Redux: Snowbound and Murderous

By: | February 5, 2016

20160124_093531The Great East Coast Snowstorm of January 2016 That Singled Out Baltimore left around 30 inches of snow, turning cars into snowhills and pausing civilized life as we know it.  In the last big snowstorm, the the worst incivility was perpetrated by the neighbors themselves, this time it was by outsiders: two different jackasses parked for over 24 hours in two different parking places that they did not themselves shovel out.  Jackass outsiders are easier to hate than jackass neighbors, but somehow the hatred is less intense.  I don’t know what I’m going to do about this; I’m no further in my thinking or moral judgment or revenge plots against breakers of social contracts than I was two years ago, the last time this happened.

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That’s an honest-to-God, non-stock photo of the view out my window.

Nobody Likes Sad Futures

By: | February 4, 2016

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On Tuesday, the podcast that I host and produce started its second season. The show is called Flash Forward, and it’s weird and fun and surprising. Every episode takes on a possible future, from the terrifying likely (antibiotic resistance) to the completely absurd (space pirates drag a second moon to earth). Every episode starts with a little radio drama, a trip to the future we’re looking at. These range from future commercials, documentaries from the future, scenes from labs, conversations between space pirates, voicemails and more. (Many of these voices are actually recorded by fans who volunteer to act out parts each week). Then we talk to experts about how that future might really go down. Those experts include historians, engineers, scientists, futurists, anthropologists, science fiction authors and more.

The second season is going to be fun, but I wanted to take this chance to reflect on the first season. Together, we traveled to twenty three different futures, everything from artificial wombs, to drones, to robot UN secretaries banning weapons, to an evil mega company building so many wind turbines that they actually alter the climate, to the discovery of an alien probe that is almost exactly like the Voyager probe humans sent out in the 1970’s.

Some people really like our dark and scary episodes: we talked about an end of antibiotic effectiveness, and about what it would be like if we applied life-extension technology to prisoners. Other people preferred the sillier ones, like what might happen if we had a second moon, or if the Earth stopped rotating around the sun, or a supernova consumed us.

But here I want to talk about the four most popular episodes, and what I think made them work. Yes, this is shameless self promotion, get over it. Continue reading →

The Misadventures of Garbage Dog

By: | February 3, 2016

11703581_10153494374632095_8252310565867126931_oPerhaps there was a time when our dog, Bea, didn’t eat everything. If so, I don’t remember it. At first, we thought it might be a puppy thing. But this month she turned two, and it seems clear that her insatiable appetite is a permanent part of her personality. Dogs aren’t known for their discriminating taste, but most dogs will balk at . . . well . . . something. Not my garbage dog. She is happiest when her mouth is full. Continue reading →

Redux: Below the Snow

By: | February 1, 2016

IMG_1600Right now, the meteorological event that some are calling Winter Storm Kayla is on its way across the U.S. While people may be curled up inside with a quilt by the fire, another group of creatures is finding shelter outside, under a cold, white blanket. This post about that unique below-the-snow spot, called the subnivium, originally ran in June 2013.

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When I think about winter, I mostly think about all the fun things that take place on the snow’s surface. Or all the fun things that take place inside: hot chocolate, eating, reading by the fire. Once spring comes, when the world outside is buzzing (and boing-ing), there’s no excuse to stay inside with a good book.

I’m not the only one who needs a winter retreat. In snow-covered spots food can be scarce; the wind-chilled open air is brutal. But for creatures that aren’t able to curl up with cocoa, the snow itself forms the insulation for a shelter under the snow.

This below-snow retreat is such a wintertime ecological haven—for everything from freeze-resistant invertebrates that can supercool their own bodies to martens and weasels that stalk prey and snooze in this space–that a paper in this month’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposes that it should get its own designation: the subnivium. Jonathan Pauli and Benjamin Zuckerberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues have gotten interested in the dynamics of this sub-snow world—and what will happen to it as winters warm up. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 30, 2016

a sage-green lichen on a gray tree trunk
As we creep up on Valentine’s Day (yes, still a couple of weeks away–don’t panic), we found ourselves writing about subjects having nothing whatsoever to do with love. Instead, it was a week about crimes, population, medicine, and lichens. Oh my.

Rose Eveleth discusses what makes a copycat crime, and why defining that term matters.

I ponder the problem with overpopulation and wonder aloud whether we can address it two by two.

Helen Fields scrapes away at the mystery of city lichens in a two-part series (part 1, part 2) that will have you peering closely at urban tree trunks.

And Jessa Gamble considers the fourth dimension…in medicine. Will circadian rhythms ever be taken seriously in medical treatment? When?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Medicine in the Fourth Dimension

By: | January 29, 2016

school of athensIn the early fifteenth century, a new artistic tool spread rapidly throughout Western Europe. Single-point linear perspective – a geometric technique that involves a rectangular grid stretching toward a central vanishing point – was a coup in the quest to represent three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces. Art had never looked so realistic, and the technique was ubiquitous for hundreds of years thereafter.

A similar embrace of dimensionality awaits in medicine, where decades of evidence collide with established clinical practice. It’s all about time of day. Set to rival the personalized medicine “revolution” in the breadth of its implications, the incorporation of circadian rhythms into our healthcare systems will require re-orientation on a paradigmatic scale.

The idea is that biological rhythms, daily oscillations in physiological processes, make the morning body a functionally different creature from the same body at night. There are peak times of day for each organ’s cell division and metabolism, as well as core temperature and gene expression. Moreover, our illnesses are rhythmic, and our pathogens have body clocks. It makes for a major strategic advantage over disease, and the current resistance in the medical field – a misconception that timing effects are somehow minor – is no longer tenable. Continue reading →

Urban Lichens, Part 2 of 2: A Visit With a Lichenologist

By: | January 28, 2016

A woman holds a hand lens up to a tree trunk.Yesterday: Urban Lichens, Part 1: OMG! Urban Lichens!, in which we learned that there are lichens in the city.

So I’d established that lichens can, sometimes, live in cities. The next step: round up a lichenologist.

On a sunny December afternoon, I met up with Manuela Dal Forno, a lichenologist. To be precise, she’s a lichen systematist. That means she studies how various species of lichens relate to each other. Originally from Brazil, she specializes in tropical lichens and recently got her Ph.D. from George Mason University in Virginia.

I had figured out for myself that there were two kinds of lichen on the young, new trees that had recently been transplanted near my office. One was a bold, sage-green, splotch with ruffled edges. The other was a subtler sort that seemed to lie closer to the bark. Two species of lichen, I thought. That’s interesting.

I had no idea.

Continue reading →

Urban Lichens, Part 1 of 2: OMG! Urban Lichens!

By: | January 27, 2016

a sage-green lichen on a gray tree trunk

It was the big new concrete transit center that brought the lichens to town.

In September, a huge new structure opened next to the metro station closest to my office. It has three levels, for buses, more buses, and taxis. It was held up by construction delays and disputes. The county and the transit authority are suing various construction companies for a very large amount of money.

The whole time it was being built, standing partly finished, and being worked on again, the many buses that bring people to and from the station had to stop on the streets nearby. The sidewalks were crowded with bus shelters and passengers. When the transit center was finally opened, the bus shelters eventually went away, leaving bare concrete pads in their place.

Then, one day, in November, something else appeared: trees. Six spindly trees planted along the sidewalk, each about 15 or 20 feet tall, bare of leaves, tied to stakes with lengths of wire, run through garden hose to protect the bark. The first time I saw them, I stopped in my tracks, delighted. It wasn’t the trees; it was the lichens. Continue reading →