Flora Sapiens

By: | August 30, 2017

A soft green plant with many tiny leaflets. Can plants behave? Can they weigh risk against reward? Do they have personalities? A new study suggests they can and do—and that we’ve missed their complex behavior in part because they live life at such a different pace.

Mimosa pudica, or “sensitive plant” is a frilly plant in the pea family with a wonderful talent—when touched, its leaflets fold up, demurely and rather sedately (but fast as all-get-out by plant standards) as if to say “I’m too proud and reserved to be eaten.”

The plant, despite its rather refined air, has weedy proclivities and has naturalized across the tropics, so its party trick must be adaptive. But the “touch-me-not”, as it is also called, has to do a bit of cost benefit analysis when deploying its rapid-fire defensive mode. You see, although closing the leaves reduces the area available to munching herbivores like insects, it also reduces photosynthesis by about 40%. Much like an animal that cannot forage or hunt for food while it is hiding, the plant can’t eat while it is tucked away. So how does it decide how long to keep those lovely bipinnate leaves hidden? Continue reading →

Guest Post: Begging Babies

By: | August 29, 2017

filling birdfeeder

Two birdfeeders hang from the deck of my house in the woods, a waystation for locals and migrants alike. They are a locus of activity — except when I forget to refill them. That happened again last month. I grew too distracted by the daily feeding and maintenance of two small humans, both of whom must be fed and bathed and clothed and entertained and educated and not-always-successfully prevented from jumping off furniture.

My small humans love to watch the birdfeeders and even help refill them, one small fistful of seed at a time, but they don’t always have time for such mundane household tasks. So, for two weeks, the feeders hung empty and quiet, the feathered action instead dispersed throughout the trees overhead.

But long after the chickadees and nuthatches had given up, a couple of red-bellied woodpeckers continued to drop by. The red-belly is one of my favorites, a bird that belies its name, with just the barest blush of pink on its belly and a startlingly bright red head. There were two of them, a female and a male, identifiable by the different-sized patches of red on their head and neck. And they were clearly a pair. Rather than fighting, they took turns: one dangling from the bottom of the feeder, its long beak digging out the few seeds that remained, while the other hammered away at the branches of a nearby chestnut oak.

When I finally refilled the feeders last week, the chunky red-bellies were my first visitors. Back and forth they flew from their chestnut tree, back and forth, chugging seed as fast as they could. They seemed hungrier than normal but it took me a couple of days to figure out why. Continue reading →

Redux: How Losing My Phone Made Me Smarter

By: | August 28, 2017

This post first ran on April 22, 2014.
SmartPhoneshutterstock_128808976

A few weekends ago, I hiked a deep canyon with a couple of friends. As has become my habit, I toted my smart phone along. I set it to mute so that I’d remain undisturbed by pings and rings, and I pulled it out of my pack only to take a few photos.

After the hike, my friend drove us back to our carpool spot, and after changing out of my hiking shoes, I reached for my phone to call my husband. Except it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the front pocket of my pack, or anywhere else I looked.

Panic. Was it in my friend’s car? Or had I dropped it somewhere in the canyon? I reached to call the friend, who was now five minutes down the road in the other direction, but — oh right. I’d have to call her when I got home. Wait, did I know her number? No, I did not. It’s programmed into my phone. I probably added it to my contacts via email, never once dialing it.

A sense of doom set in, as I thought about all the other information I’d offloaded from my brain to that shiny glass rectangle. But the despair was quickly followed by a sense of release. I was suddenly free from obligation. I couldn’t check messages. No one could reach me. I was untethered. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 26, 2017

a woman, a telescope, a piece of paper

August 21-25, 2017

Cast your mind all the way back to Monday and you may remember something special happened then. LWON had been gearing up for the eclipse with a week of related posts, and this week continued that theme, for an Eclipse Fortnight.

Craig stayed home instead of driving the eight hours to the path of totality, because it was his son’s first day of high school. But a large part of him wanted to take his boys to Wyoming: “If this were the world I made, our lives would be nothing but this: transformation after transformation, eyes so bugged out from the epic tapestry of the universe you feel like alternately weeping and screaming.”

Helen caught the full show at a NASA-affiliated event in South Carolina. It was a lot of driving made worth it for an ecstatic two minutes. And she made drawings.

Emma and Michelle captured the magic of children talking about the eclipse. “It feels like nighttime.” “Good job, moon.”

Cassie and her husband caught the whole thing on audio, with additional commentary from their two-year-old. “We came, we saw, we freaked out a little bit.” Time to drive back to Wisconsin.

