The Last Word On Nothing

TGIPF: Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby!

By: Cassandra Willyard | March 15, 2013

Warning: This post isn’t so much about penises as it is about sex. Apologies to all you Thank God It’s Penis Friday purists out there.

Sex. It’s a difficult topic for grownups, but the conversation can be downright excruciating when a child is involved. (Don’t believe me? Watch this.) Perhaps because my parents were uncomfortable, I never got the sex talk. So I relied on hearsay and rumor to figure out where babies come from. I vaguely remember a sleepover where we hotly debated the risk of pregnancy from French kissing.

Sex ed came in the form of films. In fifth grade we watched one about our own bodies. (Who knew that when girls get their periods, their moms take them for ice cream?) In sixth grade we got to watch the boys’ film. Afterward, we furtively scribbled down questions on slips of paper and handed them to the nurse, who did a terrible job of providing answers. What’s a blow job? Well, something a man and woman do when they love each other very much. The films explained how our bodies work separately, but I still couldn’t quite picture how it all worked in concert. I was this guy. (Ok, not quite).

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The Flower of Dangerous Love

By: Michelle Nijhuis | March 14, 2013

Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. Today, the building is called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tucked into a busy neighborhood in central Phnom Penh, it’s a carefully preserved nightmare.

Visitors walk through blandly macabre classrooms-turned-torture-chambers, and into tiny brick-and-wood cells where prisoners were held for weeks and months. But their silence is heaviest before the rows and rows of faces — the thousands of black-and-white mugshots taken by the maniacally efficient wardens of Tuol Sleng.

When I visited Tuol Sleng during a reporting trip earlier this year, I took pictures of some of the faces, trying — like everyone around me, I imagine — to see the people within the overwhelming numbers. Later, when I looked at my camera, I saw I’d taken several photos of the same young woman. She was beautiful, with clear eyes, a proud posture and a stylish haircut. But even more striking than her beauty was the way she’d raised one eyebrow in what looked like defiance, and set her mouth in determination instead of fear. She must have known her fate — only seven people are thought to have survived Tuol Sleng — and she’d chosen to meet it with this face.

Who was she? It didn’t take long to find out.

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Debunking Hollywood: Knockout Shot

By: Erik Vance | March 13, 2013

Today LWON is proud to announce a new intermittent series, ala TGIPF. Every so often our writers will choose a common trope in movies and television – something based at least loosely in science – and pick it apart. If you have any suggestions for topics, drop them into the comments or send them to @erikvance on Twitter.

There are certain tropes that are so ingrained, so basic in Hollywood that I don’t think anyone has ever thought whether they make any sense – noise in space, cars on two wheels, that kind of thing. My favorite is the knockout punch. I remember the first time I saw Dr. No and Sean Connery knocked out, like, three guys with one swing. Today, it’s not that ridiculous but I always wonder – how easy is it to knock a guy out long enough to pick a lock, find the diamonds, and get out? Continue reading →

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.

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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.

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