From Atlas to Plates of Meat

By: | January 14, 2013

4449986788_52cffdd786A science writer friend gave me these great nerdy baby flash cards when my older son was born. I’ve been hoarding them for myself until they got discovered last week—hoarding them both because they’re charming (and for the moment, unsullied) and because once they were spotted, I would have to start explaining what each one meant.

And so now we are studying the alphabet. A is for atom. D is for diurnal. (What’s diurnal? What’s nocturnal? Oh, nocturnal is like Mommy.)

The one that’s attracted the most interest is U. U is for uvula: even if you’re four, it seems, the word seems vaguely forbidden and completely irresistible. Uvula, uvula, uvula. (Here’s a shaky video from the National Uvula Association.) Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 12, 2013

Cracker v Kevin copyJanuary 7 -11

Erik wonders if canaries have musical taste.

Guest poster Roberta Kwok tells the story of unusual evidence from a heartbreaking crime scene.

Nausea — hyperemesis in particular — is a lot more interesting than you think it is, Michelle finds.

Guest poster Erin Gettler demonstrates that there’s no shortage of wild things to find.

And when Cassie tries to find out why she is only happy when she’s in flux, she finds interesting clues from happiness research.

 

See you next week!

Guest Post: After the Crash

By: | January 11, 2013

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Around 2 AM on July 16, 2005, graduate students Benjamin Boussert, Giulia Adesso, and Jason Choy left a dance party in San Francisco and started driving home to Berkeley, where they were studying chemistry. Boussert spent his days experimenting with tiny crystals, while Adesso investigated the properties of nanoparticles and Choy used lasers to explore how enzymes unfold proteins. All three were less than 30 years old.

As they approached the campus on highway I-80, a big rig on the other side of the freeway lost control, smashed through the median, and collided with the students’ car, setting it on fire. Boussert, Adesso, and Choy died in the crash.

Bob Snook, then sergeant of the California Highway Patrol (CHP)’s Valley Division Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team, received a phone call that morning from the CHP. “It sounded like the world had come apart,” he says. Continue reading →

Improve Your Memory With Reverse Peristalsis

By: | January 10, 2013

iStock_000018654624XSmallI’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for members of the British royal family. But last month, when the press reported that a pregnant Kate Middleton had been hospitalized with hyperemesis gravidarum, my stomach lurched in sympathy. Pregnancy-related hyperemesis is usually described as “severe morning sickness,” but that doesn’t capture the suffering it involves. Unlike the intermittent, typically short-lived nausea of morning sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum is characterized by debilitatingly severe, nearly constant nausea, sometimes accompanied by vomiting, that can last for an entire pregnancy. Stephanie Nolen, a hyperemesis sufferer, described her experience in the Globe and Mail in December:

For the first months of my pregnancies, the world pitched and roiled and heaved. I could tolerate no food, or the smell of food. I don’t mean that I was a little pukey. I mean that I spent 50 days curled up motionless in the dark under a blanket, unable to bear rolling over at even a glacial pace. I lost five kilograms in a couple of weeks. I could not speak, I could not open my eyes, and when a sympathetic friend crept in to see me, the undulating pattern of her black-and-white striped pants triggered a round of heaving.

Only a few drugs are known to ease hyperemesis, and none of them work very well. Most sufferers are hospitalized periodically for dehydration and then sent home to curl up in bed, try not to worry about fetal weight gain and hope striped pants go out of style.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: What’s That? And That?

By: | January 9, 2013

eg_whitecedarcones1In 1804, Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to catalog the wildlife and geography of North America. They spent two years searching the continent, documenting their finds as they asked, “What’s that? And that? And what’s that?” I conduct my expeditions the same way today. I have dozens of see-and-ID encounters every time I go out. As I log more sightings of common species, though, I grow more curious about the hundreds of other critters, crawlers and creepers I haven’t seen yet. Continue reading →

The (Un)Happiness Project

By: | January 8, 2013

IMG_0813_2My husband and I have been in the same apartment for more than four years. It’s a truly lovely place — spacious (for New York) with high ceilings, stained glass, and parquet wood floors. Each room has the appropriate furniture and many of the walls have been painted a color of my own choosing. We have plants and table linens and martini glasses. We’ve settled in.

Yet I can’t help but think longingly of leaving. This is the longest I’ve lived in one place since I left home at age 17. And lately I’ve been feeling antsy. It’s not just the apartment. My life has begun to feel stagnant. Continue reading →

I Have No Clue Why the Caged Bird Sings

By: | January 7, 2013


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I have this theory. It’s not rocket science (which, by the way, rocket scientists tell me ain’t exactly brain surgery) and it’s not brain surgery (which brain surgeons tell me ain’t exactly rocket science).

It goes like this: décor in your office is a reflection of your inner science nerd. You see, far more than the living room or the dining room, the office is the window to your soul. In those other rooms you put stuff to impress people – original art, antiques, the carcasses of your fallen foes, whatever. But in your office you put the stuff that you want to look at every day.

Thus, geologists decorate with rocks and minerals, anthropologists with exotic masks, and mathematicians with bizarre pictures of theoretical topology shapes or fractals (please, all of you out there, enough with the fractals already). I even know biologists who have little stuffed viruses and chemists with equation necklaces. It doesn’t matter if you were never a professional scientist, your decorations are dictated by that inner science geek struggling to be free. And if you claim to be a biologist who likes fractals, then guess what? Deep inside, there is a frustrated mathematician trying to get out. Me, I was a behavioral scientist. On my wall is a painting done by a dolphin, my kayak paddle, and Kevin. Kevin is a $10 canary who has become something of a tiny little feathered enigma for me.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 5, 2013

417px-Roshi_Ensei_lifting_a_heavy_beam31 December – 4 January

Well, I guess we made it through 2012 without dying. So, drink up and get back to work.

Heather wrote about the strange therapeutic, cultural, and linguistic history of the tattoo.

Guest poster Emily Underwood examined a part of the body so complicated that it requires 10,000 processors to simulate.

“Living in a basin means being a receptacle for everything that flows downward,” Jessa told us, and explained what that means for London.

Michelle wondered if autocomplete errors predate the iPhone.

And this week, we wrapped up Secret Satans — our holiday treat to ourselves in which we allowed ourselves to confronted our most feared disciplines — with Tom’s disclosure that he suffers from “mathematical Aspergers”. Mathpergers? You heard it here first.

See you next week!