A Pirate’s Life For Us

By: | March 27, 2014

futuristic floating cityEngineers and architects have been facing the question for years. “When we were designing the Tate Modern, there was a moment when someone said, ‘What will you do when the water is a metre or two higher?’” remembers Stuart Smith, a director at global engineering firm Arup. “As an individual building, there’s not much you can do — you have to rely on sea defenses and civil engineering.”

Sea level rise is just one of the reasons posited for a future where cities extend into the sea on floating platforms, or even become independently seaworthy. In a story I wrote for the Guardian last week, I explored some of the sci-fi visions and futuristic schemes going to create floating cities. A wise commenter pointed out that real floating cities wouldn’t look like the slick artists’ renderings in the slide show. They’d be rusted out and encrusted with seagull crap. Continue reading →

Infected and Imprisoned

By: | March 26, 2014

Man in mask

The outbreak that shook the tiny town of Ninety Six, South Carolina, probably began in the spring of 2012. An elderly janitor at the local elementary school fell ill and began unwittingly spreading the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. By June 2013, more than 50 students were infected and at least ten had developed signs of the disease.

To prevent further spread, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) ordered the janitor to take medication and stay home, but he didn’t. According to an emergency public health order, he left his house without DHEC’s permission and refused to answer some of the department’s many questions. When he did answer, his responses were “evasive, vague and inconsistent.” What happened next probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did: The state arrested the janitor and threw him in a medical detention facility. Continue reading →

The Long Now of the Tiburón Bighorn

By: | March 21, 2014

Bighorn skull on Tiburon IslandIn the spring of 2012, botanist and graduate student Benjamin Wilder was camping on Tiburón Island, a large island in the Gulf of California whose flora he has studied for most of a decade.

Wilder wanted to find out more about the evolutionary history of the plants on Tiburón, so he was looking for fossil woodrat middens—piles of vegetation and other debris collected by woodrats, glued together with woodrat pee, and cached away for tens of thousands of years. For scientists, woodrat middens are like care packages from the past.

In a shallow cave in the foothills of the Sierra Kunkaak, Wilder, a lab mate, and two friends from the local Seri community found something that resembled a midden, but didn’t look quite right: It had a lot of dung in it, and not many plants. Wilder took it back to Tucson, Arizona, and showed it to his mentor Julio Betancourt, who recognized it with a look and a sniff. “That’s bighorn sheep dung,” he said. Its identity was confirmed by DNA analysis, and when samples were radiocarbon dated, they turned out to be 1,500 years old.

Which was, as far as anyone knew, impossible.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: I Walked Across the Hudson River

By: | March 19, 2014

Ice yacht

Several times a week, I drive over a Hudson River bridge to pick up my daughter from her school in Troy, NY, and bring her back home to the Albany side. Back and forth I go, and every time my eye wanders to the frozen surface below. Even when it’s dark and there’s nothing to see, I look down and sense the expanse.

I’m not quite sure how the idea crept into my mind, but once there, it lodged and grew. Could I walk across the Hudson? It’s been a very cold winter. Not just cold, but consistently cold. The river’s surface has been solid since the new year. It easily held up the 20 inches of snow we got in mid-February. It sported puddles on the ice when temperatures hit 50 degrees about a week later.

I wondered and daydreamed and fantasized. At some point I realized that there must be others out there, thinking the same thing, feeling the same pull. That’s when I started to scheme. Perhaps there was a secret place where people walked on the river. Perhaps there was a wacky upstate New York event celebrating a frozen winter. Perhaps I could really do this. Continue reading →

Interview with Will Storr: Disputable Sources

By: | March 18, 2014

Star Wars ConventionAnn:  Will Storr is a phenomenon.*  His specialty is writing good stories about people in bad places.  He’s got a story in Matter about an extremely unpleasant disease called Morgellons.  People with Morgellons have terrible itches, then tiny fibers creep out of their skin and make oozy sores.  The disease sounds like a horror story out of Darwin’s parasitic wasps which lay their eggs in other insects that the hatchling wasps then eat from the inside out.  And sure enough, the usual medical diagnosis isn’t Morgellons but DOP, delusions of parasitosis. The disease, according to the doctors, belongs to the mind part of the mind-body split.  I read Will’s story after the great Ginny Hughes wrote on Twitter that somebody should interview him about how a writer works with sources who are what? bug-nuts? victims of unimaginative docs? unreliable? anyway, sources with whom a writer isn’t sure he shares a reality.  But maybe Will himself should describe these sources who after all, are fellow humans.

Will:  The Morgellons piece is an extract from my latest book, which begins with me spending some time with a creationist who’s determined to prove to me, using the methods of science, that the earth is only 6000 years old. The thing about that guy – and about many of the people I’ve written about over the years – is that he wasn’t crazy. He was living an orderly, successful life. He was happy (as happy as any of us, anyway). There was no evidence of pathology, as far as I could tell. Also – he wasn’t stupid. So if he’s not crazy and not stupid – how the hell did he come to believe what he does?   Continue reading →

Do Penguins Need Sweaters?

By: | March 17, 2014

jumperpenguinI’m a lover of science and a devoted knitter. Science-related projects that appear on the internet and have to do with yarn find their way into my inbox. That means I am aware of the project in Glasgow to knit microbes for elementary schools. I am in love with that shawl that depicts the night sky in silver beads. The knitted version of a dissected rat with its innards showing? Yep, seen it. Also the frog.

Proof that I’m doing something right in my life: When my friends see a knitted piece of science, they think of me. Continue reading →