Nothing New Under the Sun

By: | August 20, 2010
Venetians aren't scared to dangle their undies in public

I looked up my parents’ house in London on Google Earth, and was excited to see not just the lush greenery of their garden, but smack in the middle of it, their rotary clothes line. This may not seem so thrilling to the average reader, but outdoor clothes lines are cool these days, and my parents have had one forever. In rainy Olde Englande, that’s quite a feat. It’s also the environmentally friendly thing to do: stuffing the clothes in a dryer generates a walloping 4.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. Line-dried clothes smell garden-fresh and don’t shrink, either, although they may form an occasional target for birds. Alas, some 60 million people in the U.S. live in private communities that forbid line-drying, since many view fluttering underwear as an eyesore that lowers property values.

The times are changing, however: as of 2009, the states of Florida, Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have passed laws forbidding clothes line bans. So I was pleased to read of the Care to Air Design Challenge, aka build a better clothes line. Or, as sponsor Levi Strauss & Co calls it, the search for “the world’s most innovative, covetable, and sustainable air-drying solution for clothing.”

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Calling 911 in the Maya World

By: | August 19, 2010
A Maya ruler and his favorite chocolate drink

In the early 8th century A.D., the great Maya city state of Tikal reached the zenith of its sophistication and power. Its kings sipped frothy chocolate and smoked elegant cigars in their chambers, listening to the music of trumpeters and drummers. Its painters rendered brilliant court scenes on vases. Its architects designed pyramidal masterpieces that climbed to the sky. Tikal was the Manhattan of its day.

Over the next century and a half, however, the bloom went off the rose in Tikal.  Its ambitious building program collapsed and its artists ceased to carve inscriptions on stone. Its divine kings vanished and its population thinned to just 20 percent of its peak. Tikal, moreover, was not the only Maya city state to suffer such a dramatic fall from grace. Elsewhere in the Maya world, dozens of other splendid cities crumbled over a span of 300 years ending around A.D. 1050.

Archaeologists have pointed to many reasons for the fall of the classic Maya civilization. The Maya slashed and burned most of their forests. They mined the fertility of their fields and allowed their populations to soar unchecked, straining food supplies. Then they fought wars over prized resources, terrible wars. When climate change finally arrived in the 8th century, in the form of severe, prolonged droughts, many Maya were singularly ill-equipped to weather it.

Just how did the Maya react to this sudden disastrous change in climate?   Continue reading →

Us, From Far Away

By: | August 18, 2010

This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun.  The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth.  The less bright dot near it is our moon.  Click on it:  it almost makes you cry. Continue reading →

Bug/Blog/Bunfight

By: | August 17, 2010

I thought I’d made the case against parasitic wasps with evidence and eloquence.  I thought that would be the end of it.  But no:  counter-arguments were made (even if insects did evolve first, Josie, I can still feel superior), gauntlets thrown down, aspersions cast (you think I didn’t notice “delicate flower,” Heather?), and lines drawn in the sand.  I decided I must defend those of us revolted by the moral tendencies of insects.  I began by googling bees.  Before I could find anything about killer bees or maybe the horrors of the hive-mind, I got diverted.

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In Defense of Insects

By: | August 13, 2010
The ladybug, named for the Virgin Mary, is a ravenous beast that can eat several hundred aphids in one day.

Five years ago, I was invited to speak at BugFest, the annual insect extravaganza at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, about my book, Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects. One day before the Fest, (which features an arthropod Olympics, butterfly gardening and a “Cafe Insecta”) I was a guest on North Carolina Public Radio’s program The State of Things. Together with my fellow speaker, the museum’s Arthropod Zoo curator Bill Reynolds, I talked about all the benefits insects bring to the world: they pollinate many of our crops, decompose plant and animal matter, eat pests that destroy our harvests, and serve as food for birds, fish, reptiles, frogs, and mammals, including ourselves. (Yes, even the Bible permits the consumption of selected “flying creeping things,” such as locusts and grasshoppers.)

After we had spoken, radio host Melinda Penkava invited callers to add their comments. One by one, each caller asked for advice on how to kill insects and other leggy bugs: mosquitoes, roaches, and ticks. Continue reading →

More Parasites, More Ickiness

By: | August 11, 2010

My apologies to all the delicate flowers out there. But here is a video that will actually make you feel sorry for a vampire bat.  Assassin bugs really do come by their names honestly.