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6 – 20 December
This week, Erik reported on the state of science magazines in Mexico: aliens, conspiracy theories and Jesus in crisis. Note to self: move to Mexico.
Michelle gave Bilbo Baggins a gender makeover.
Cameron asked our esteemed readers for help with a head scratcher: why do the highest tides on winter fall exclusively in the morning?
Cassie requested a little more gravitas for men diagnosed with saxophone penis.
And Ann revisited the story of the kidnapped nuclear scientist.
By the time dermatologist Sanjeev Vaishampayan met his patient, a 45-year-old father of four, the man was in a bad way. Antibiotics had taken care of the infected lesions on his legs, but now the man had a new and mortifying problem: His genitals were bulging and bloated. “The scrotum was huge and its contents could not be palpated,” Vaishampayan observed. What’s more, the man’s swollen penis curved sharply at the tip. Vaishampayan had no trouble coming up with a diagnosis. This man had a clear-cut case of saxophone penis.
Saxophone penis, sometimes called “ram’s horn” penis, is just what it sounds like. The condition describes a penis so sharply twisted it resembles, well, the instrument from which it takes its name. Swelling causes the distortion, but the source of the swelling varies and is often difficult to pinpoint. Continue reading
About a month ago, I wrote a review of a play by David C. Cassidy about Farm Hall. Farm Hall was the English country house in which the British government, just after World War II, sequestered the German nuclear scientists they’d kidnapped. The scientists’ rooms were bugged, and their conversation was recorded and transcribed by listeners. The result was a transcript which had fairly cried aloud to be turned into a play. David Cassidy, among others, did. I reviewed it and afterward, heard from Dr. Oliver Dearlove, pediatric anaesthetist (retired) who lives in the UK.
Oliver: Very interested to read your review in Nature about the Farm Hall play. I remember 2010, Adam Ganz did another play about Farm Hall on Radio 4. In the e-book of the Farm Hall transcripts, one of the listeners was a Peter Ganz. I suspect/wonder if he was Adam’s father.
Ann: How very extremely interesting. I’ve never heard of either one. With your permission, I’ll forward your question to David Cassidy, who not only wrote the play I reviewed, but is also an historian of physics who wrote a splendid introduction to one publication of the transcripts.
Oliver: Thank you for your speedy reply, dear madam. Please send to Cassidy the following version of my question which I have tarted up in true scientific fashion.
Tarted-up official question was sent immediately to Cassidy.
David Cassidy: Dr. Dearlove, I am the author of the play Ann Finkbeiner reviewed, and I thank you for the reference to the Radio 4 play. Do you happen to know how I might locate Adam Ganz?
Oliver: I am sorry for not replying sooner. Adam Ganz is to be found here. His play is listed on the Radio 4 website but as far as I can discern it is unavailable for playback. Do you think that A. Ganz is related as I suspect to P. Ganz?
David: I’ll try to get in touch with A. Ganz. It’s a shame that his play isn’t available.
A short interval occurs before emails resume.
Ann: But you CAN, you can, you can get Ganz’s play. My work has been going badly so I’ve clicked around on the internet. And the Radio 4 link really is dead but there’s another secret one. This is the best thing I’ve done all day.
Oliver: We are having an excited Adam Ganz experience via the internet.
David: A jolly good find, indeed!
Ann: And here’s Peter Ganz! Or rather, his obituary. Continue reading
My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.
The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)
But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way?
I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.
Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.
And you know what? The switch was easy. Bilbo, it turns out, makes a terrific heroine. She’s tough, resourceful, humble, funny, and uses her wits to make off with a spectacular piece of jewelry. Perhaps most importantly, she never makes an issue of her gender—and neither does anyone else.
Several weeks ago I was invited to sit in on a fascinating workshop on journalism. Hosted by the Mexican Society for Science and Technology Communication (SOMEDICYT), it was a collection of science writers from Mexico and abroad gathered together to discuss the definition of science journalism.
It was the kind of philosophical dialogue that you don’t get to have too often as a working journalist, concerned about selling stories and hitting deadlines. But it’s a crucial topic, especially in Mexico. Despite being a massive market with a (mostly) common language, Latin America is virtually overlooked by the wider science writing community.
On the one hand in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile (skipping Brazil for now because I am talking about Spanish-speaking science writing) have robust research endeavors. On the other, most of the mainstream “science” magazines are simply embarrassing. The two biggest, Quo and Muy Interesante, trade between covers between aliens, conspiracy theories, and the ever-popular Jesus-in-crisis. About half of the material is legitimate science and the other – well – I really liked the exposé on wolfmen. Continue reading
This weekend the moon pulled back the curtains on the beach, revealing plenty of sand in the evening hours. I love the beach in the winter, particularly near dusk. The sand seems to go on for miles; when there’s a full moon, it rises from behind the mountains, which are still rosy from alpenglow.
I think I understand how tidal extremes work, enough so that I can explain using a stick drawing in the sand. The moon and the Sun and the Earth fall into line (or close enough), giving a little extra tug on the tides. These higher highs and lower lows are called spring tides, ones that “spring forth” around the time of the new and full moons.
But I haven’t yet figured out why the beach seems to appear mostly in the evening in the wintertime, while it’s drowning in seawater near dawn. Continue reading
December 9 – 13
Guest Michael Balter would like scientists to understand that by talking to science writing grad students, they’re talking to the people who will one day be representing their work to the public. Please and thank you.
I wouldn’t consider reading my horoscope but in any case, it’s always wrong. Abstruse Goose reads his and it’s uncannily accurate. How does he do it?
Cameron’s son loves infectious diseases, wants her to read him about them, asks her to tell him everything she knows. What’s a mother to do?
A national — nay, an international– crisis, says Christie: English has no second person plural pronoun. When a woman’s right, she’s right, y’all.
Babies’ lives all over the world could be saved, Jessa says, if we could just keep the little guys warm.
Out of 20 million premature and underweight babies born each year, four million die. Most are in developing countries. Solving this problem is not just a short-term humanitarian effort, it also constitutes low-hanging fruit in the international development field. When infant mortality goes down, we tend to see population sizes decrease as well.
Poverty can be confoundingly complex, but for these infants the proximal threat is clear: Hypothermia. Without the body fat reserves to regulate their own temperature, babies need external heating. Kangaroo care (skin-to-skin contact with a mother) promotes breast feeding and warms babies to the right temperature but can only ever be part of the solution when mothers have competing survival demands of work and other children.
The incubators we see in well-supported hospitals are expensive, but the real barrier to access is infrastructure. Incubators require a continuous power supply. Continue reading
