The Last Word

By: | June 14, 2014

teotihuacan_la_ventillaJune 9 – 13, 2014

This week Michelle convinces us that cryptozoology has never known a stranger — nor more adorable — creature than the moose-like hugag. It is the creation of William Cox, and surely the ancestor of the heffalump.

Richard kickstarts a memetic phenomenon with the phrase, “telling the fire by its ashes” as a task faced by evolutionary biologists and, indeed, most scientists.

Stones of the salivary gland are a thing, according to Cassie. A painful ordeal of a thing for which “passing” one simply has to wait.

Uncomfortably close to the Earth’s dynamic nature, Christie spends the week re-assessing the mountains around her house, the largest of which recently calved, killing three men.

And just when you think you know your hieroglyphs, Erik introduces you to the cartoonish, interlocking balloon letters of Mesoamerican epigraphy and the as-yet undecipherable doodles made by the Teotihuacanos.

Image: Karl Taube

What’s in a Word?

By: | June 13, 2014

shutterstock_139799134 (1) Next week, in the July issue of Scientific American, you can read a story I wrote about the fascinating archeological site of Teotihuacan. You may remember it as the Mexican site I wrote about in 2012 with an almost magical ability to draw in hippies. The story focuses on our growing understanding of the politics and culture of the city.

It’s a fascinating place for tourists and the most visited archeological site in North America. But it’s equally fascinating for researchers. That’s because, unlike the Maya to the east, Teotihuacanos didn’t have a proper written language.

“If I could go back in time, that’s the place I would want to go,” says Karl Taube, a well-known Mayan epigrapher (a fancy word for someone who deciphers ancient dead languages like Latin, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and html).

Let’s leave aside the fact that a tall, bearded white dude wandering around Teotihuacan in 200 AD would attract a fair bit of unwanted attention. Taube has puzzled over texts from across the Maya world – some of the most exciting archeological digs in recent history. Yet, if you gave him his choice of any period in history, he’d choose a place without any writing. Why would he do that? Continue reading →

A stark introduction to geologic time

By: | June 12, 2014

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When I was a kid, my mom would measure time for me in units of Sesame Street. During a road trip when I’d inevitably ask, “Are we there yet?” she might answer, we’ll be there in two Sesame Streets. For a kid, two hours can seem like forever.

We imagine the world through the lens of our experience. When you’re six, a day or a month represent a substantial portion of the life you’ve lived so far. When you’re 60, such periods of time are gone before you know it. It’s all about perspective. Things that happen too quickly or slowly for us to see tend to escape our notice. As a result, the vibration of an atom or the formation of a Grand Canyon inspire our awe and wonder, because they exist outside our normal realm of attention.

Slide2A few weeks ago, geologic time made itself visible to me and my community when a massive section of the mountain we call home slid down the hill in an epic display of nature’s brute force. The mudslide happened on Sunday, May 25 near Collbran, Colorado, trapping, and presumably killing, three men. Wes Hawkins, Danny Nichols and his father, Clancy Nichols had gone out to check on an irrigation canal that was likely clogged by the first rumblings of the slide. At a town hall meeting in Collbran on May 29, Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey told attendees,

These are the facts we have: Sunday morning, 7:18 a.m. seismic activity occurred.  Probably that was when the first slide impacted the irrigation of the area, prompting the men to go to the area. At 5:44 p.m. seismic graphs recorded the major slide.  Based on what the experts have provided, event duration was only a couple of minutes.

In that brief moment, an enormous slab of the Grand Mesa — the world’s largest flat-topped mountain — came tumbling down. Initial estimates measured the slide at four miles long and two miles wide, reaching 250 feet in depth. At the town hall meeting, Jeff Coe of the USGeological Survey told the crowd that the event is classified as a “debris slide” because it’s a mixture of soil, rocks and trees. Witnesses said that it sounded like a freight train, speeding down the mountain. Continue reading →

This Too Shall Pass

By: | June 11, 2014

 

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María Juan’s pain began eight years ago, at lunchtime. She was dining with her parents when suddenly she felt a sharp jab under her tongue. “Like an aguja,” she says — a needle. Each time she tried to swallow, she felt another poke. After the meal ended, the pain subsided. At dinner, however, it returned. And now the right side of her neck was a swollen. A couple of days later, María decided to see a doctor.

