The Art of the Insect

By: | December 15, 2010
'bee veins' by Barrett Klein

Earlier this week I was tickled by a study about dancing insects. European honey bees perform a rump-shaking ‘waggle dance’ in order to tell their hivemates where they’ve found food. The new research showed that when the bees don’t get any sleep, their dance moves become spasmatic and repellent; they clear the floor like a drunk uncle at a wedding (see a video here).

I suspected that the lead researcher, Barrett Klein, would be an interesting guy just based on the URL of his website — www.pupating.org — and I was right. He not only comes up with clever experiments to test Apis social interactions, but is an illustrator, sculptor and expert in ‘cultural entomology’: the study of how insects inch into human culture.
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Buried Violence: the Ouachita Sleepers

By: | December 14, 2010

I swear, you could get a good start at being a practicing geologist, just from looking at maps.  These lovely looping patterns are a satellite’s view of some mountains in southeastern Oklahoma.  They are the Ouachita, pronounced Wachita and mispronounced Wichita. I’m fond of the Ouachita – they’re sleepers. And given what went on underneath them, we’re probably glad we weren’t around when they were awake. Continue reading →

Emperor Hadrian and the Boy He Loved

By: | December 13, 2010

Last Wednesday night, in a swanky hall at Sotheby’s in New York, auctioneer Hugh Hildesley opened bidding for a sculptural masterpiece from the Roman world. Art collectors knew this statue as A Marble Portrait Bust of the Deified Antinous, and Hildesley and his staff expected that it would sell in the two- to three-million dollar range.

That didn’t happen though.   Continue reading →

Spooks, Wikileaks and Archaeology

By: | December 10, 2010

Like many other journalists, I’ve been following the reports this week about Julian Assange, editor-in-chief at Wikileaks. I like whistleblowers and others who shed light on dark places, and I hoped that Assange would find some way of slipping through the fingers of all those Interpol inspectors. Of course it wasn’t to be. As of last report, British authorities are holding Assange in a segregration cell in Wandsworth Prison in South London, the Victorian-era penitentiary that once housed Oscar Wilde.

I wish there were more such whistle-blowers out there, particularly in a field that I know fairly well: archaeology. As I have discovered, intelligence agencies have a particular penchant for recruiting archaeologists as spooks.   Continue reading →

Bold and Italicize Your Way to a Better Memory

By: | December 9, 2010

Let’s say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read.

What if I didn’t care about the ease with which you flipped through my book, but with the amount of information you retained from it? In that case, the fourth option is actually the worst choice, according to a new study.
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AG: End Times for a Scientist’s Career

By: | December 8, 2010

This happens.  An astronomer said that he found, as astronomers do, something that looked unusual and that turned out to be an unusual form of a usual thing.  But before he figured that out, a reporter happened to ask him what’s new, and the astronomer said he’d found this unusual thing, couldn’t figure it out, kind of mysterious.  And the reporter wrote an article for the New York Times (8/17/99), “Rarely Bested Astronomers Are Stumped by a Tiny Light,” and then the Weekly World News picked it up: “New York Times Story Sends Shock Waves Through Governments: Mystery Light in Northern Sky Baffles Scientists,” and began the story, ” . . . political and religious leaders around the world are terrified that the bizarre phenomenon is another sign from God that that the End Times are near.”

Luckily the scientist and his career both survived.

Credit:

http://abstrusegoose.com/321

Sticky Business

By: | December 7, 2010

Amateur beekeeper Gita Nandan began to suspect something wasn’t right about mid-summer. That’s when her bees’ honey, normally amber, turned the color of cherry cough syrup. After a day of foraging, her bees would return to their Brooklyn hives, their distended bellies glowing bright red.

She posted photos on the Facebook page of the New York City Beekeepers Association hoping someone would be able to come up with an explanation. One person suggested that the bees had been supping off hummingbird feeders. Another said they might have ingested antifreeze. Continue reading →

Small Problems for Astronomers

By: | December 6, 2010

Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below.

An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his 14.5 inch Starmaster Dobsonian at the horizontal position, put a towel over the eyepiece, and called it a night. The next morning, the wind first blew the towel off, then blew the telescope out of gear so it bobbed up into a vertical position and looked at the sky. As the morning passed, the sun hit the mirror, the mirror focused the sunlight, the eyepiece caught fire, the telescope exploded into flame, the whole back porch caught fire. The amateur wasn’t entirely dismayed: he was insured and besides, it was only the 14.5 inch Starmaster that exploded, not the 20-inch.

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