The Man Who Cannot Die

By: | October 1, 2010

A few days ago, while idly surfing the net, I stumbled upon a photograph that seemed to come from another world, a place much more surreal and interesting than the one I inhabit. The photo in question showed a traditional fighting shield from highlands of Papua New Guinea. But it wasn’t the shield that caught my attention. It was the artwork. The maker had painted the Phantom on it, a comic-strip character created in the 1930s by American artist Lee Falk. And the superhero on the shield clearly meant business. He held an axe in one hand, a revolver in the other.

The idea of the Phantom fighting off evil in Papua New Guinea fascinated me, so I began digging around, trying to piece together the anthropological backstory. I was pretty certain there was one.

And I was right. Continue reading →

Stress Factors

By: | September 30, 2010

At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, two decades after he served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, Lance Johnson felt the tremors of San Francisco’s Loma Prieta Earthquake from his apartment in Marin County. He took his cup of coffee to the couch, switched on the news and saw a live feed of the fire and destruction happening 40 miles south. Suddenly, he was hit with some of the common symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As he recalls: Someone tripped a switch in my head, and instantly, I was back in Vietnam. In my mind, the concept of time suddenly meant nothing, and I traveled a wormhole in space from San Francisco to twenty years earlier in Southeast Asia. Panic. I didn’t know what to do.*

You don’t have to be a combat vet to know that your response to stress—whether a loud noise, dying relative or looming deadline—changes over time. After the first exposure, we are somehow primed for the next, even weeks or years later. And when something in that process goes wrong, the consequences can be tragic.

Neuroscientists don’t understand much about how the brain encodes such a versatile stress response. It’s part of a complicated mess of hormonal, chemical and electrical signals in a brain system called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. A new rat study has made the picture slightly less muddled, opening the door a tiny bit to new treatments for PTSD and other types of chronic stress.

Continue reading →

The Newest of the People of LWON

By: | September 29, 2010

(“People of Last Word on Nothing” doesn’t sound as exciting as People of LWON.)  We are pleased and proud to introduce Virginia Hughes.  One of her early stories was about why Hagia Sophia doesn’t fall down in earthquakes, which was impressive because not just anyone can get you interested in the structural loads of cathedrals.  She introduces herself if you click About, and explains her Myers-Briggs personality on her own website.  We are so very happy she’s here.  Her first post:  tomorrow morning.

Photo credit:  Hagia Sophia, Radomil

People Standing in Lines

By: | September 27, 2010

ZapperZ is a physics blogger who worries about people believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, that ghosts are real and evolution isn’t; and in short, that the public knowledge of and interest in science is thin as a dime.  He met a scientist, a woman, who said the only way to explain science to politicians so they’ll fund it was to be “shallow, perky, and superficial.”  ZapperZ knows a wake-up call when he hears one, so he’s adopted “shallow, perky, and superficial” as his watchword and has declared a contest for the cutest physicists, men and women both, and began with the women.  He wasn’t sure anyone would be nominated. Continue reading →

Christie’s and the Roman Helmet

By: | September 24, 2010

Last May, a man armed with a metal detector stumbled on something almost magical in a farmer’s field in the Eden Valley of northwestern England. Buried under the earth were 74 metal fragments, some large, some small, but all clearly part of a Roman helmet. And not just any Roman helmet.

When the conservators at Christie’s in London had finished restoring it for an October 7th auction, Roman experts gasped. It was an exceedingly rare cavalry-sports helmet, a work of incredible beauty and great historical importance. Only officers of the highest rank or the best horsemanship were permitted to wear such helmets during sporting competitions. “Its face mask is both extremely finely wrought and chillingly striking,” noted Ralph Jackson, a curator at the British Museum, in a formal report. “It is a find of the greatest national (and, indeed, international) significance.”

Have you noticed anything wrong yet about this story? Continue reading →

In Defense of Sloths

By: | September 23, 2010

Maybe it’s the advent of the rainy season here on the Northwest Coast, the time of all things mouldy and green. Or maybe it’s just the battle I wage every morning to crawl out of bed when it’s still so bloody dark. But sloths strike me as very simpatico these days.

Ok, if you watch this video–which I heartily recommend–you may feel a little repelled by a creature that can’t be bothered to wave away the large insects roaming its nostrils or dispose of the moths that flutter about its fur. But rise above your antipathy. The latest thinking among biologists is that the sloths are masters of energy conservation. Continue reading →

Outright Gifts

By: | September 22, 2010

I drove up to an auction in the Pennsylvania hayfields, parked in the field to the left because the lot to the right was reserved for buggies and horses. Maybe five auctions were going on in different parts of the fairground and everywhere were Amish in black and dark jewel-colored clothes, Mennonites in black and light sprigged cottons, all the old Anabaptist sects, the people that locals call “plain folk.”  They spoke a dialect of German you couldn’t understand even if you understand German. They had no-shit faces, meaning they don’t hand it out but if you do, then that’s the kind of person you are.

Kids were quietly all over the place, and a surprising number of them were in wheelchairs – plain peoples’ kids are unusually likely to have genetic diseases that interfere with the way their bodies process proteins, which in turn plays havoc with the parts of their brains that control muscles. The auctions were to raise money for the clinic that treats them, The Clinic For Special Children, which is what the plain people call these kids, God’s special children. The clinic supplies these people who have no telephones, no cars, no electric stoves, no electric lights with the only true personalized genetic medicine in the country. Continue reading →