Thanks, Kids

By: | December 13, 2016

The girl sits on the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together, hands twisting in her lap and chin jutting out slightly. Her braids are tight and smooth, hanging just past her shoulders and secured with matching red bands. A little comic strip kid, neatly drawn, eyes big and sparkling.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” she keeps saying. “I’m so honored to meet you.” She smiles and smiles some more. Then: “You’re my favorite author!”

I am tempted to turn around to see the great scribe about whom this precious girl is gushing. But oddly, she is staring up at me.

It’s me! I’m her favorite author!

 I never saw myself as a children’s writer. I still don’t. Before books, I wrote serious magazine articles about natural history and conservation, and sometimes health and medicine, for a college-educated audience. My Unlikely Friendships series is aimed at animal lovers of all ages. But it skews young, and my publisher has been capitalizing on that. Which means I rarely dress up in evening wear to schmooze with adult readers over wine and cheese at a bookshop.

Instead, for my book tours I visit elementary schools. One after another. Hundreds of kids file into cafeterias and libraries and auditoriums just to hear me talk about how much I love animals, to tell stories about my experiences. I try to sneak some science into my talks—about what makes wolves different from dogs, about the panda’s unique digestive system, about the medicinal value of reptile venom, for example. And I talk about the science of emotions—the brain structures that make us feel and that we share with other mammals. Geeky stuff that I hope they’ll tell their parents at dinner when asked “what did you learn today?”

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Goodbye, Home

By: | December 12, 2016

I close on a house this week. I’ve never done this before, not quite sure how the paperwork is supposed to happen.

It’s not much of a place really, almost a thousand square feet and a loft with spaces between the planks where my older boy pressed his eye, watching his brother being born on the couch next to the wood stove downstairs.

Few people live in these high river forks in the West Elk Mountains on the Utah side of Colorado. Forty houses are connected to the same spring coming off the pyramid of Landsend Peak, one of several mountains that gather around the watershed like a cradle. The nearest town is Crawford, CO, population 422. My mom and stepdad live down the road, and the Clarks, who’ve been here forever, still have dogs that come running at you out of the bushes.

The New York Times sent a reporter to do a spread on us: a writer, his wife, and two kids living off the grid beneath a pike of gray, igneous rock sticking 600 feet in the air. This seasoned Times reporter was terrified by the rock towering over the house. She had trouble not staring at it, unnerved by the way a mass of incomprehensible stone took up half the sky, its blank face not noticing us below. At one point she told us we could be called negligent for having children here, which thankfully she didn’t print. She could imagine our house crashed in as if by a meteor similar in size to any one of these half-ton lichen-decorated boulders lying around the property. We lived in a rock heap, an old one, thus the lichens, while she didn’t have a good sense of geologic time. The house was not going to be destroyed. Probably not for a good, long while.

When she said negligent for having children here, we stared back at her perplexed. “You live in Manhattan,” one of us said. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 10, 2016

December 5-9. 2016

At a writing residency in Oregon, Emma finds a bird foot in coyote scat, and then sees death all around her in the forest. When I stopped for lunch, I took out my notebook and wrote, “Thinking mostly about nothing much except how the forest is death, death, life out of death, death accumulated so it seems to become life.”

In Canada, Sylvain Martel is developing bio-bots to carry drugs to tumors, writes Jessa. The microbiologists in Martel’s lab are the only ones who know how to cultivate this bacteria. “I tell them to be careful crossing the street,” he says.

Michelle writes about the Wellcome Collection, a medical museum in London that displays an extensive collection of forceps, which were invented in the 1500s and remained the primary tool to assist with delivery until the 1950s. The obstetric armamentarium has expanded, on average, once every 228 years. Women—and babies—pay the price for the difference.

Ann did not want to join a yoga class, but lots of things hurt and her brain would not shut up. She applies Michelle’s Bullshit Prevention Protocol, gets nowhere, keeps going to yoga. . . not because it’s not bullshit but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains.

