The Last Word, Turkey Day edition

By: | November 24, 2012

November 19 – 23

I hope you nice people in the States had a lovely Thanksgiving.

This week, Ginny introduced us to the sleep molecule.

Jessa explained the 21st century superbear. It’s a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly, and it’s straight out of the anthropocene.

Christie considered a status symbol shared by male turkeys and female fashion victims.

Tom interviewed Matter’s head honcho Jim Giles, about his brand-new science magazine, and asked him about that freaky inaugural story.

And Cameron gave thanks to science, scientists, science writers, the world, and our readers in what should surely become an LWON tradition from here on out.

See you Monday! Good luck with the turkey hangover.

Black Friday Special: 24 LWON posts for the price of one

By: | November 23, 2012

One of my favorite newspaper columnists has a Thanksgiving column that has been reprinted more or less year after year for nearly two decades (or at least, that’s as far as the Chronicle’s online archives reveal). Along with talking about why, in a sea of holidays, Thanksgiving is the one that gets his wholehearted support, he pays tribute to an annually changing list of people who’ve been an essential part of his world that year.

I thought I’d start a similar, LWON-inspired list here, covering the people who I’ve come to realize have shaped my world in the last year or so. Please contest my choices and/or add your own below. Continue reading →

Re-Awakenings

By: | November 22, 2012


Anna Sumner’s craving for sleep began when she was an 18-year-old high school senior. She thought nothing of it.

When it followed her to college, she blamed it on stress. She was working so hard, she told herself, her body just needed the extra rest. But it was more than that. She would choose naps over eating lunch, working out, or being with friends. Every night after dinner, she came back to her dorm room to sleep. If her parents called on those evenings, her roommate would cover for her, telling them she had gone to the library.

After graduation, Sumner moved to Bangkok to teach English. Her sleeping continued, and so did her rationalizations. It was OK that she was napping between every class because she was adjusting to a warm climate. Then she spent a winter working in London. There, her excuse was the dark and dreary sky.

Her parents started worrying after she moved back to the U.S. for law school. The summer after her first year, she lived at their house in Mississippi while working for a law firm. “Every day I’d go to work, come home, say ‘Hi Mom and Dad’, and go to bed,” she recalls. “That was the entire summer.”

Sumner needed sleep like an addict needs a fix. “It was this overpowering desire in me, a physical urge,” she says. “And there was always the hope that, maybe this time, I would wake up feeling better.”
Continue reading →

One, two, three, er…many.

By: | November 20, 2012

It’s amazing what scientists can do nowadays. They can get right down into the center of an atom. They can tell us in detail about rocks on other planets. So it’s no wonder when they report there are a certain number of very large animals in an area – and they only have to count up to a thousand or two – we tend to believe the number is pretty close. Population surveys for polar bears, for example, sound a bit like taking the census, only the bears don’t have phones.

In reality, counting white animals against a white backdrop from a helicopter, over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, is actually pretty tricky. Ditto caribou against the tundra. It’s also really expensive, so when a survey is done, those numbers have to be used for a decade or two, in combination with other measures, to estimate the health of a population.

When an August 2011 survey of Hudson Bay’s 8000km western coastline found 1,013 bears – 66% higher than the extrapolated estimates that had led to endangered status and trade moratoria on bear parts in the EU and US –the results were met with incredulity. The numbers confirmed reports from the Hunter and Trapper Associations in the area who have consistently seen more bears, but have been discredited by their immediate financial interest in raised hunting quotas.

Every year, about 450 foreign hunters each pay around $50,000 for a tag to shoot a polar bear, accompanied by an Inuit guide. For the North American Super Slam, and other large animal lists that prescribe the hunter’s complete trophy room, a dead polar bear is de rigeur. In China and Russia, a polar bear pelt can fetch $15,000. (You may be thinking laws against this would be wise regardless of bear population numbers, and you would not be alone.) Continue reading →

MATTER Takes Online Publishing Out on a Limb

By: | November 19, 2012

Back in March 2012, more than 2,500 people declared their support for a pretty modest idea: that the world is full of interesting, relevant, important science stories that aren’t being told. No shocker there — that’s pretty much the operating principle of LWON, too, or one of them anyway. But these particular people did something I found quite surprising. They coughed up money, to the tune of $140,000, to support a new venture that would try to bring some of those stories to light. Thus was born MATTER, via the fundraising website Kickstarter, a digital thing that promised to “focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science … Just one unmissable story.”

Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson launched MATTER with their first story last week. It’s called “Do No Harm,” and fits into the loose genre of medical oddities — and it will be no spoiler to suggest that the medical dictate is not the only thing violated over the course of the narrative. I know Jim far too well to write an objective review, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t give him a bit of a grilling about MATTER and the first story, “Do No Harm.” And I can say that you should definitely read it. Seriously. Just as soon as you’re finished reading the  LWON v. MATTER Q&A that follows: Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 17, 2012

12 – 16 November

This week, our site went boom. But we’re all better now.

Cassie explored the compelling pseudscience behind chronic Lyme’s disease, and why it can sway even people who should know better.

Ann considered gravity’s uncompromising brutality.

Heather’s chilling story about how Fritz Haber changed her grandfather’s life is a reminder of how casually any of us can be sideswiped by scientific glory.

Ann reminds Abstruse Goose that we have been programmed by eons of evolution to know that “a skittery thing with too many legs is just deeply wrong.”

And Ginny’s heart-melting new puppy got her interested in the astounding engineering feat that is a dog’s nose.

See you back here on Monday!

 

 

The Pseudoscience of Chronic Lyme

By: | November 16, 2012

In 2009 science writer Laurie McClellen’s husband, Pat, fell ill. The exhaustion came first. He grew too tired to exercise. Even the office left him fatigued. “He was so tired that he needed a two-hour nap every night after work,” McClellan wrote in her account of the ordeal. Then came other symptoms. One night Pat forgot the name of their subway stop. He complained of cold feet, and began to stumble. His joints burned.

McClellan’s doctor suggested Pat might have chronic Lyme disease. The test came back negative, but she prescribed a course of antibiotics anyway. Pat began to feel a little better. At a clinic specializing in Lyme disease, “Pat was given prescriptions for a sophisticated regimen of drugs to control his symptoms, plus multiple antibiotics to fight the infection. He would need to take the drugs for the next year or so. He started swallowing some twenty-five pills a day, and the pace of his recovery picked up,” McClellan wrote.

While all infectious disease doctors acknowledge that Borrelia burgdorferi, the corkscrew-shaped bacterium that causes Lyme disease, can stay in the body for years, most believe that a short course of antibiotics is enough to wipe out the infection. However, an increasingly vocal group of patients, advocates, and doctors believes the bacteria can hide out in the body and persist even after treatment, causing a laundry list of vague symptoms — everything from night sweats and depression to back pain and vertigo. They argue that a cure requires not weeks but months or years of strong antibiotics, and that relapses are common. They portray Lyme as “a disease that is insidious, ubiquitous, difficult to diagnose, and almost incurable,” according to one group of infectious disease physicians from Johns Hopkins.

The debate has been raging for years, but evidence has yet to emerge in support of an epidemic of persistent yet invisible B. bergdorferi infections. And three clinical trials funded by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases failed to find any benefit of long-term antibiotic therapy in individuals like Pat who have no evidence of active infection. In fact, long courses of antibiotics can be dangerous. Continue reading →