Guest Post: Enough With the Spin

By: | May 29, 2013

7572983836_47e1ce21f8_z“In the 1960s we noticed there was a problem with time,” says Witold Fraczek, an analyst at Environmental Systems Research Institute in Greater Los Angeles. In 1948 Harold Lyons at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. built the world’s first atomic clock, an instrument that keeps time based on the vibration of atoms or molecules. But the atomic timekeepers noticed that every year was slower than the last. “They said what is wrong with the clock, only to realize that actually earth is slowing down and there was nothing wrong with their atomic clock,” says Fraczek.

The sun rises in the East. And sets in the West. And that’s because the earth spins as it circles the sun. It completes a rotation every 24 hours. But this scenario, this earth-spinning business, it hasn’t always been like this. It used to be considerably faster. And it will be slower in future. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind. Like by five billion years. Continue reading →

Is There Such A Thing As Extinction Proof?

By: | May 28, 2013

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Last year, I reported a story about sharks disappearing in the Sea of Cortez. The story deals with one little spot near the bottom of the Baja Peninsula called El Bajo. El Bajo is famous for two things, I suppose. One, it’s the site where scientists discovered a now-famous behavior in which hammerhead sharks from all over the ocean gather and circle in an amazing slow-motion mating dance (see above and below).

Nowadays we know that there are other spots where this happens, the Galapagos, Guadalupe Islands, and a few others. But the second thing that El Bajo is (or should be) famous for is this: today there are no more hammerheads there. All of them are gone. The story is now on the cover of Discover magazine (marking a sharp divergence from my recent streak of NOT publishing stuff) so I won’t ruin it by telling you why. But in the story I ran across this rather interesting fact. Never in the history of humans-screwing-with-the-world have we managed to send an open-water ocean species into extinction. Continue reading →

Soap Operas versus the Population Bomb?

By: | May 27, 2013

shutterstock_112517477It’s early morning in a Mumbai train station. The video is grainy, but you can clearly make out a dense swarm of humanity along the platform.  By my count, the crowd stands at least ten or twelve people deep, males for the most part, many dressed in light short-sleeved shirts, the kind you’d wear in an office.  As the train rumbles into the station, the men surge forward as if one.  It’s the first stop along the route, and in seconds the train is sardine-can full.

Local observers say that if you want to understand just how congested Indian cities are today, try squeezing into one of Mumbai’s commuter trains. And indeed such Indian scenes of teeming humanity have become enduring memes for the problem of human overpopulation.  In 1960s, for example, Stanford University ecologist Paul Erhlich and population biologist Anne Ehrlich gazed from a car in growing horror as they wound through the streets of New Delhi.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 25, 2013

DSC_0221May 20 – 24

Paleo-BS or solid science? This week, Cassie investigated the new obsession with intermittent fasting.

Cameron examined the void that lurks on the far side of achievement.

Christie revealed some of the most surprising and least expected effects of guns.

Heather told us how experimental archaeology is helping answer the question of what people wore on intercontinental boat trips during the ice age.

Richard tells us that Einstein and Freud met once. Draw your own conclusions.

Happy Memorial Day, Americans!

Buds

By: | May 24, 2013

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“Did they ever meet?”

I got the question all the time. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say a book about Einstein and Freud, and then would come the question.

Same thing with my next book. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say a book about dark matter and dark energy. Figuring these words were more foreign than Einstein and Freud, I would add, “Maybe you’ve heard about this,” or, “I don’t know if you’re familiar with these terms.”

“So it’s like…black holes?”

“No,” I would say. “Scientists actually know what black holes are. But dark matter and dark energy are parts of the universe that are totally unlike anything else we’ve ever encountered. We know they’re there, and we know they make up 96 percent of the universe, but we don’t know what they are.”

A month later, maybe two, I would run into the same person at a party or on the street. And then, inevitably, would come the question: “Hey, how’s that book of yours going—the one on black holes?”

Continue reading →

The Crash

By: | May 23, 2013

I did a big run on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I stuffed my face, had a welcome beer after a training dry spell, and felt glorious. Sunday morning I spent in bed, reading the New York Times in a puddle of pure contentment. Sunday night, I went to an epic dinner and felt the opposite of hangry.

Then Monday came. I hid from my kids in the bathroom, I cried when I dropped my mom off at the airport, I almost fired off several barely-civilized email responses (luckily, my phone died before I could hit send). In the afternoon, I yelled at my older son when he picked one too many blueberries on our way home and then I collapsed on the couch with a pillow over my face. What happened to my post-run halo? Continue reading →

Fasting: The New Fad Diet?

By: | May 22, 2013


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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a beautiful rural home that belongs to my parents’ friends, a slim and sophisticated couple who enjoys bird watching and international travel. I was meeting this pair—let’s call them George and Marsha—for the first time. I’m inherently nosy, so while the rest of the group chatted, my eyes scanned the room. On the fridge, I noticed a slip of paper that looked to be George and Marsha’s weekly dinner menu. That night they’d be having polenta and pork roast. The other days had meals written next to them too, all except for Monday and Wednesday. Next to those two days, Marsha (or George) had scrawled “Fast.”

Fast as in not eat? Marsha and George didn’t seem like the type to fall for juice cleanses or fad diets. My parents said the couple had probably seen the same documentary they had. The show follows Michael Mosley, a BBC journalist and former physician, on his quest to become slimmer and healthier through fasting.

I’ve never heard of Michael Mosley, but I’m not sure how I missed him. Lately Mosley is everywhere — on the BBC, on PBS, in the news. In January he launched a bestselling diet book co-authored by journalist Mimi Spencer. Here’s the approach they’re advocating: To lose weight and improve health, dieters should fast two days each week. On fasting days, women should consume no more than 500 calories. Men are allowed 600. The other five days dieters have no restrictions. Continue reading →

Guns on the brain

By: | May 21, 2013

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I recently witnessed one of the kindest, gentlest people I know fly into a momentary rage over a parking space. Such transformations used to baffle me, but after writing a Discover story about embodied cognition, I’m starting to understand why normally mild-mannered people can become uncharacteristically aggressive behind the wheel of a large automobile.

The big idea behind embodied cognition is that thoughts and perceptions are not confined to the brain, but extend to the body too. As a result, our bodily states affect how we think and our perceptions are fundamentally shaped by our ability to act.

Get behind the wheel and suddenly the world looks different. You’re protected by a big chunk of metal, and you’re navigating the world with the power of an internal combustion engine. You not only see the world differently, you may behave differently too, as my friend’s moment of road rage demonstrated.

“We think of perception as providing us with this geometrically accurate picture of the world,” says Jessica Witt, a psychologist at Colorado State University. But while we may believe that we see the world as it really is, Witt’s research suggests that our perceptions are guided by what we’re doing with our bodies.

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance last year, Witt and her colleague James R. Brockmole at the University of Notre Dame performed a series of five experiments that asked college students to look at photos of people holding something and then indicate whether the object was a gun or something neutral like a ball or a shoe. When the participants held a plastic gun, they were about 30 percent more likely to deem the object a gun. Continue reading →