The Last Word On Nothing

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | April 20, 2013

April 15-19

Can a country have post-traumatic stress disorder? This week, guest poster Amy Maxmen reported back from two weeks in Sierra Leone, where survivors and perpetrators eke out an uneasy truce after a ten year war.

Cassie realised in the aftermath of the Boston bombings that no matter how fast Twitter and CNN can get you the news or how close to the ground they can get you, no technology can shake that feeling of helplessness like turning off the TV.

Michelle observed that the money spent to save a single animal could have saved an entire herd – and explained why that’s just fine.

Forget everything you knew about hot flashes: Ann explained why estrogen’s got nothing to do with it.

And Cameron introduced us to the concept of state microbes. What’s Oregon’s? Hint: beer.

Broadening the Beam of Compassion

By: Michelle Nijhuis | April 18, 2013

A few years ago, my neighbor in Colorado decided to learn something about animal rights.

I thought this was a pretty interesting project under any circumstances, but it was especially interesting because my neighbor is Michael Soule, the biologist credited with founding the field of conservation biology.

Like a lot of conservation-minded scientists, Michael was suspicious of animal-rights activists, disliking their focus on individual animal welfare rather than the survival of species and habitats. (The suspicion is mutual: Conservationists and animal-rights activists have clashed over invasive-species eradication, DIY feral cat control, hunting, and many other issues.) But Michael realized he hadn’t tried to understand the animal-rights perspective. So for a year, he subscribed to magazines, read websites, and talked to activists. And he realized that animal rights and conservation had much more in common than he’d thought.

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Fast Journalism and Senseless Acts of Violence

By: Cassandra Willyard | April 17, 2013

On September 11, 2001, I was visiting a teacher in a one-room school in Kikijana, Bolivia, a tiny community nestled high in the mountains. After school let out, the teacher switched on a battery-operated radio. The broadcast was in Quechua, a language I don’t really speak, so I tuned out. But the teacher was listening. “Conoces los torres gimelas?” he asked. I nodded. Yes, I’d heard of the twin towers. I could almost conjure a faint outline of the skyscrapers.

A plane ran into them, he told me. I pictured a small aircraft. I imagined a pilot thrown wildly off course. I thought the incident was an accident. Continue reading →

Whereas the Microbe

By: Cameron Walker | April 16, 2013

An important decision faces Oregon’s lawmakers this week. It concerns a $2.4 billion industry, an organism that’s important in genetics and other research, and a ritual that boosts the happiness of the multitudes, starting around 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

I know, I know. I could have just said that Oregon is considering making brewer’s yeast its state microbe—a designation that, if approved, would make it the first state with its very own microbe. But I don’t usually give microbes enough respect, even though they’re as essential as the air I breathe (in fact, cyanobacteria shaped our oxygen-rich atmosphere). Continue reading →

Guest Post: From a place with little relief for mental wounds

By: Amy Maxmen | April 15, 2013

Tamba Aruna in his office at the Doctors without Borders clinic near Bo, Sierra Leone.

Last November, I spent the hottest hours of a West African afternoon camped outside Tamba Aruna’s office. He’s a slight, soft-spoken man who listens to the sorrows of others each day. His job – mental health supervisor at the emergency clinic operated by Doctors without Borders (or MSF) in Sierra Leone – makes Aruna a hard man to catch. When he found me at his office, he told me the latest. An eight-year-old had signs of Lassa Fever, a potentially lethal hemorrhagic disease that can spread from person-to-person through various bloody excretions. Aruna had been comforting the patient’s mother, and asking her to leave her child at the hospital until the results from the diagnostic test for Lassa returned from a laboratory in a neighboring town. The mother refused. Aruna leaned back against his wooden office desk and said softly, “These are the difficulties.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | April 13, 2013

8 – 12 April

This week, Richard marveled at the quantum carnival that rages in the decimal points.

You might have heard that birds and wind power don’t mix. Erik brings home the heartbreaking reality — and shows that there might be a solution.

Erika explains why you don’t want any austerity cuts in the emergency stockpile.

Michelle considers how iPads will change art.

And Jessa got my hackles all in a twist with her report on Bruce Sterling’s closing talk at SXSW. In the era of Google Glass, he said, science fiction is no longer a relevant way to envision the future. HOW DARE YOU, SIR.

What happens when we can’t afford to be prepared?

By: Erika Check Hayden | April 11, 2013

The emergence of the H7N9 bird flu virus has rekindled memories of our last flu pandemic – just as the United States is debating whether it can afford to prepare for the next one.

Remember the H1N1 flu scare of 2009? I always will, because pregnant women were vulnerable to becoming severely ill or dying from the H1N1 virus, and I was gestating our first kid that year. I felt like a sitting duck as scientists took six long months to develop a vaccine against it.

We weren’t totally defenseless, though. The H1N1 virus was treatable with antiviral drugs that the United States had stored in a national resource called the Strategic National Stockpile. Less than one month after the first U.S. H1N1 cases were detected, the stockpile had shipped 12 million courses of the drugs around the country.

But public health officials are now pondering whether the stockpile can afford to repeat that performance in an age of austerity. The stockpile is like the nation’s all-purpose emergency kit; it stores a huge array of supplies to deal with all kinds of disasters, from bioterror attacks to floods and earthquakes. But the stockpile’s budget will fall increasingly short of its projected costs beginning this year. Officials, who must make cuts, are trying to decide what emergency supplies the nation can live without, and there are no good choices.

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