Eclipse fortnight having ended, I continued our occasional series, Debunking Hollywood, taking a look at human hibernation and finding some holes in the movie version.

 

-Art by Helen

Debunking Hollywood: Human hibernation

By: | August 25, 2017

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. 

Nothing says interstellar travel like a hibernation pod. The heroes of the 2016 holiday blockbuster Passengers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, embark on a century-long journey to an planet outside our solar system. Hibernation pods extend their lifespans for the long trip, but they wake from torpor 90 years earlier than scheduled. Then they set about trying to fix the ship and trying to put themselves back to sleep.

First of all, let’s talk about this ‘waking’ from hibernation business. Hibernation may involve lying down with ones eyes closed, but there’s no sleeping going on; In fact, a long stretch of it leaves the body sleep deprived. If this movie were true to life, the first thing that would happen when Jennifer Lawrence opened her long-lashed eyes in the hibernation pod would not be her listening to the ship computer’s crew update. It would be her closing those long lashes again and descending straight into sleep. Continue reading →

A Toddler in Totality

By: | August 24, 2017

A couple of months ago, I hatched a really good plan. My husband and I would drive six hours into the path of totality without our two-year-old daughter. We would have a relaxing car ride, followed by some nice meals at fancy St. Louis restaurants. But then I realized that no one was available to watch our two-year-old, so we had to take her with.

I could write a long post about the unspeakable freakiness of seeing a total eclipse. Or about the uselessness of trying to make a two-year-old wear eclipse glasses. But I can’t say anything that others haven’t already said. So instead I invite you to join my family as we experience totality. The following three-minute audio clip was recorded and produced by Radiolab’s managing editor, Soren Wheeler. I got it for free because he’s also my husband.

What: A total eclipse!

Where: Dr. Edmund A. Babler Memorial State Park, just outside St. Louis, Missouri

Who: Me, my husband, our two-year-old, and a bunch of eclipse-happy strangers

Why: Because my science writer friends told me that 85% would not be good enough. Not by a long shot.

Totality Awesome

By: | August 23, 2017


The eclipse, as narrated by our children and their friends.

Two hours before totality

Adele, age 7: “What do you know about the eclipse?”
Lulu, age 8: “What happens is that the moon comes in front of the sun and eats it and blocks the sunlight.”
Adele: “Goes in front of it, kinda.”
Lulu: “And it is very important that you wear the eclipse glasses because otherwise the eclipse is gonna hurt your eyes and so we need eclipse glasses to keep us safe. And it is a really interesting thing if you are wearing the eclipse glasses.”

One hour before totality

Sylvia, age 8: “The sun’s mouth is opening!”
Adele: “The moon is getting hungry.”
Lulu: “It looks like a cheesecake with a bite out of it.”
Abe, age 8: “It looks more like Pac-Man.”
Adele: “I love the eclipse.”

Three minutes before totality

Nicolas, age 5: “It’s almost time to go to sleep, Mama?”
Nicolas, later: “I was saying that for a joke.”

Two minutes before totality

Adele: “I wonder what is going to happen?”

Thirty seconds before totality

Lulu: “There’s a star!”

During totality

All: “Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”

Nicolas: “Why is it like it is night time?”
Emma: “Why do you think?”
Nicolas: “Because the moon is covering the sun.”
Emma: “Right. How does it feel?”
Nicolas: “It feels like night time.”
Emma: “Does it make you feel strange?”
Nico: “No. Feels like …” [starts screaming, possibly with joy]

Sylvia, quietly: “This is amazing.”

Five seconds after totality

All: “Yaaaaaaay! Good job, moon!”

24 hours after totality

Emma: “You never told me how the eclipse made you feel, Adele.”
Adele: “It made me feel … eclipsey.”

Photo of young eclipse-watcher by Emma.

On the Path of Totality

By: | August 22, 2017

drawing of traffic jam on interstate

I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95.

When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on I-95, from the world’s worst traffic jam, on my phone.

Well, the joke’s on me; my phone died.

Surely no one can expect anything coherent from me, from the right lane of an interstate somewhere south of Fayetteville, NC. Instead, I present some eclipse impressions.

1. Traffic. The drawing that starts this post is from the worst traffic we hit on Saturday, on I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg. Here’s the thing, though – I think that may have been normal August weekend traffic. Apparently taking 2.5 hours to go 30 miles is not that unusual. (It was many hours after that traffic jam that my phone gave up its fight. Fortunately, I also brought a laptop.)

 

Continue reading →