The Last Word

By: | May 18, 2013

6883525172_13913c8a2b_zMay 13 to 17

It’s spring! Except in London, where for the past two months, the weather has been stuck in a kind of sodden cold amalgam between spring and winter that’s probably best described as splinter.

But back to spring. Among many other eye openers you’ll learn in Ann’s post, men’s reproductive hormones peak in June, as do contraceptive sales and sexually transmitted diseases. And you’ll never feel okay walking through a cloud of gnats again.

But where Michelle lives, the spring is false and the fruit is dead.

And Cameron wraps up Spring Break with a post about the least welcome rite of spring — the frantic scramble to wash off the poison oak.

So many assumptions rest on the behavioural manipulation of toddlers and what we can extrapolate about the human condition. This week’s guest poster, Kendall Powell, reports on what happened when she sent her kids to participate in these experiments.

And Erika advances a new theory about why Henry VII had so much trouble having children.

Oh, Spring

By: | May 17, 2013

runningOutside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again.  They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around.  They’re going flat-out on long skinny legs, hair flying and completely silent.  Sometimes they’re playing tag, but mostly they’re just running, they hardly touch earth, they’re all but airborne. What is it about spring?  Continue reading →

The Darling Buds of May

By: | May 16, 2013

2012 Bloomin' OrchardsThe poets tell us that spring is for love. Tomorrow, Ann will tell you it’s for running, jumping, and giving in to hormonal chaos. Where I live, spring is for gambling.

I live in the fruit basket of Colorado, in a valley famous for peaches and cherries, and every spring the local orchardists keep a close eye on the thermometer, wondering if their luck will hold this year. Cool weather makes the fruit sweeter, they say, but a freeze at the wrong time means no fruit at all. Whenever the temperature drops close to the danger zone, the growers are up all night, running fans to keep the cold air from settling, building bonfires between the rows of trees, even hoisting giant mesh curtains over entire orchards.

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Guest Post: Experimenting on My Kids: What’s really being tested?

By: | May 15, 2013

shutterstock_96323885For the last five years, I’ve been letting psychology graduate students experiment on my children. That, of course, sounds much worse than the reality that I take them to participate in experiments at the University of Colorado lab that probes early language development in toddlers. Still, I have a lingering unease when it comes to these sessions.

Ever since they were about 12 months old, I’ve been carting my kids down to the lab–just a couple of shoddy office rooms filled with a table, chairs, video camera, and old filing cabinets. Not a boiling beaker or electrode in sight. The kids play various “games” sorting toys into categories, or indicating where they expect a toy to be hidden. But as a former scientist and a science writer, my inner skeptic questions the validity of some of these experimental set-ups. Continue reading →

On Henry VIII and the mystery of the missing male heirs

By: | May 14, 2013

Anne_Boleyn“There are so many women in the world, so many fresh and young and virtuous women, so many good and kind women. Why have I been cursed with women who destroy the children in their own wombs?”

So complains Hilary Mantel’s fictional version of Henry VIII – and this Sunday marks the date, 477 years ago, when Anne Boleyn paid the price for his lament.

Boleyn was the second of Henry’s six wives. Though Henry broke with the Catholic church to marry Boleyn, he had her executed on May 19, 1536, three years after she became his wife. He was frustrated with her and her inability to have a male child – something which four of Henry’s other five wives also failed to do.

Reading Mantel’s enthralling novel, “Bring up the Bodies,” which documents the souring of the marriage through the lens of Henry’s adviser, Thomas Cromwell, I couldn’t help wondering how this situation – indeed, the course of history – might have turned out differently if the sixteenth-century English court had access to modern medicine.

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Red Badge of Courage (Or, The One Where I Jinx Myself)

By: | May 13, 2013

8110488526_194c13d266_nGuest poster Mary Caperton Morton wrote a lovely post about poison oak a few years back, but I just had this itch…

I saw an old friend—or foe, I guess—on a run last weekend. Leafless during winter, the poison oak in a nearby park has started to push out shiny green triads along the trail sides. My bare legs shivered a bit as I ran by.

Poison oak, like its kin poison ivy and poison sumac, is slick with urushiol. The lacquer tree also produces thick, urushiol-rich sap; between June and October, people tap these trees, stir the sap, and evaporate the water to create a lacquer that forms a beautiful protective coating on boxes, bowls, even pens.

But brushed on the surface of susceptible skin, urushiol produces a much less refined veneer of bumpy red rash. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 11, 2013

8254680961_2a975c53f8May 6 – 10

This week, LWON spawn Virginia Hughes returns to the mothership to ask: Isn’t it a waste to spend precious years of our waking lives in service to death?

People with discipline are more satisfied with less, says Jessa. People with self-control deficiencies want more.

Christie considers the difference between a study whose findings support a hypothesis, and one that simply don’t contradict it.

Michelle tells us what makes a tribe work.

And we, the people of LWON, smoke our own exhaust and interview the writers of The Science Writer’s Handbook.

Build Your Own Tribe … in Five Easy Steps

By: | May 10, 2013

8254680961_2a975c53f8As a freelance writer, I spend a lot of my time in contented isolation. But lately I’ve been appreciating a particular kind of social network. It’s not my intimate circle of family and friends, wonderful though that is. It’s not the choppy, wide-open seas of Twitter and Facebook, though those have their place as well. The kind of network I’m talking about is looser than a family, more trustworthy than any real or virtual crowd, and more or less egalitarian. I think of it as a tribe.

Two of my tribes have been busy in recent weeks: I just co-edited a book written by more than 30 friends, all members of a network of science writers called SciLance. I’ve also connected and reconnected with alums of my alma mater, Reed College, through the Switchboard, a student-built network where Reedies of all ages ask for and offer internships, career advice, spare rooms and so on.

Dunbar’s number suggests that the maximum size of a stable social network is about 150 people. While SciLance has 30-odd members, the Switchboard is open to tens of thousands. Yet both have managed to lure notoriously independent, cocktail-party-averse types into enthusiastic daily communication with their fellow humans. (I once got a college-reunion pitch that began, “You may think you’re the only person who didn’t know a soul at Reed …”) In both cases, the results are surprisingly powerful, helping everyone do better than they would have on their own.

What makes these tribes work?

Continue reading →