. I take a pre-emptive antihistamine,
Day 2: Scratchier sore throat, possible increase in fatigue. I would decline drinks again but receive no invitations. I take another pre-emptive antihistamine, add an anti-inflammatory nasal spray, sleep badly.
Day 3: Continued as before, wondering whether a cold that takes this long to kick in means I’m beating it or it’s going to be a bitch. I bundle up and go the farmers’ market for the week’s food. Sleep interrupted by coughing and nose blowing.
Day 4. Scratchy sore throat turns vicious, coughing painful. A cold virus, I think. I remember my husband telling me about a long-ago relative whose doctor told her she had a virus and viruses can’t be cured, so she went home, told her family she had an incurable virus, and took to her bed for seven years. I think the story was true.
I spend too much time on the computer. I’m doing it right now. Between files, tabs, and docs, I keep up Google Earth — when it doesn’t crash — catching by accident out of the corner of my cluttered desktop a bolt of a mesa or a canyon’s shadow. I click on it like taking a breath.
Looking in on a wild landscape must be good for the brain, a little flush of serotonin. Like Japanese forest bathing, only in the desert, and on a computer monitor showing overlaid images from private and governmental imaging organizations from around the world.
So, not forest bathing.
Time spent on screens appears to be associated with depression in adults. The intense light interrupts sleep patterns and, somewhere there’s got to be a study that shows this, it makes you into a worse person. Given all that, the best I can do when I’m supposed to be working is click Google Earth and tour around for a moment, like an angel in the sky. A 2015 study amongst 150 university students found that glancing at a monitor showing a roof top garden results in more accurate productivity than the same monitor showing a concrete roof.
Yesterday, I dropped in on mostly local stuff, a 45-minute drive from my house, the torturous bends and goosenecks of the Dolores River as it flows across southern Colorado (pictured above). Zoom in, figure out what needs investigating.
At last, it is here. February 14th: Your favorite party for beheaded Christian martyrs. And your opportunity to tell that special someone just how much you care. So what are you to do now that those gum-lacerating conversation hearts are no more? Or when the greeting cards on offer just involve too many soft kittens lounging on powder-pink throws? Look no further. I visited the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collection of open-source images and mocked up some card options so you don’t have to!
“I can’t take my eyes off of you…because my nictitating membranes are stuck.”
That’s the name of this garden, a weird fairy hollow situated near the border of the weird fairy artist ranch where I’m staying in Tucson.
I am looking north. I can tell because the sun is at my back. In front of me there is a small trapezoidal fire grate set over a sunken pit surrounded by rocks. On my left is a carved metal screen with a scene of a coyote howling at the moon. I am sandwiched by saguaro.
When you think of plagiarism, poems and books probably spring to mind more easily than, say, scientific papers. And words more easily than images. But plagiarism is not uncommon in science papers, and it often takes the form of images fiddled with and grafted from elsewhere. Whether they’re a consequence of laziness or a desire to mislead, these have played a role in the replication crisis many disciplines are now facing.
It’s a lot more difficult to detect plagiarism and fraud in scientific images than in written text. And even when you have irrefutable proof of wrongdoing, there are some surprising barriers to holding its authors to account. Nonetheless, some people are up to the task.
Meet Elisabeth Bik: by day, a mild-mannered director of science at a microbiome startup. By night (and on weekends), she takes to the internet and sifts through the scientific literature for the subtle visual fingerprints of misconduct. She has identified more than a thousand fraudulent images, and her work has led at least one journal to change the way it screens submissions. Her work has been featured several times by Retraction Watch, a blog that flays scientific malfeasance*.
Bik has contributed countless hours to keeping science honest, but most of them have been unpaid. Why would anyone commit so much of their own time to hunting down details that elude even paid gatekeepers? How does she do it? And does it do any good? I called her to find out.
The pumpkin used to discover florigen, the universal flowering hormone. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them.
Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags again, in early January, some of the bulbs were dusted with mildew. I’d lost the instructions for when to plant the different types of bulbs, and what bulb belonged to which type of flower. As I brushed the mold away, I contemplated how little I knew, not just about these flowers, but about flowers in general.
Understanding flowers is not trivial. Darwin referred to the awesome expansion of flowering plants during the late Cretaceous period as “the abominable mystery.” The ability to manipulate flowering has always been key to crop domestication, allowing humans to expand the range of rice, wheat, corn and other staples. Despite this, scientists only recently discovered how flowering works on a molecular level.
The story is surprisingly brutal, and begins with chrysanthemums. In the early 1930s, Russian plant physiologist Mikhail Chailakhyan was trying to figure out how plants sense light and dark, and decide when to flower. He shone light on different parts of chrysanthemum plants — the stem, the leaves — and found it was the leaves that sensed light. When leaves detect a certain daylength, the plant bursts into bloom, he discovered.
Last month I spent a week scuba diving in Bonaire. Just writing that sentence makes me embarrassed about how much disposable income I have, but look, it was a cheap trip organized by a group, ok. I borrowed most of the equipment. And I don’t have kids to put through college.
I got certified to dive when I was in college myself, more than 20 years ago. So you might imagine that I’m a veteran diver, but in fact I haven’t dived that much. And I haven’t really wanted to that much.
Why? Diving is scary. You spend a lot of the training learning about what to do in potentially deadly emergencies. Breathing pressurized gas comes with risks that you have to thoroughly understand and monitor. I can feel claustrophobic underwater – the only space that is actually workable for human, air-breathing life is the mask over your eyes and nose and the regulator delivering air into your mouth. It’s easy to get disoriented under water and have a wee panic attack. Before you even get down there, there are a lot of things you have to do to get yourself all set to stay alive underwater and you often have to do them on a rocking boat. Also, as mentioned, it’s expensive. And the equipment is heavy – once I’m all suited up and get my tank and my fins on and I’m shuffling over to the edge of the boat to jump in, I’ve probably added a good 50 pounds to my weight. And my mask has a tendency to let in a tiiiiny trickle of water on one side or the other that dribbles into my eye, stings, and makes the whole experience annoying.
But last month, in Bonaire, I finally, finally got it. I figured out the sequence of things I had to do on the boat, and got them all done in plenty of time to jump in the water without feeling like I was holding anyone up. The last year of workouts had really helped with holding all the equipment. The group of experienced divers I’ve been with for my last two trips finally rubbed off on me; I relaxed.
And once I calmed down I noticed, oh my goodness, I’m in the ocean. Schools of glimmering fish swam by. A teensy shrimp waved from inside an anemone. Coral glowed greener than you’d think a living thing could grow. And those clouds and clouds of fish.
I was weightless; I flew.
I originally got certified so that I could scuba dive on a college study abroad program to Australia and New Zealand. My first open water dives were pretty bad–I did the required certification dives in a lake in Minnesota in the fall (there were snow flurries). Another anxious 19-year-old and I got each other through it by constantly reminding each other that we were doing this so we could dive on the Great Barrier Reef. So we did it, and we dived in Australia, and it was something–but it was claustrophobic, and the gear was heavy, and it was expensive, and I thought I’d probably had enough.
So why did I keep going back to something that I was so uncomfortable with? Other people. A boyfriend had a lifelong scuba habit and a conference in Hawaii; I refreshed my skills and went along. I was thrilled to see turtles and rays and whatnot, but never got over being scared of diving and jumpy about diving with an unknown set of strangers every day.
Then my dad got super into diving, so I went along on the most beginner-friendly trip his scuba club runs. The people were so friendly above water and so calm underwater, and patient with me as I tried to figure out how to be comfortable, too.
So I went back the next year, and there were the clouds of fish, and I worked out how to hover, mostly, and here I am. Ready to go again. Maybe next time I’ll figure out how to make my mask stop leaking.
Photo: Colin, a member of my dad’s dive club who probably has a last name.