Full of “weird, mostly bad business ideas,” Rose presents her latest: custom, personalized 3-D printed menstrual cups. For some people, one cup might fit just right, and for other people that cup might be far too big or too small. Yes, it’s like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but with vaginas.

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Photo via Wellcome Images, Creative Commons license

 

 

 

My Latest Bad Business Idea: 3D Printed Custom Menstrual Cups

By: | December 9, 2016

Friends of mine know that I’m full of weird, mostly bad business ideas. There was the science tattoo consultant service, to help fact check your tattoo before you put the wrong DNA sequence on your body. There was the Brooklyn dog running company, that would go for runs with your dog. There was the proposal to retrofit all the cabs in New York City with my bike-alert system. (For the record, if you would like to invest in any of these businesses let me know I am still accepting offers.)

And now I am here to present to you my latest idea: custom, personalized, 3D printed menstrual cups. Hear me out.  Continue reading →

Yoga & the Bullshit Prevention Protocol

By: | December 8, 2016

I did not want to join yoga class.  I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure.  But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up.  I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t either.

So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the pre-K of yoga classes. Continue reading →

Forcing the Issue

By: | December 7, 2016

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One of the best free diversions in London is the Wellcome Collection, the medical museum operated by the Wellcome Trust and supported by the posthumous generosity of Sir Henry Wellcome, the American frontier kid who became a British pharmaceutical tycoon. “Medicine Man,” one of the permanent exhibitions, is drawn from Sir Henry’s own extraordinary collection of memorabilia related to health and the body. Though he was a Victorian, Wellcome was no prude, and the items span the breadth of human experience, from beautifully detailed medical models to Japanese sex aids to fearsome-looking anti-masturbation devices.

Only one display, though, is guaranteed to make those of us with female reproductive anatomy instinctively cross our legs: More than a dozen pairs of steel obstetric forceps, of varied size, shape, and vintage, are arrayed on blood-red fabric, positioned as if still ready to spoon out a dawdling baby.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Intelligent Design

By: | December 6, 2016

wellcome-images-nanobot

Sylvain Martel of the NanoRobotics Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal has spent the last 15 years discovering that just as you figure out what you need to design, it often comes about that it’s already been designed. At least, something else already exists with those exact specifications – it’s just being used for a different purpose. He’s been working on cancer, which in Canada is the number one cause of death. Canada is also – for now—the only place where medical nanorobots are a going concern.

In 2001, there were some very specific nanobots Martel wanted to build. They had to get a cancer drug from A to B. To get a therapeutic agent from an injection site to a tumour, systemic drugs are supremely inefficient. Only about 1% of the drug gets to the tumour, and 99% just drifts out of control and contributes to the patient’s decline. You can’t inject it directly into the area of maximum therapeutic effect, because the pressure of the injection will spread the cancer and help it to metastasize. Continue reading →

A Bird’s Foot: Death in the Forest 

By: | December 5, 2016
Three tall trees at the HJ Andrews experimental forest. The ground is covered by soft moss.
The HJ Andrews Experimental Forest

I find a stick and use it to break up the dry twists of coyote scat I have found on the trail. Shit is nature’s obituary page. In each pile are the traces of lives recently lost.

In this particular excreta I find a sprinkling of little white brittle bones—bird bones. And then I pull out a whole bird’s foot, about the size of a quarter: yellow and reptilian with three forward toes with serious looking claws, and one backward toe, higher up on the ankle, also clawed.

I email a picture to my brother in law, Vanya Rohwer, now the Curator of Birds & Mammals at Cornell University’s Museum of Vertebrates. He guesses it was a Steller’s jay or varied thrush. Then he adds, ‘The jay falling prey to a coyote seems a little dubious though—trickster vs. trickster—and i think the jay would win…. If it is a jay, perhaps the coyote found an old hawk kill and scavenged the foot.”

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