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.)

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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 →

On the Menu

By: | June 5, 2014

4766947609_a36bd98aaa_zA local restaurant reviewer has a monthly feature in which he lists openings and closings of eateries around town. The list only contains the restaurants’ names and addresses, which always seems especially stark when it comes to the places that have shut their doors.

It’s the culinary equivalent of a gravestone. There’s nothing about the buckwheat crepe with fava beans and goat cheese, or the martini with habanero-infused vodka, or the truffle-stuffed chicken—or the people you remember sharing these things with you. Continue reading →

Why I Won’t Watch California Chrome Race on Saturday

By: | June 4, 2014
The author’s former horse, Dancing Plume, nicknamed “Natalie”

We haven’t had a Triple Crown winner in 36 years, since a horse named Affirmed won in 1978.  This year, there’s a lot of buzz around a chestnut colt named California Chrome. He’s already won the Kentucky Derby and The Preakness, and word is he has a good chance to win Saturday’s mile-and-one-half Belmont Stakes, one of 12 horses slated to run.

I know that the horses are gorgeous; I’ve loved horses all of my life. The pageantry of thoroughbred racing at this level is hard to resist, and California Chrome is already getting rock star treatment, with video of his arrival at Belmont Park in New York, journalists in tow. The gleaming horses, the racing silks, the landscaped  racetracks varnish over a sport with an ugly underbelly that’s been lost in the pre-race excitement.

I bought my first horse, named Hank, not long after college, when I finally had an income. I wanted to learn to jump and eventually go to horse shows (which are another abusive environment because owners and trainers of show horses can be just as abusive as the owners and trainers of racehorses). At the time, I couldn’t afford anything fancy, but Hank and I did well together. My second horse was a chestnut thoroughbred mare that I bought “off the track,” an expression for horses that don’t succeed in a racing career. Her registered name was Dancing Plume (she was nicknamed Natalie) and she had good bloodlines: She was the great granddaughter of Native Dancer, perhaps not a household name outside of horse racing but a talented horse who only lost one race, the Kentucky Derby in 1953. He was also a prolific sire whose offspring were top racehorses.

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Exoplanet Oliver, Oh Please?

By: | June 3, 2014

kep16edgewise-full_0I was interviewing an astronomer for a story about planets outside our solar system, extrasolar planets. Exoplanets have names like Kepler-11 e, or HD 106906 b, or HAT-P-54b. (Googling those names will get you some satisfyingly weird planets and in fact, most exoplanets are satisfyingly weird.  I mean, 51 Peg b is 150 times more massive than Earth and is so close to its star, its year is four days.)  Anyway, I found I needed to ask the astronomer whether he had trouble keeping all those names straight. “Sometimes I do,” he said, “not always.”

“Shouldn’t those exoplanets have real names?” I said.

“There’s a fuddy-duddy International Astronomical Union that gets worked up and forms committees to name things,” he said.

And well they might.  Left to their own devices, astronomers just name things up one side and down the other:  51 Peg b is also called TYC 1717-02193-1 b, IRAS 22550+2030 b, BD+19 5036 b, HIP 113357 b, HR 8729 b, GJ 882 b, HD 217014 b, 2MASS J22572795+2046077 b, and SAO 90896 b.

Wouldn’t it be easier if they just called it, say, Lucille?  When we care about something, don’t we name it? Continue reading →

Astronaut, Heal Thyself

By: | June 2, 2014

Nutrition4The manned craft negotiates entry into the thin Martian atmosphere and lands in some sort of ingenious fashion in the three-eighths gravity. This is it. My generation’s very own “One small step for a human” moment. Real live people are inside, ready to hop out and get to work. The fifteen-minutes-delayed camera feed zooms in on the door, which opens,

…the door opens, I said.

…hang on, where is she?

Oh there she is, lying like a useless lump in her seat, smiling weakly.

“Recovery, anecdotally, it’s day for day,” says former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who spent 215 straight days on the ISS. “So for a seven-month mission, it takes the same amount of time to feel normal.”

When you first return to gravity, your blood volume is 10% lower than normal, and your vestibular system has become uncoupled from gravity, so you walk around like a drunk person for a day or two. You might be able to drive again after about two weeks, but pervasive fatigue lasts a long time — months. When the first humans arrive in the partial gravity of Mars, they won’t be bursting out of their spacecraft ready to explore. It may require months of recovery before they are able to work. We’ve learned a lot about health in space, but there remain some major unknowns for a manned mission to Mars. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 31, 2014

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I have been in the back of a London taxicab in the small hours with Sally, and after what seemed like days of nausea-inducing back-alley turns I loudly suggested we might be faster just taking a main road. This was met with scorn and derision from said co-blogger. Now I know why.

When Craig goes artifact hunting he takes only photos and leaves only footprints. No digging. No holding. No taking. Tell no one. Having attached our affections to an indigenous seed jar, he leaves us on a cruel, cruel cliffhanger.

Also this week, Christie honors the American holiday of Memorial Day and Abstruse Goose points out that aliens whose home star is Vega are currently watching Seinfeld.  And finally, Cassie discovers her parenting style through the experience of crate training a puppy, using an ingenious stuffed toy with an artificial heartbeat.