It’s not the setup of a bad joke. For years, the U.S. military has likely used brain scanners to try to read the minds of suspected terrorists. Some bioethicists have argued, and I tend to agree, that using neuroimaging during interrogations is not only ineffective, but could also exacerbate the abusive treatment of prisoners of war.
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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?”
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.
In his several books and many articles in magazines and academic journals, Horace Freeland Judson dared to size scientists up, though he wasn’t one. He died on May 6, age 80. He was my teacher and my friend, and I would like to say a few things about his works both to offer tribute and to explicate some of what was significant about the most original science observer of our time. Continue reading
Kids will put anything in their mouths. My aunt, who lived briefly in Hawaii, once found my cousin gnawing on a dead lizard. My childhood tastes were less exotic. I loved dirt.
Eating dirt was forbidden. I was old enough to understand that. But I could. not. help. myself. My mother would often find me next to a houseplant, black streaks covering my mouth and hands. “Have you been eating dirt?” she would ask. I would solemnly shake my head. The perfect crime. Except for that telltale black ring around my mouth.
For me, eating dirt was a phase. I grew out of it. But years later I still felt like a freak. I shouldn’t have. Turns out dirt eating is pretty common. In fact, there’s even a scientific name for the practice: geophagy. Continue reading
The first time I heard about bacterial photography, I thought, “Wow, that’s so rad! I’m not sure what they’re gonna use it for, but anyway, it sure is cool!”
The bacterial photography project involved transplanting a light sensor into an Escherichia coli bacterium so that it could take “pictures” in Petri dishes. It sprang from a field called synthetic biology, in which scientists engineer biology to perform new functions.
Here is a sampling of some of the other things that synthetic biologists have done since the bacterial photography project: they’ve made cheese from the bacteria that grow on human skin. They’ve engineered yeast to make lysergic acid, the precursor of the psychedelic drug LSD. They’ve made plants whose leaves change color when they detect explosive chemicals, and bacteria that digest the pesticide Atrazine.
A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, cheese doodles, Wal-Mart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the Hudson River town of Poughkeepsie, New York, he perked up.
“Oh!” he said, sounding as if he’d almost cracked a smile.
People from Poughkeepsie are not, to say the least, used to this kind of reaction. Depending on your generation, you may know my hometown from Gene Hackman’s “Pickin’ your feet in Poughkeepsie” rant in The French Connection; from the Lemonheads song; or from the Friends episode “The One With The Girl From Poughkeepsie” (“How great can she be if she’s from Poughkeepsie?”)
If you know Poughkeepsie at all, chances are you don’t ache to return. The name is Wappinger for “the reed-covered lodge by the little-water place,” though a friend of mine translates it as “place of many strip malls.” We once made a decent living making hats, brewing beer, and shipping stuff up and down the Hudson, but those glory days are long over. (One of our most successful industries was whale rendering.) With a chronically lackluster downtown and boring burbs, we have neither urban sophistication nor rural charm. As Hudson Valley folkie Bill Ring puts it, “It’s bigger than a village, but it ain’t quite a city/ and it’s not a place a lot of folks are itching to go.” I love a lot of people in Poughkeepsie, but honestly, I prefer to meet them elsewhere.
Please welcome Michelle Nijhuis, the newest Person of LWON—and, given her street address, the one least likely to be stalked in the physical world. Michelle seems to spend a great deal of her time winning awards and fellowships, but that’s not why we like her. Rather, it’s because of the moments she sets aside to write evocative, heartfelt stories about conservation and global change and, as often as not, people who are trying to do something good—and perhaps a little nutty—for the world we all share. And that’s just part of why we think she’ll fit in so well.
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Image: Perhaps Michelle’s closest neighbor? From an abandoned house in Foote Fields, Colorado. Photo courtesy of JT Thomas.