The doctor stuck one finger in her mouth and placed another finger on her neck, probing. He could feel something in her salivary gland. Something hard and strange. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. He tried to pinch it out with his fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. There was nothing to do but wait. María left with some pills to make her salivate, and orders to drink lemon juice — a surefire way to produce spit. Amazingly, the regimen worked. The pain disappeared.  Continue reading →

Repeat After Us

By: | June 10, 2014

wood-ashesI was reading the end-of-semester student essays in the Science as Narrative course I teach when one phrase stopped me. Stopped me as in, I didn’t go on:

“Darwin was happy to be tasked with telling a fire by its ashes.”

Was it an actual thing, I wondered, this “telling a fire by its ashes”? I tried to think if I’d ever heard the phrase. Not that I could recall. So I Googled it. Nothing. I Googled variations on it. Still nothing. I resisted the impulse to email the student and ask if he’d made it up. As much as I wanted to know the answer, I also wanted to hear his peers’ reaction to the question; the seminar consisted of eight students, most of whom were happy to cross-talk at high volume—a teacher’s dream of engagement and passion.

So I waited until Tuesday. When the time came to discuss this student’s essay, I asked him directly: Was it an actual thing, this “telling a fire by its ashes”?

Continue reading →

Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods

By: | June 9, 2014

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Allow me to introduce you to the hugag, a moose-like creature native to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and eastern Canada. “Its head and neck are leathery and hairless; its strangely corrugated ears flop downward,” wrote William Cox, the first state forester of Minnesota. “Its four-toed feet, long bushy tail, shaggy coat and general make-up give the beast an unmistakably prehistoric appearance.”

According to Cox, the enormous but mild-mannered hugag has a “perfect mania for traveling,” perhaps because of its jointless legs, which make it impossible to sit or lie down. The last known hugag sighting was in the early 1900s, when an 1,800-pounder was found stuck in the mud near Turtle River, Minnesota. (“It was knocked in the head by Mike Flynn, of Cass Lake,” Cox reported.)

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 7, 2014

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June 2-6, 2014

This week began with cosmic conundrums.

Jessa looked at the maladies astronauts suffer after long periods in zero gravity. For Mars-bound explorers of the future, the toll on their bodies–and their psyches–is unknown. “Travelers won’t even see stars. Outside the window, there will be blackness. Utter blackness.”

And Ann wrestled with what to name the planets beyond our reach. The problems: There are at least 5,000 of them (“probably the thin edge of a fat wedge”); we’ve used up Greek, Roman, Gallic, Norse and Inuit gods; and we’ve still got to figure out a naming process. Her suggestion: “I kind of like 51 Peg’s Lucille. SDSS J102915+172927’s Oliver.”

Then we turned to more terrestrial predicaments. Today is the Belmont Stakes, an annual thoroughbred horse race that’s the third jewel of the coveted Triple Crown. Guest poster and horse lover Jeanne Erdmann won’t be watching it. “Thoroughbreds run because they love to run. They race because we ask them to. We should stop asking.”

I even looked underwater to find a dilemma to explore. Well, underwater and on the dinner table–researchers are starting to use restaurant menus to figure out how fish species fared in the past.

But the week ended with a rainbow from guest posters Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe: a spectacular display of the aurora borealis and an even more spectacular melding of two different time periods in an Icelandic village that was almost destroyed by lava during a volcanic eruption in 1783. Their book Island On Fire tells the story of the widespread, long-lasting effects of this natural disaster; their post describes the uncanniness of returning to the village this spring, and finding a place they’ve “come to love in both the past and present.”

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photo of a fortuitous rainbow in Klaustur, Iceland by Witze and Kanipe.

 

 

 

Guest Post: Return to Laki

By: | June 6, 2014
A fortuitous rainbow over the Jón Steingrímsson memorial chapel, Klaustur, Iceland.
A fortuitous rainbow over the Jón Steingrímsson memorial chapel, Klaustur, Iceland.

People say that writing a book is something of an obsession. It has to be. Why else would you turn over your life for several years to, say, the sex life of bedbugs or the dark energy driving the universe?

In our case, it was 18th-century Iceland that did us in — more specifically, a pastor in a remote village in 18th-century Iceland. Our book Island on Fire details a horrific volcanic eruption that took place in 1783. It started on June 8, almost exactly 231 years ago, practically in the back yard of a farmer, doctor and pastor named Jón Steingrímsson. He wrote down everything he observed, documenting the eruption day after day, in what has become an important chronicle in the annals of volcanology. The eruption lasted eight months; the famine from its toxic ashfall lasted nearly two years. Pastor Jón wrote of earth and fire and flames, and of how the volcano named Laki destroyed nearly everything he loved. Continue reading →