DIY Dog Doctor

By: | January 10, 2018

Donut the dog has always been a bit of a lemon. “She hates kids. She hates other dogs. She hates physical activity,” says Julia Gilden. Gilden adopted the 80-pound Bearded Collie seven years ago. All the things people love about dogs? Donut didn’t really have many of those attributes. But she was sweet and goofy and, for the most part, pretty healthy.

All that changed in 2015. Donut developed a series of health problems so perplexing and expensive that Gilden, a cellular immunologist, began pondering a radical DIY solution. “How dumb is it,” she asked her Facebook friends, “to consider giving her a brief helminth infection?” In other words, should she deliberately infect her dog with parasitic worms? Continue reading →

It All Depends Where You Look

By: | January 9, 2018

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.

Continue reading →

Redux: Antevernals in the Anthropocene

By: | January 8, 2018

When Robert Macfarlane recently chose “antevernals” as one of his words of the day, I remembered this post, which I wrote in February 2016. Now we need a word to describe our continent’s increasingly split-screen winters. How about twinter? Or splinter? And climate change isn’t the only phenomenon demanding new vocabulary: I sometimes hear others say that they’ve “run out of adjectives” for our political moment, and I often feel the same. How about we make up some new ones? Your ideas welcome.

Over the past twenty years, naturalist David Lukas has hiked thousands of miles of trails in the Sierra Nevada, most of them accompanied by a slim, sturdy little book called Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms. Lukas likes nature and he likes words, and he especially likes to know the history and meaning of our words about nature, from Abies magnifica to Zzyzx Springs. As he learned Latin and Greek roots on the hoof, he began to wonder how new words, especially new nature words, enter the language. Scientific binomials are approved by international committees, but what about common words? How do they form, and why do they survive?

So began a four-year, mostly self-directed study of the processes of word-making in the English language, resulting in an unusual and delightful book called Language Making Nature: A Handbook for Artists, Writers, and Thinkers. It’s part etymological field guide, part potted history of English, and part how-to manual for creating new words to describe natural places and phenomena. “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and engaging,” Lukas asks, “then is it any wonder that few young people get excited about nature?”

Continue reading →

The Kid Fire

By: | January 5, 2018

A small fire on the beach, ringed with white seashells

Some years ago I attended a beach barbecue in Juneau, Alaska on a gray summer day. The adults drank beer in a ring around a fire where salmon collars sizzled and talked about the price of boats and politics. The kids ran in a mixed-age herd closer to the surf, clambering over driftwood and getting wet. And then with the sly grace of a trickster god, a ten or eleven year old boy insinuated himself into our adult circle and lifted a burning brand from our fire, disappearing with it before I could so much as determine which adult he went with.

A few moments later, the kids had coalesced around an expertly built ‘kid fire,’ which they had lighted from that stolen spark. This ‘kid fire’ seemed to alarm none of the local adults, and indeed seemed to be a regular feature of long afternoons on the beach in Juneau. I watched with interest as the older children maintained the fire and policed access, allowing younger children only to chuck on small sticks from a distance. This would never fly in the lower 48, I thought.

Continue reading →

Adventures of an Occasional Goatherd

By: | January 4, 2018

Baby, it’s cold outside! So I’m posting a little look-back at some warmer-weather fun on the farm.

————–

I love goats. In many ways they’re a lot like dogs, and I love dogs. So, it follows.

How are they like dogs? At least the ones I’ve met love attention. They want to be petted and loved. They look you in the eye and make you feel needed. They’ll jump and climb on you in a friendly way. They’re not shy about whapping you with a foot if you stop stroking them. (I prefer the dog’s paw in this scenario, because cloven hoof.) They burp and poop a lot. They have terrible breath. (Fermented hay is pungent stuff.) They live about as long as dogs. They love taking walks.

I’ve learned these things because I’ve been spending some time on a farm in central Virginia that had (before a big sale in September) 100-plus goats, lots of them young females. The place is called Caromont Farm and it’s known in the area because Gail, the owner, makes fantastic (goat-milk) cheeses in a small building on the property, and she invites the public to come cuddle the kids (baby goats) each spring. She gets so many requests for the latter that she now schedules all-day cuddlefests and sells tickets for $10. Continue reading →

2018: What’s the worst that could happen?

By: | January 3, 2018

a bird on a wire

“It is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the odds that all human existence is a simulation

“Two tech billionaires [are] secretly engaging scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.” – The Guardian 

“What is going on with all these spammy pitching bots in my inbox?” – Chief Features Editor, New Scientist

 

From: Alyssa Callaway
Sent: 22 September 2017 09:59
To: Sally Adee [New Scientist technology news editor]
Subject: Can I contribute!!

Hello Sally,

how are you? I first want to take the opportunity to congratulate you on your blogs, quality of writing, intellectual viewpoints and diverse underpinnings. I have read your blog many times and love the content you post.

I recently saw that you write on Bitcoin related items. What do you think of Bitcoin and Blockchain related issues post publishing? Continue reading →

The Historically Slippery Age of Puberty

By: | January 2, 2018

Puberty is happening earlier now. Girls in the West, particularly those living in poverty, get breast buds a year or two earlier in the 21st Century than they did in the mid-20th Century, and on average the age of menarche—a girl’s first period—has fallen by about 3 ½ months per decade. Boys’ development is accelerating too. We see this trend tracking childhood obesity rates and other endocrine disruptors, and there has been considerable handwringing in the media about this divergence from nature.

The worry is justified in the sense that the sorts of things that currently cause it are worrying, as I wrote recently in Nature. Childhood obesity is worrying. Endocrine disruptors in the environment are worrying. Sexual abuse, which also leads to earlier menarche, is awful and must be fought. But as for the age of puberty itself, the story of the last half-century or so—that our twisted lifestyles warp our children into adults before their time—is only part of a much larger and more interesting story.

Throughout human history, puberty has hopped back and forth along the timeline of our lifespans. Boy’s voices tend to break around age 11 now, whereas in 1960 that age range centered around the 13 year mark. But keep scrolling back and you’ll find choirmaster’s records show chorister’s voices breaking at age 18 in the mid-1700s. Girls get their periods on average when they are 12 now, whereas in 1920, the average age in the United States and France was 14. Again, scroll farther back and you get up to age 16 in Northern Europe during the 1800s. Continue reading →

Walking Into the New Year

By: | January 1, 2018

Well now then.  Here we are.  The first day of another year.  What to do about that?

January 1 is a day for looking forward.  Kids mostly look forward, I think.  But any adult knows you make sense of any given situation only by looking back, by remembering.  Memory allows the comparison between then and now by which we more thoroughly understand the now.  The fact that memory is also a complete crapshoot just makes life more interesting.  Where was I going with this?  Ok, I remember now.

I’ve lived in Baltimore since 1980, longer than I’ve lived any other place.  Most people from where I grew up move a lot: I remember a guy telling me the average stay in my home town was now 2.5 years. I remember thinking that 2.5 years doesn’t give you much chance at maintaining a community.  I’m digressing again, please forgive me.

Back to Baltimore.  I’ve lived here long enough that places, buildings, streets, sidewalks, aren’t just themselves any more, they’re colored by, or they resonate with, what happened there in the past.  The street corner where I fell off the curb and cut the hell out of my knee and my husband took me to the crowded ER where I didn’t make the triage and when I finally got into an examining room, flat on my back looking up at an examining light, and the doctor said to my extremely-curious husband, “Sir, your head is between the light and her knee,” that street corner is a little scary and mostly funny. Continue reading →