Coming Home From Saudi Arabia

By: | July 4, 2014

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It was water that impressed me first when I got back to the U.S.

I spent the month of June in Saudi Arabia, teaching teenage girls about writing and science. On the van ride home from the airport the other day, I couldn’t believe the trees. I’d forgotten about trees. The highways are lined with them. My neighborhood is full of them. All these magnificent green trees, everywhere, sucking water from the ground and spewing it into the air, like sprinklers attached to massive, woody wells. And there’s humidity in the air. Already the rough, dry patches on the backs of my hands are starting to sort themselves out. And I can drink the water from the tap.

When I stepped out of the cool airport into the Saudi air on the evening of May 31, I thought I was standing by of a bus exhaust. But I looked and looked and there was no bus. That was just the air. Hot. Excessively so. And moving. Yesterday I walked past a bus here in D.C. and it felt just like that first step into Saudi Arabia. Continue reading →

Anti-Copernican Shock

By: | July 3, 2014

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[NOW WITH NEW VISUALIZATION:  see below]

Planets around other stars, exoplanets, have given me a long-running case of boredom – how long can you sustain OMG LOOKIT THAT PLANET HAS TWO SUNS? not long.  I keep writing about them anyway.  I do it because 1) sometimes somebody pays me to; and 2) the planets may or may not be interesting in themselves but the systems they’re in OMG THAT PLANET ISN’T GOING AROUND ITS SUN’S EQUATOR IT’S GOING OVER THE POLES! cause serious anti-Copernican shock.  That is, though we’ve learned we’re not special in the universe, OMG NOT ONLY ARE WE SPECIAL AFTER ALL WE’RE APPARENTLY THE ONLY ONE THERE IS!

NASA and the ground-based planet hunters are fixated on finding another earth but — aside from the rigors of proving habitability — all they’ve found so far is not us.  The most common exoplanets, of the thousands found so far, are bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune; they’re called super-Earths or sometimes sub-Neptunes and up to half the sun-like stars have them. Our solar system has none (0, zero) of them.  But being on an unlikely planet isn’t all that amazing.

What’s amazing is that no other solar system – more properly, planetary system – looks anything like ours.  True, the two main planet-finding techniques are best at systems with exoplanets close to their stars.  And if these techniques were looking at the solar system, they’d likely find the inner terrestrials and miss the outer giants. But never mind because the planetary systems they’re finding so far could give you a solid case of CAPS-LOCK.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

The Secret Lives of Animals

By: | June 30, 2014

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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 →