The Benefits of War?

By: | July 4, 2011

In the festive spirit of LWON’s first birthday celebration, Jessa asked me the following question: “ Squirrel it however you like — War: What is it good for?” The answer follows.

What is war good for? Absolutely nothing. Listen to me–I’ll say it again: absolutely nothing. Huh.

And yet …

Edwin Starr had it absolutely right, of course, in his 1970 hit song, War.* War is nothing but a heartbreaker, an enemy of all mankind—spend too much time doing it, or even thinking about it deeply, and it will truly blow your mind. But is that the whole story? Hardly.

War is an evolved human trait, as much a part of our genetic endowment as our large brains and bipedal gait. (Don’t buy the argument? Buy the book! Or if you’re cheap, read the basics for free. Lazy, too? Try the video version. Sheesh, already.) And it’s a funny thing about evolved traits—they may not be pretty, but by definition, have to be good for something. Or at least, to have been good for something, once upon a time. Otherwise the behavioral predispositions that make war possible–violent aggression and competitiveness, the ability to toggle empathy on and off, among others–wouldn’t have become fixed into our genetic endowment. Continue reading →

Avastin and the Power of Hope

By: | July 1, 2011

This week, an FDA panel unanimously voted to revoke its approval of Avastin (bevacizumab) for breast cancer. The decision evoked cheers from some groups and jeers from others.  At least one group derided the decision as the work of a  “death panel.”

Initially hailed as a wonder drug, Avastin is a monoclonal antibody first approved for use against lung and colon cancer. Its maker, Roche (under its Genentech division), hoped that it would prove similarly useful for breast cancer. The FDA granted provisional approval of the drug for metastatic breast cancer in 2008 under the accelerated approval program.

But in an unusual move, the drug was granted this accelerated approval based on what researchers call a “surrogate” endpoint. Instead of measuring overall survival rates, Roche submitted data showing that Avastin slowed “progression-free survival.” What that means is that the drug slowed the time between new MRI findings, but it did not improve survival times. To repeat — the drug has never been shown to extend the lives of breast cancer patients. Still, the hope remained that the drug could nonetheless improve quality of life in people with breast cancer.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Drought in the Garden of the Gods

By: | June 30, 2011

When I first moved to New Mexico from the east coast I asked somebody how to tell the difference between a juniper and a piñon pine. Easy, they said: most of the junipers are alive and the piñons are all dead.

Across the Southwest, piñon pines have been dying off over the past twenty years due to a long drought cycle that has left the plants water-stressed and vulnerable to insects. Under such prolonged dry conditions, the trees cannot make enough sap to defend themselves against the piñon bark beetle and ecologists estimate between 40 and 90 percent of piñons have died, leaving behind a lot of flammable deadwood.  Continue reading →

The Crow Knows Your Nose

By: | June 29, 2011
Crow diving at a masked researcher in Seattle. Photo by Keith Brust.

Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them.

Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t just remember Roger’s suburban Seattle home and his BB gun. They also seem to remember his face. When he leaves his house, the crows mob him, diving and screeching around his head. (They leave other family members alone.) When this harassment — or retaliation — began, Roger took his campaign into a second-floor bedroom, where he crouched below a windowsill and poked his BB gun through a slit in the screen. But the crows have never forgotten his mug. Years after his last open attack on the noisy neighborhood flocks, he’s still Corvid Enemy Number One.

Now, I have some actual science to bring to our argument. In a paper released today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ecologist John Marzluff and two of his students report that crows are past masters at holding a grudge.

Continue reading →

How to Beat a Closed System

By: | June 28, 2011

Christie wrote a post about the suckiness of power-point presentations and of scientific conferences in general.  Conferences are an occupational hazard for science writers:  walk into a big-city convention center; find Session 425B which is in a narrow, fluorescent-lit room with sliding walls, little chairs in rows, a podium, and a screen; sit down; the speaker opens the power point; the room darkens; a heavy fogbank of boredom moves over your brain; you pass out cold and fall off your chair – it’s professionally embarassing.

I like the smaller meetings, maybe 100 astronomers all together in an academic auditorium, nice lighting, comfortable movie-house chairs, and by the third day, everyone has de facto assigned seating.  Small meetings are personal.  Anyway, Christie asked readers to share experiences so I am.  In the first place, power-points can be entertainment:  in the meeting I just came back from, one projector went black in the middle of a talk on advanced technologies.  Oh, the irony. Continue reading →

Sez Who?

By: | June 24, 2011

In 1992 I wrote an article for the New York Times on body doubles—the performers in movies who substitute for stars who aren’t quite buff enough for close-ups or brave enough for nudity. I cited several examples of stars who have used body doubles, including Kim Basinger in My Stepmother Is An Alien and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. A few weeks later I received a letter at my home address from an admirer of Ms. Roberts. He informed me that because I had impugned her artistry, my family should suffer. I contacted the Times’ security department, which contacted the authorities where this fan lived. The Times then assured me that I needn’t give the episode another thought.

But I do think of it from time to time, when I talk or write about some of the wilder, yet apparently true, concepts in cosmology. During my visit to Antarctica to research a book a few years ago, a National Science Foundation liaison liked to take me around to tables in the McMurdo Station cafeteria at breakfast and introduce me to the non-scientists who worked there. She wanted them to hear this jaw-dropping idea I’d described to her: that the universe consists of 73 percent dark energy and 23 percent dark matter, leaving only 4 percent the stuff we’d always assumed, from the dawn of civilization to the final quarter of the twentieth century, was the universe in its entirety—galaxies, stars, planets, people.

“Sounds like God to me,” one person answered, in a baiting tone. The next morning the response at another table was even more antagonistic: “Why should I believe you?”

Continue reading →

A Royal Pain

By: | June 23, 2011

A lovely young English couple are planning to visit my town in a fortnight, along with 70-odd out-of-town police officers, trucks-full of barricades and a personal hair stylist. As William and Kate’s arrival approaches, I find myself situated as a public servant, so I shan’t venture any opinion at all on Canada’s future with the monarchy. I shall simply offer an objective and, of course, unrelated account of consanguineous unions in European royal history.

All ten current European monarchs — that’s Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg, UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Netherlands, for those who haven’t kept track of republican trends — are direct descendants of John William Friso, Prince of Orange, who died in 1711, ten generations ago. This fact understates their actual degree of kinship, however, because the interconnected bloodlines cross much more recently. Most of the European monarchs are also descended from the grandmother of Europe, Queen Victoria of England and from Christian IX of Denmark, both of whose many respective grandchildren – who occupied their thrones during the First World War – married each other so conscientiously their family tree sports the systematic order of a round-robin badminton tournament. Of course, Queen Victoria and her consort Albert were first cousins to begin with, and Victoria passed her hemophilia down to her far-flung grandchildren.

Continue reading →