Strange Times in Washington

By: | October 17, 2013

Capitol at nightThe first I knew of it was about 11:00 Monday night. The Capital Weather Gang, a brilliant blog that was snapped up by the Washington Post a few years ago, posted on Facebook: “Have seen some reports of a fireball (large meteor) in DC area around 8:25 pm. Anyone see it?”

Comments came in. A friend saw it while driving home after a rehearsal with her teenaged daughter. “Very cool!” she wrote. Other people spoke up, reporting seeing it in Herndon, Va., and Baltimore, Md. The meteor, it turned out, entered the atmosphere over southern New Jersey and headed northwest into Pennsylvania. Its flame was visible from Virginia all the way up into New York and Connecticut. Continue reading →

Why the Debate over Abortion is Secretly Awesome

By: | October 16, 2013

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I woke up this morning, had a cup of English Breakfast tea, and thought to myself, “This seems like a good point in my career to alienate all of my readers.” So I sat down and wrote a blog post about abortion.

If you are even a mildly thoughtful person, it’s a good chance you’re sick of the debate over abortion. People screaming past each other, lawmakers scoring useless points, both sides totally entrenched. But here’s the thing – the debate isn’t religious or political, it’s scientific. And totally awesome. To demonstrate this, let me fall back on a hackneyed narrative device called the hypothetical conversation. It’s between Robyn the Righty and Lizzy the Lefty. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Six (Or Seven) Degrees of Separation

By: | October 15, 2013

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A couple of months ago astronomers reported the discovery of an unusual six-component “gravitational lens”—six images of the same object coming at us from slightly different positions in the sky. As light traveling across the universe passes a large mass, the gravity from the mass will serve as a kind of lens, bending the rays. In the case of SDSS J2222+2745, the light from a quasar (the signature blast of energy that results from matter falling into a black hole at the center of a galaxy) passed through a cluster of hundreds of galaxies, getting diverted this way and that, until six images of the quasar emerged. For astronomers such as myself, the detection of this particular gravitational lens is important for several reasons. But for me, the detection of any gravitational lens isn’t just important. It’s personal.

Gravitational lensing is a consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which he published in 1916, but not until 1979 did astronomers actually report the discovery of a gravitational lens. Three years earlier, however, I might have been the first person to see such an object in an astronomical photograph.

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Ask Mr. Cosmology

By: | October 14, 2013

Time again to reach into the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag and see what readers want to know about . . . The Wonders of the Universe!

Q: Why does the full moon look larger near the horizon than when it’s higher in the sky?

Mr. Cosmology: Because it is.

Q: What is the correct pronunciation of supernovae?

Mr. Cosmology: Supernovae.

Q: I have a light, almost porcelain complexion. I’m a natural brunette, and I’ve always been fine with that, but I think I wouldn’t mind a change. I’m wondering if there’s a shade that might complement my features?

Mr. Cosmology: You’re thinking of “Ask Mr. Cosmetology.” And it’s henna.

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The Last Word

By: | October 12, 2013

2856129250_5e35626728_zOctober 7 – 11

This week, another LaWONian did us proud: Michelle is in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013! In her latest post she finds biologists fretting over a flock of very tiny — and very endangered — sandpiper chicks.

Cameron and cursive are not friends. But that doesn’t mean the end of cursive is is a good thing.

Ann watches Freeman Dyson’s 90th birthday party, a shindig thrown as only the scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study can do it.

Christie is not happy about the muddy waters around mammograms, so she does something about it.

And guest poster John Cannon makes like David Sedaris, but in Kinshasa.

Chukotka to Myanmar or Bust

By: | October 11, 2013

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Every year, a tiny bird called the spoon-billed sandpiper tours the Asian economic boom.

From its breeding grounds in Chukotka, an autonomous region in the Russian Far East, the sandpiper makes a 5,000-mile migration through South Korea, coastal China, and finally to Southeast Asia — including the shores of newly busy Myanmar, where the birds overwinter on barrier islands in the Andaman Sea. Hunting, coastal dredging, and development along the migration route have literally decimated the species over the past decade, and now fewer than 100 pairs remain in the wild. It’s one of the world’s most endangered birds.

Saving a species so close to extinction is never easy — or cheap — but the sandpiper’s multinational habitat makes its conservation an especially complex effort. In Myanmar and elsewhere, local and expat conservationists have been working to stop shorebird hunting, convincing trappers to give up their trapping equipment in exchange for grants to buy fishing gear. And at the other end of the migration route, in Chukotka, a group of British and Russian biologists spent most of this summer fretting over a flock of very tiny — and extremely adorable — sandpiper chicks. Continue reading →

Curses, cursive!

By: | October 10, 2013

640px-Albert_Anker_(1831-1910),_Schreibunterricht,_1865._Oil_on_canvasI used to practice my signature everywhere. I wrote on napkins and notebooks, in crayon on restaurant placemats, with a finger in the wet sand. I even remember a grade-school art project in which I wrote my name and its mirror image, and then used the pair to create a creature: the top loops of the “C” as its antennae, the lagging tips of each lowercase “n” its feet.

That carefully-practiced motion has become a jumble, even though now I have more reasons to write it: in pen on the bottom line of checks, in crayon when frantically filling out preschool forms in the car, with my finger when I use my chiropractor’s smartphone to pay my bill.

Some would say I’m not losing much: longhand is so last century.  My kids might never have to learn how to write in cursive: it’s not included in the Common Core standards that California recently adopted, joining 44 other states.

But while our keyboards and our thumbs have elbowed out our handwriting, practicing with a pen or pencil isn’t passé for the brain. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Lost in Congo

By: | October 9, 2013
The rapids just downstream from Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
The Congo River just downstream from Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

Ever get the feeling that the whole world’s privy to a joke you just don’t get? That sort of approximates my life in the sprawl of Kinshasa. For the next year or so, my wife Anne-Claire and I will call this notorious behemoth of a failed state home. I couldn’t be happier – to live in Africa again and sate a childhood fascination with the continent; to find stories to tell that no one else can; and to learn French. My current lack of fluency, in addition to many other aspects of life here, has me in a near-constant state of bewilderment.

I accompany my fluent-in-French wife to work every day and desperately try to follow what’s going on. As she deftly navigates a barrage of bilingual situations, I peck at adding something more useful than “OK, d’accord” or “Oui, ça c’est bon” to conversations. Meanwhile, my wife has charmed the local staff by learning a few phrases in Lingala. Heartened by her results, every once in a while, I get up the courage to start a conversation in French with one of the local staff, often going something like this:

Continue reading →