A Placebo a Day…

By: | July 2, 2014

shutterstock_91706279The other day I was walking home and I noticed that the local herbal remedy place in the neighborhood had closed down. It was a cheery place, with pictures of flowers on the windows, and often a pretty girl outside to lure in customers. It may have been a tad corporate-looking but I never really thought of it as evil.

“I have a perverse sort of glee knowing that place is shutting down,” my wife whispered as we walked past.

I knew what she meant. The place, called Club Naturista Alecos, sells a tincture “derived from indigenous herbs” that “acts as an internal and external cleanser” and “is the most amazing product in the world” that “greatly helps the health of all people.” “Snake oil” doesn’t appear in their pamphlets but it’s pretty well implied.

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Guest Post: Farewell Invertebrates, We Hardly Knew You

By: | July 1, 2014

coral1The first thing I saw when I walked into the National Zoo’s Invertebrate Exhibit on Saturday was a glass tank filled with corals. And the first thought I had was, oh my god, they’re so beautiful.

In the tank, an explosion of star-shaped mouths opened and closed in time to some inaudible rhythm. Nearby a thousand stalks, each tipped with its own fluorescent bulb, undulated in the current like so much wheat in a breeze. A blue and turquoise-fringed underwater mushroom colonized a discarded shell, and from behind a coral skeleton a red mini-lobster poked its antennaed head.

The second thought I had was, these things look totally alien, and yet they’re all animals, which means we’re related, and they’re having some sort of experience of life that isn’t altogether different from my experience of life.

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The Secret Lives of Animals

By: | June 30, 2014

Dressy Bear 1

A bear broke into my wife’s old teardrop trailer in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. It must have been yearling by the bite marks in bean cans, and the smallness of its hips where it busted out the door-window and dragged itself inside. The bear didn’t find much, leaving by the front window, aluminum frame ripped to tatters.

I studied where it had pawed into a cabinet, tearing off a door, crashing through the one and only shelf, revealing where it had stood, snout flexing to smell for anything good, paws smudging the small refrigerator, unable to free the latches or hinges, giving up, probably disappointed. Tracking its moves through the trailer, what it destroyed, what it did not, I felt as if I were seeing a secret part of its life, a glimpse into the day of a bear. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: the Mad Scientist, IRL

By: | June 29, 2014

mad_scientistI never watched mad scientist movies, except maybe Dr. Strangelove, and I don’t have a clue what biologists do.  But Abstruse Goose here just seems to be describing real life.  Sad.  Not very.

Much sadder:  our AG hasn’t  been seen or heard from in a month of Sundays. Has he retreated from this world?

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http://abstrusegoose.com/123

The Last Word

By: | June 28, 2014

SciWriSum14-Ireland1-IMG_0828June 23 – 27, 2014

Guest Christine Grillo wonders whether, once climate change hits, California will get tired of sending Baltimore avocadoes.  Turns out the last Baltimore winter killed her fig tree.  “Stunata,” her uncle says.

Science writers had a meeting about actually Doing Something about this eternal gender bias crap.  Christie reports, and I mean reports.

LWON reduxes (redices?) Sally on replacing World Cup refs with reliable technology: “Maybe we should start thinking about which cognitive tasks should be outsourced.”

This thing called confirmation bias, where Richard’s hotel radio goes on by itself and is clearly haunted by a ghost who comes the same time every night.

Cassie switches out Penis Fridays for Vagina Fridays and rightly so, except jeez.  Those poor women of the olden days, born without vaginas and under the care of docs who should have been mechanics.

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closeBonus Sally:  Cassie’s husband and LWON guest poster, Soren Wheeler, bases a RadioLab program on Sally’s old LWON post about how being zapped by a 9-volt battery turned her into a highly accurate killer (“I didn’t leave any of them alive”), also serene.

TGIVF: So Many Ways to Make a Fake Vajayjay

By: | June 27, 2014

 

uterusHappy Friday! Normally we talk about penises at the end of the work week, but that’s not really fair, is it? After all, only half of us have them. So today I’d like to discuss a body part a little closer to my own heart: the vagina. Actually I’d like to talk about women who lack a vagina, and the multitude of techniques physicians have employed to give them one.

I hadn’t thought about this problem or its solution until recently, when I stumbled across an article about lab-grown vaginas. They exist. And this isn’t some rodent study, folks. Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine implanted these vaginas into four teenagers in Mexico City. The women suffer from a rare congenital condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome that results in incomplete development of the reproductive tract. Most women with MRKH lack a uterus, and their vaginal canals may be missing or underdeveloped. To help these girls, the research team took a bit of tissue from the vulva, grew the cells in a dish, and seeded them onto a biodegradable scaffold that they hand sewed into a vagina-like tube. The team implanted these vaginas between 2005 and 2008, and the results of this pilot study — reported for the first time this spring — are truly amazing. These ladies now have fully functional vaginas that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.  Continue reading →

The Ghosts in the Machines

By: | June 26, 2014

radio

Early one evening a couple of weeks ago I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Aspen, laptop in lap, when I started hearing voices. I raised my head, listening closely. At first I assumed the voices were coming from the street, but then I saw that the windows were closed. I got up and partially circumnavigated the bed, trying to trace the voices to their source, until I found myself standing before a radio on a nightstand. At this point I recognized one of the voices as belonging to an architect of the Iraq invasion eleven years ago. Back then he had warned of mushroom clouds, and talked about being greeted as liberators, and argued that the war would pay for itself, and promised the discovery of weapons of mass destruction. Now he was criticizing President Obama for wrecking the Middle East. That’s crazy, I thought. I don’t remember turning on the radio.

I’d heard the hotel is haunted. Another guest had told me that she refused a room on the third floor because she’d read on the internet that that’s where the ghost is–or, perhaps, ghosts are. Google “Hotel Jerome,” she told me, and look at the autofills. One of them, she said, will be “Hotel Jerome haunted.” I did, and sure enough, there it was: Continue reading →

Redux Post: The thin white line

By: | June 25, 2014

This first ran 12/17/2012. The subject is timely and so is the take-home: don’t be too ready to hand over the keys.

It was hardly the first time a ref had gotten it wrong. But the error at the 2010 World Cup was the last straw. Germany (the machine) was only beating England (the perpetual underdog) by a single goal. No fewer than five refs were milling about the pitch when Frank Lampard, an England player, took a shot on goal. It went in – for a moment. The ball hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced about two feet behind the goal line, and then bounced back out. But because all five refs were looking somewhere else at the crucial moment, it wasn’t a goal.

England probably would have lost that game anyway. Probably. But who can say? A crazy underdog goal can change the emotional trajectory of a game.

When officials make such infuriatingly bad calls, and we have technology that can do better, it’s time to use it. So this year, Fifa, football’s global governing body, finally caved on its protracted resistance against goal-line technology. This neat little piece of engineering gives officials highly accurate, real-time intelligence on whether a ball has crossed the goal line. Two contenders are making their debut right now at the Club World Cup championship in Japan. The winner will probably be used in all future high-level football games – and chip away a little more at the human animal’s willingness and ability to trust its own judgment. Continue reading →