The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

So Long, and Thanks for All the Canids

By: Ben Goldfarb | January 15, 2025

Lately I’ve been a bit lax about my camera trapping — dead batteries, neglected cameras, etcetera — but, last month, I did manage to check the rig I’d had set up for a while at our county’s friendly neighborhood carcass pile, where highway crews and hunters dump the sorry detritus of elk and deer, and scavengers come to feast. I’d been hoping for an elusive mountain lion or late-season bear, but no sooner did the videos upload than I realized it was going to be a rodent-dominated set. I’d unwittingly placed the camera right in the middle of a squirrel’s territory, whose frantic scurrying had triggered its electronic eye every few minutes and drained the battery in about ten days.

In between the rodent captures, I did manage a few nocturnal glimpses of our region’s standard canids: coyote, red fox, gray fox. I love seeing this trio; I have boundless admiration for these carnivores’ stealth, pluck, and adaptability. Apparently a wolf has also recently wandered into our corner of Colorado; with luck, she’ll be next to appear at the elephant graveyard.

And with that, I’m sorry to report that my tenure at LWON comes, for now, to an end; for a variety of reasons, I’ll be stepping away to focus on professional and personal duties. I’ve so enjoyed writing for and engaging with this community over these last years, and offer my deepest gratitude to all you readers and my fellow LWONians (LWONites? I could never get it straight) for making this such a vibrant hub of thoughtful, quirky science writing. See you in the comments!

Science Metaphors (cont.): Touchstone

By: Ann Finkbeiner | January 13, 2025

Last Friday, Sarah used “touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor — you touch a stone and see its landscape in time — in a way that’s poetically off-center from touchstone’s usual meaning. Which is a thing that’s solid, grounded, and reliable and which is the way I’ve used “touchstone,” because I have a long-standing issues around grounding and reliability. A touchstone is what you refer back to when you’ve become uncertain; it’s reliable certainty, isn’t it, a truth in which you can believe and by which everything can be judged.

But touchstones didn’t start out as metaphors, they’re real things, originally dark and fine-grained rocks, like slate. They’re used as a test for the type and purity of a metal. Specifically, gold — like, you’re paying for gold here, is it really gold? is it pure or has it been cut with baser metals? You draw a line, called a streak, on the touchstone with a piece of the metal, then look at the line’s color. If the streak is gold, the metal is gold and the gold is pure. If the streak is black, it’s pyrite, fool’s gold. If the streak is white, it’s silver; copper-colored, it’s copper. The more copper that’s alloyed with the gold, the redder the streak. Alloys of silver and copper, of silver, copper, and gold; and of tin and lead, all have their own streaks.

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Composite

By: Sarah Gilman | January 10, 2025

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Oh Wow: An Exercise in Certainty

By: Kate Horowitz | January 8, 2025

Watercolor painting of a tadpole-shaped prehistoric sea animal with no fins, staring round eyes, and a silly triangle mouth. — *“Oh Wow!” (2024).*

Key:
* = Pretty darn sure
** = Scientists are making some educated guesses here

Hundreds of millions of years ago during the Ordovician period, someone blorped and wiggled around in the shallow waters off Gondwana.*

This someone didn’t have jaws or fins,** nor did they have utility bills or shoelaces.* Their name—as assigned by strangers who never even met them—was Sacabambapsis. They had a big ol’ head, front-facing eyes, and a triangular mouth that never shut.** They looked, in short, like an incredibly goofy cartoon,** at least in this model that resides in the Finnish Museum of History.*

I love this someone, partly because I, too, look a bit like a cartoon, but also because they remind me how little true certainty there is in this world, even—or especially—when it comes to science. There’s a reason this blog isn’t called The Last Word on Everything.

Some things (anthropogenic climate change, the benefits of vaccines and pasteurization, the earth being round, bats being awesome) are pretty damn solid. But so many others are educated guesses, our sense-seeking minds drawing shapes in the dark. And man oh man, some of those shapes are hilarious.

Watercolor painting by me.

By the wind sailors

By: Emily Underwood | January 6, 2025

*Velella velella*, or by-the-wind-sailor. Credit: Notafly, Wikimedia Commons

This post first appeared in March 2023. I can’t wait to go to the beach again.

Walking south along the beach towards Los Angeles this weekend, my friend and I were talking about all the arbitrary things that can alter a life’s trajectory, like where you’re born or if your parents went to college.

As we walked, we noticed hundreds of tiny sea creatures scattered like dark blue flower petals along the water’s edge. Some were as small as a baby’s fingernail. Others were as big as silver dollars. When we looked at them up close, we saw that each animal had a flat, blue oval disc for a body, joined to a transparent sail.

We prodded the stranded animals gently to see if they were alive or had any stinging venom, since they looked a lot like jellyfish. When nothing happened, we started arranging them in a line on the damp sand, from small to large. All the sails curved in a shallow S–shape, and were angled slightly to the left. They looked like a fleet of ships waiting for a general’s command to launch. Later, we learned that the strange blue discs were called Velella velella, or by-the-wind-sailors.

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Maybe Good Things Will Happen – II

By: People of LWON | January 3, 2025

Ed. note: Yes, certainly, parts of last year were pretty bad, yes, we noticed that. But not everything is terrible at all times in every way. And maybe, possibly, even probably, in this new year good things will happen.

Craig: A Robbie Robertson song contains some of my favorite lyrics:
Give us the strength
Give us the wisdom
And give us tomorrow

The good thing I’m noticing is that time doesn’t stop. We keep being given tomorrow. It’s not a guarantee, a plug could get pulled on the video game of us, but so far it’s worked. It’s worth a prayer now and then, or mention in a song (“Showdown at Big Sky” by Robbie Robertson).

What more could we ask for than tomorrow, and what is more sure than sunrise?

For the record, the next lyrics in the song are a call to action, so let’s get busy:

Let the bells ring out (ring those bells)
Hear the bells ringin’
Let the bells ring out (all the people gonna)
Keep on ringing, ringing (ring those bells)

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Maybe Good Things Will Happen – I

By: People of LWON | January 1, 2025

Becky: Maybe the Steller’s jays will hop back and forth on the pine outside the kitchen window. Maybe the turkeys will riffle through the fallen oak leaves, which I did not pick up on purpose. Maybe my 3-year-old will draw another picture of her older sister. Maybe the package will arrive from Dnipro on time. Maybe there will be no more death in Gaza, or from rampaging viruses. Maybe the refugees who my friends are helping will arrive before January. Maybe the high natural fluoride in my municipal water supply will be enough? Maybe the wind will bring in more snow. Maybe, if we are lucky, that wind will be at just the right speed to make my favorite sound, whistling through the ponderosas. Maybe the holiday dinner will be low stress. Maybe we will even be happy. Maybe we’ll have our health, too. Maybe we will be together again someday, in some place. Maybe it will be warm when we get there, and we will see blue jays, and hear the wind.

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