The Last Word On Nothing

Humanizing details

By: Jessa Gamble | March 12, 2013

The Finkbeiner Test for gender-neutrality in science reporting took flight last week, offering female scientists the hope of having their work represented in print without gratuitous pink sprayed all over it. A scientist’s partner’s profession and their family responsibilities are irrelevant unless specifically shown otherwise. But now, I find myself with another journalistic quandary: Strict instructions to ask a male scientist about his love life.

In articles about relationship research, human-interest stories are part of what distinguishes a magazine feature from a journal review paper.

34-year-old pastry chef Suzy seemed to have it all: A boutique bakery of her own and a creative and sensitive boyfriend. But a growing yearning nagged at her as she played with her nieces on family holidays. More and more women like Suzy are delaying having children….

Indeed, in the scientific literature itself it is not unusual to see little embedded case studies for the purposes of example. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: In the Classroom

By: Ann Finkbeiner | March 11, 2013

I swear, I heard the short version of this just a little while ago.

Graduate student X: I hate that one kid in our class.

Graduate student Y: You mean that undergraduate? The one who always talks? The kid who never says anything, he just talks?

Graduate student X: That’s the one. I really hate him.

The confident clarity that comes with age: yes indeed, this is BS.

http://abstrusegoose.com/487

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | March 9, 2013

March 4 – 8

This week, Tom delved deep into the mystery of the SCOBY lumps found at the bottom of an old jug of apple juice.

Think nature documentaries merely observe? Don’t read Erik’s post.

Heather describes the conditions faced by an archaeology writer in the field.

If we want to get rid of invasivores — including a fish-choking slime known as gorilla goo — Michelle says it’s time to break out the super sucker!

And guest poster Craig Childs told us the riveting story of the grizzly skull with a bullet hole wound.

Attack of the Super Sucker

By: Michelle Nijhuis | March 8, 2013

Kaneohe Bay, a keyhole-shaped notch on the southeastern shore of Oahu, is known for its placid waters, its coral reefs, and one very large, floating vacuum cleaner.

Not long ago, Eric Conklin, marine science advisor for The Nature Conservancy, gave me a tour of the bay in his rubber-sided outboard. We called on a small barge, where a dishwasher-sized gold dredger — originally designed to suck gravel and flecks of gold out of mountain streams — was bolted to the deck. Officially known as the Super Sucker (“It started out as a joke, but we kept saying it, and after a while we could say it with a straight face,” said Conklin), the barge is crewed by a half-dozen divers, who take turns swimming slowly over the reef and wrestling the dredger’s 4-inch-diameter plastic tubing toward thick tumbleweeds of invasive algae. They vacuum the reef, bag the collected algae, and give it to local farmers, who prize it for its ability to fertilize enormous sweet potatoes.

Two divers can collect 800 pounds in an hour. But there are many millions of pounds to go.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Unknown Grizzly

By: Craig Childs | March 7, 2013

In the mail yesterday I received a grizzly bear skull from an acquaintance and taxidermist in Soldotna, Alaska. Expertly cleaned down to chalk-white bone and glistening, thumb-sized canines, it was the size and general shape of a football, and as smooth as sanded wood. My friend had apologized ahead of time for there being a bullet hole.

Lifting the skull from its packaging, I expected to see a neat-dime-sized hole, a clean kill straight to the brain. Instead, there was a ragged gap as big as a fist through the left eye, pieces of jaw and skull exploded around it. Little flecks of bone salted out as I turned it for a closer look.

The angle of the shot looked like it could have been head-on, the bullet fired from only slightly to the side. But this wasn’t the shot that dropped the bear. This bullet had not actually penetrated the brain case. It had been stopped by exploded muscle and bone.

I wondered, had this been a charge, all slobber and paws? Or a curious 350-pound grizzly turning to study an intruder with a gun, then taking it right in the eye. I knew nothing about this bear. The only identification was a plastic tag looped through its one remaining zygomatic arch, which read, AK BGR 0202873.

Continue reading →

Floating Domestic Object, Unidentified No Longer (part two of two)

By: Thomas Hayden | March 6, 2013

Two weeks ago, Erika posted about a new addition to our household — no, not our adorable children, but rather some viscous blobs lurking in menacing fashion at the bottom of a long-ignored bottle of apple juice.

Said juice jug was purchased in early April, 2012. It was offered to guests, who declined. The bottle sat unopened in a dark, room-temperature pantry until mid-December, when we again offered it to guests. They too declined, but the thing was in the refrigerator by that time and taking up valuable space. In desperation I started trying to consume it myself. But we’re not a big juice house, and it was nearly two months more before Erika discovered the blobs.

What were they? The comments on Erika’s original post are well worth a gander — they’re a classic instance of the general principle that LWON’s readers are more insightful, resourceful and eloquent than LWON’s writers. The comments include hard information, informed speculation, personal anecdotes, suggestions for further investigation, and even a solid citation. Continue reading →

Redux: Survivor Woman

By: Heather Pringle | March 5, 2013

Heather posted this on July 16, 2010, a time when we had probably 13 readers so apologies to all 13. She’s referring to a post Ann wrote about being dead wrong about some science. She also testifies to the physically horrifying life of an archeology writer.

471px-Grand_Junior_Suite — Where I’d love to stay while doing fieldwork

Yesterday, my colleague Ann Finkbeiner fessed up to one of the great travails of being a science writer. So today in the spirit of full disclosure I thought I’d fess up to another pitfall, one that I should have anticipated before I became an archaeological writer, but didn’t. So here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: tagging along with scientists in the field often requires fortitude, real fortitude–not to mention pretty good footwork.

Before I give you an example, let me put all my cards on the table. I’m not a particularly athletic person. I rarely go hiking for recreation and I loathe camping. (I like my beds comfortable with at least two good pillows, please.) I don’t like spiders, scorpions, centipedes, leeches, cactus spines, stinging nettles, or poison ivy, all of which I have encountered in the field. And I cower when it comes to bears and poisonous snakes. I don’t relish squatting to pee in the woods: I hate doing it in the desert where there is no cover. And I completely lack essential survival skills. I have no sense of direction whatsoever, and I never learned how to read a compass.

In other words, I am an archaeologist’s worst nightmare. But I never let on about any of this, maintaining what I imagine to be a kind of “hail fellow, well met” manner. After all, I love seeing archaeology on the ground and wouldn’t trade my job for anything. And most days my bluffing works. But there are moments when I can’t quite rise to the occasion, and the carefully constructed mask comes a little unglued. Continue reading →

Cry the Beloved Porcupine

By: Erik Vance | March 4, 2013

In 2001, fresh out of college and yearning for adventure, I moved to South Africa. My recollection is that I had seen Cry the Beloved Country and The Power of One several times and decided that I had to go to Africa to intern at the University of Cape Town and write bad poetry. I’ll admit, the entomology professor I called to inform that I would be volunteering in his lab was a bit confused but when I told him that I wouldn’t cost him a cent (or a rand, in this case), he said fine.

It was during this odd sort of internship that I signed up for my great porcupine adventure. It seems that occasionally documentary films draw from grad schools for cheap labor tracking and tagging animals that they will be following for a show (if you truly love nature documentaries and believe they are all spontaneous, stop reading now before I shatter your illusions). Many documentaries send able and moronic young people into the bush months beforehand to implant tracking devices into animals to make them easy to follow and habituate.

I’ll get to “habituate” in a second, but first we had to catch the little bastards. I was hired by a company doing a BBC documentary on aardvarks and the animals that live in their burrows (thrilling, right?). Our focus would be the porcupine. Continue reading →