Guest Post: The Dirty Bomb of Nutrition

By: | March 7, 2016

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The hard thing about teaching nutrition to college students is that, as far as eating healthy is concerned, they’ve heard it all before. In fact, Michael Pollen’s phrase, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”– is about the best 3-second nutrition message around. I find myself wanting to repeat this phrase to my students and dismiss class for the semester.

I don’t, though, because “Not too much” is the dirty bomb of nutrition. Whenever I ask my class if they have eaten a Hershey’s Chocolate Kiss in their lifetime, I already know the answer. It’s always 100% hands raised.

Hershey’s has our number. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 5, 2016

shutterstock_156034427February 29 – March 4, 2016

This week, Helen and her friends became famous using nothing but some marshmallows and an idea. Here’s the blow-by-blow of her brush with celebrity.

Craig reports from the Bering Strait where, as ever, he walks in two overlaid landscapes, separated by thousands of years.

Rose has a fantasy life in a town she’s never been to – one that shares her last name. Should she dare to go and face the reality?

Michelle follows developments at Project Puffin, which not only restores the range of seabirds in Maine but provides valuable insights into their marine environment.

My ancestors, the Holland Brothers, brought the first motion pictures to North America. And little old Ottawa was in the middle of it all.

Image: Shutterstock

The Holland Brothers

By: | March 4, 2016

Blacksmith Scene (1893), thought to be the first staged narrative in film

Last summer, after a decade in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I moved south to Ottawa. It is a city that holds deeper roots for me the longer I dig. Every day, I pass the park where my high school friends used to hang, and I pick up my son from an after-school program in the church where my parents were married.

Here, the experimental farm where my mother had her first summer job, picking strawberries. There, the yellow thing that has usurped the lot of my grandparents’ house. Its windowpanes have prominent Xs instead of + shapes. (Actually, maybe I like it.) We play at the beach in Britannia Bay, where my great-great-uncle drowned in a sailboat accident. His body was never recovered, so presumably he’s still there.

But there are clear familial voices from still further back – ones that blend with the ghost of another city in the same place. It wasn’t Ottawa in the early 1800s when my four-times-great-grandfather arrived from Montreal – it was a timber hub called Bytown, and Confederation was yet to bring Canada into being. Continue reading →

The Puffin’s Progress

By: | March 3, 2016

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Stephen Kress has studied Atlantic puffins for more than forty years, so you might think that he knows everything there is to know about them. He’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t. Until very recently, in fact, neither he nor anyone else even knew where the little rascals were most of the time.

Puffins used to be common in Maine, but the population was almost wiped out by hunters in the early 1900s. When Kress, a wildlife biologist, arrived in the state in the 1970s, puffins lived on only one island. At the time, most biologists thought seabirds had an unbreakable connection to their birthplaces, but Kress wondered if young birds could be taught to accept another island as home. He and his fellow members of the Audubon Society-sponsored Project Puffin transplanted puffin chicks from Nova Scotia to Maine’s coastal islands, spent a summer raising them by hand, and watched as they left for the open ocean, hoping that they would eventually return to Maine to breed.

Continue reading →

Do I Stay Or Do I Go? The Eveleth Conundrum

By: | March 2, 2016

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Two years ago, I wrote a story for The Atlantic about my obsession with the town of Eveleth, Minnesota. I’ve never been there. But I’ve visited it often on Google Maps. Often enough to know the town really well. To know the giant hockey stick, the city hall, the big church, the tattoo shop where the Google car has captured a woman giving it the middle finger.

I thought it was just going to be some fun story to write and then it would be over, but once the story was up I started getting emails. Lots of emails. The fine folks of Eveleth had found the piece, and my inbox was suddenly full of messages from people who currently and formerly lived in Eveleth. They sent me photos of the town and their stories of growing up. They offered to take pictures of anything I wanted to see that I couldn’t see on Google Maps. One of them even scanned and sent poetry that her father wrote about how much he loved the town.

Eveleth is a darn good city

Not a big or fancy place

Eveleth is a friendly city

With friends who are tough to replace

It goes on from there. Continue reading →

Live from the Bering Land Bridge

By: | March 1, 2016

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My desk is a mess, skulls, books and papers strewn. The cast of a saber-tooth cat skull sits on the corner, resting on its two double-edged daggers, reminding me of the book I am writing about the first people in North America, and what they encountered. As I crab myself over the keyboard, the Smilodon skull is there to remind me to keep it real.

When writing about what humans would have faced in the New World, my desk is not enough. I’ve had to leave it and find something more real. One summer I traveled to the Bering land bridge, or at least what remains of it. Every evening that July, I walked out of the village of Savoonga along the hard breaking north shore of St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska to get a look at my subject.

Continue reading →

How I Won the Internet and Brought Joy to Peepdom

By: | February 29, 2016

The cast of Hamilpeep stands on their diorama stage.

Last week, I was famous on the internet…for dressing colorful marshmallow bunnies in cravats and spreading them to the enthusiastic fans of a hit Broadway musical.

My friends and I made Hamilpeep. Perhaps your cousin shared it with you?

Hamilpeep was our entry into the Washington Post’s annual Peeps diorama contest, in which readers are challenged to depict a scene using marshmallow Easter treats. Two years ago, our creative team–me and my old friends Joanna Church and Kate Ramsayer–made it to the semifinals with a Sweaters for Peepguins diorama. It went mildly viral, with nearly 800 people and some knitting sites sharing the picture on Facebook.

We kind of hoped we could get this one to reach lots of strangers, too…but we had no idea how much it would take off. I invited Kate, who is also a science writer, to discuss the weird, exciting, exhausting experience of having something you made spread through the internet.

HELEN: Hey, Kate, remember that time we made a diorama of a Broadway show and it went viral? Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 27, 2016
Helen Fields (American, 1975 - ), Daniela and Her Pet Lion, 2016
Helen Fields (American, 1975 – ), Daniela and Her Pet Lion, 2016

Feb. 22 – 26, 2016

RadioLab doesn’t run climate change stories. Cassie asks her husband, who works for RadioLab, why not.  Cassie’s husband explains about anti-stories.  Cassie says, “what the hell.”

Jennifer was out in the rain and cold, and was on the receiving end of kindness and empathy.  She doesn’t care whether her kind empathizer was just making him/herself feel good.  “Good begets good,” she says.  “It doesn’t matter why.”

Helen set up her easel in front of Rubens’ Daniel in the Lion’s Den so she could copy some lions.  What she ended up with was “Daniela with her blue martini, her pet lion, and the skull of the last man who tried to mess with her.”

Cameron considers a cartoon called the Octonauts, some citizen science called JellyWatch, thinks the octopi and jellies all inhabit a quiet world, and wonders, “What could go wrong?”

Sarah tries to love ticks, a journey that takes her through John Mayer, the U.S. National Tick Collection, and a clearly-crazed entomologist.