I’m aging. I love too many people whose health and wellbeing is too uncertain. I want to write about too many things, each one requiring too much time and too many brains. I take on too many assignments and some of the most important are outside my talents and over my head. I can’t keep this up indefinitely but I never want to stop but some foreseeable day I’ll have to. So most days I’m preoccupied and touchy; nights I wake up in a panic. I’m pressured, I’m stressed, I’m distressed. I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in this.
Just when many people had dismissed the Cold War as a relic of the past, it resurfaced with a vengeance last week as authorities arrested eleven alleged Russian spies in the United States and Cyprus. But what a difference a decade or two makes, I thought. No more weather-beaten Burberries or dead letter drops in grungy East Berlin cafes for Anna Chapman and company. Instead Chapman was observed transmitting information to a Russian intelligence officer over a wireless network at Starbucks. How wonderfully 2010.
The Cold War never really left us, however: intelligence agencies on both sides of the former Iron Curtain continued snooping long after the fall of the former Soviet Union. And all this determined espionage has generated some unexpected spinoffs for science–archaeology included. As Spying on the Past: Declassified Satellite Images and Archaeology, a new exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, reveals, spy photos from the 60s and 70s are showing archaeologists many things they have never seen before. Continue reading
All I can say is, yup. That, and the little colored oval just under the BANG! is real data. 
Nalini Nadkarni, “the Queen of the Forest Canopy,” spends her professional life clambering around in tree tops, studying the jumble of plants that grow in the high branches. I had the privilege of hearing Nadkarni, a professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, speak in April at the New York Academy of Sciences in a talk entitled Between Earth and Sky. I was fascinated by her eclectic range of interests, which include training prisoners at the local Cedar Creek Corrections Center to raise endangered mosses.
Every once in a while, archaeologists come across a find that casts the ancient Egyptians in a particularly humble, human light. Such discoveries often fly under the radar, overshadowed by showier finds of mummies and newly discovered tombs. But I delight in these discoveries; they are antidotes to the almost paralyzing sense of awe I experience when roaming a land tottering with massive sphinxes, pyramids and temples. All that splendor, all that artistry, all that craning of the neck, all that looking up, up, up into majesty. I feel like an ant.
So I was delighted to read an announcement that Zawi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, made yesterday about a mysterious tunnel that went nowhere in the Valley of the Kings. Egyptologists long suspected that the tunnel linked the royal tomb of Seti I to a secret burial place. But it just ended suddenly, and Hawass now believes that work crews simply picked up their tools and walked out after Seti I died suddenly around 1279 B.C. The new pharoah had other work for them.
Now here’s the part that I really like. Continue reading
A charming website called Who’s the Scientist? shows seventh graders’ images of scientists before and after actually meeting scientists. Continue reading
When I was a child, my grandfather took me to London’s Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons. Thousands of these statue-splotchers covered the square, feeding on seeds offered by the outstretched hands of excited tourists. It must have been a favorite outing, because he also took my mother and her cousin (left) out for a similar thrill when they were children. The seemingly innocent act was outlawed in 2003 by London’s then-mayor Ken Livingstone, who cited £140,000 worth of dropping-induced damage to Nelson’s Column. It turns out that it’s not just the long-dead Nelson who has reason to fear the pigeons: Spanish researchers at the Animal Health Research Center in Madrid have discovered that feral pigeons carry several nasty pathogens, including two that cause diarrhea in humans.
June’s solstice has just passed and I find myself where I usually am each year at this time—37,000 feet in the air and winging off to the field. One of the great joys of my job is to set out armed to the teeth with notebooks, cameras and voice recorder, and join an archaeological crew in some remote part of the world. Over the years, I’ve winced at mummy autopsies in Egypt, wandered ankle deep in mummified rats in a greathouse in New Mexico and wormed through caves in the northern Yukon, scouting for traces of the earliest migrants to the New World.
This morning, my destination is southern Arizona, where I’ll be joining Jason De Leon, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his students on a field survey in the hilly backcountry of the Sonoran Desert. I can’t divulge any details about the story, but I will say that it has little to do with archaeology as it is usually practiced.
The weatherman predicts a scorching week, with temperatures soaring as high as 108 degrees Fahrenheit. De Leon tells me that the team heads out at 5 am each morning to take advantage of what little coolness there is and generally wraps up its field work at 1 pm. Team members fill their array of water bottles with ice each morning before setting out, but within a few hours, they are glugging down water hot enough to steep tea. And De Leon’s recommended gear includes a few things I’ve never seen before on an equipment list: a pocketknife with pliers for extricating cactus spines, instant icepacks, and something called hand coolers. Continue reading
