Dear Dr. Collins: I’m Disabled. Can the N.I.H. Spare a Few Dimes?

By: | July 14, 2015

Three years ago, a sudden fever struck veteran science writer Brian Vastag on a blue-sky Wisconsin morning. He’s been sick ever since. Now cognitively and physically disabled, he lives on the island of Kauai. On Brian’s third “illiversary,” he presents an opportunity to National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. 

Dear Dr. Collins,

You might recall the last time we spoke. It was January 2013, and I was working as a science reporter at The Washington Post. Your people arranged an early call for you to announce that the N.I.H. had decided to retire most of its research chimpanzees. We spoke for about 20 minutes, and I typed up a 600-word story. It wasn’t very good.

I was working from home that gray day because I had little choice. I was mostly bedbound then, seven months after a sudden fever had knocked me prostrate. My legs were so weak that climbing the stairs to my home office required pulling myself up the railing hand-over-hand. My brain was so sluggish I asked few questions of you. The ones I managed to croak out were poor, no doubt. Continue reading →

Mocking Tricks

By: | July 13, 2015

4315761217_4ab22fc17d_bCaveat: I’m possibly having something like a Cassie-Willyard-Hubble-Moment here – in this case, I learn something new, don’t quite understand it but get all excited about it, and it’s, you know, wrong.  Never mind because I’m all excited anyway because science has found a new way of being confident that what you know is right.  Ok, confident enough that what you know is right enough.

I was reading about a defense department war game that took place completely inside a computer.  Individual virtual terrorists worked together on an attack; the defense department had to catch them first and needed to find the method that would work best.   So put the terrorists’ behaviors and tactics into a virtual world along with the defenders’ methods, and see whether a given method was any good at finding terrorists.  No? you missed some terrorists and got blown up?  Try another method until you find one that works.

I don’t think this war game was ever actually created but what do I know.  Nor do I know whether this is actually an accurate description of the war game, nor whether it’s actually as similar to a game astronomers play as I think it is. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 11, 2015

 

Leash burn

 

July 6 – 10, 2015

That about wraps up our Snark Week 2015, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other seemingly adorable animals that want to tear you limb from limb, and we’ll tell you about them next year (if you survive to read about them).

To recap this year’s horror show, we begin with the duck-billed platypus which, according to Erik, is not only venomous but also poisonous — and implicated in all the most intriguing assassinations in history.

Jennifer is intimately familiar with the darkest side of sand fleas — the side that sounds like popcorn and feels like a kid poking you from the next booth at Pizza Hut.

Many of us understand that farming is a hazardous industry, what with all the heavy machinery involved, but Christie reveals the second leading cause of farm injury: The Ferocious Bovine Menace.

A bull in a china shop is nothing compared with the destructive power of a dog in a family home, as Cassie can tell you first hand. Joyous leaping can be just as injurious to bystanders as an intentional attack.

It’s no coincidence that sloth is listed among the deadly sins. Once they were elephant sized, and now all that ruthlessness is condensed into a stealthy mammalian package that doesn’t look at all right.

Image: Jennifer’s nasty case of leash burn.

Snark Week: The Wrath of the Sloth

By: | July 10, 2015

shutterstock_203659915If there’s a landmass that has them, get off of it now. As you’ll learn in this blog post, the last thing you want to do is find yourself trapped in a confined space with sloths, and I consider a continent a confined space.

For starters, the sloth is the only animal listed as one of the 7 deadly sins. Their slowness may come off as apathy, but it is far more insidious. A three-toed sloth crawling on its belly toward you at a max ground speed of 5 feet per minute will make your hair stand on end. The larger species have claws 5 inches long, which you can right now feel sliding around your throat from behind.

Besides that, they just don’t look right. Chinless with pageboy haircuts, they have a distorted human-like appearance, the stuff of nightmares. Continue reading →

Snark Week: Man’s Best Friend?

By: | July 9, 2015

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Back in the 1970s, Saturday Night Live ran a skit in which Chevy Chase played a very clever land shark. He selected his victims by going door to door. And because no one would in their right mind would open the door for a shark, he pretended to be other, more benign things: a plumber, a flower delivery person, a dolphin.

Land sharks, of course, don’t exist. And even if they did, we wouldn’t bring them into our homes. But a dog in a shark costume? We’d kiss its wee fuzzy wuzzy face off.

But consider this: DOGS ARE JUST AS DANGEROUS AS LAND SHARKS — maybe even more so. Continue reading →

Snark week: Killer Cows!

By: | July 8, 2015

COWS-Flickr.com:photos:splatt:427800976

Apparently there’s some television extravaganza going on this week that makes it seem as if the beach is a scary place where a shark could attack you at any moment. Don’t believe it. You want a dangerous place? I’ll show you a dangerous place. A farm.

It’s not just the little roosters. If you’re worried about being killed by an animal, fear the cow. The most recent CDC statistics show that between 2003 and 2007, at least 108 people were killed in cow-related incidents. The CDC report provides a chart describing some of these incidents, and they’re brutal. Continue reading →

Snark Week: Sand, Sea, and Family-Oriented Flesh-Ripping Aliens

By: | July 7, 2015
Sea Stone Photography-Krista Queeney-Gloucester MA-2 (1)
Alien sand flea nicknamed “Old Blue Eyes.” Cuter than it deserves to be.

Some years back, in search of sunshine and sand, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I packed up the Bronco II and headed down to the Florida Keys (we love punishingly long and mind-numbing drives). We’d brought camping gear because we hadn’t booked anywhere to stay and, more important, we were dirt poor. The fee to pop a tent on the beach was manageable, plus we were still young enough to count Cup-a-Soup and gritty cheese sandwiches as a meal.

The “beach” we ended up on wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind. It was narrow back to front and there was more dried-up greenish black seaweed than sand in any direction. But there it was, and there we were, and we were tired of driving. So we set up camp on the sandiest spot, took a walk, ate a granola bar each, and, having run out of ideas and energy, crawled into bed.

That’s when the many-layered nightmare began. Continue reading →

Snark Week: A Silent, Adorable Killer

By: | July 6, 2015

platypus underwaterI have noticed a disturbing trend on the internets recently. A series of videos, pictures, and posts have portrayed the duck-billed platypus as an adorable, lovable creature. As if it is some cute little bundle of playful, ticklish fun. They’ve even been given a cute little web nickname of “puggle.” In fact, I might go so far as to say the platypus is on the verge of becoming the web’s new hedgehog. This needs to stop and it needs to stop now.

The duck-billed platypus – often called “nature’s mistake” or “holy crap, what is that freaky thing” by scientists – is not a toy, not a pet, and not even remotely safe. You see, platypuses (or “platypi,” as they are called by people who also use the word “octopi”) have a deadly secret. Continue reading →