This week came with heartening news in the frog world. An Australian study showed that if you offer frogs a sauna in a greenhouse, it allows them to recover from the fungal disease that has played a role in 90 species extinctions so far. The greatest loss of biodiversity ever attributed to a single disease, the fungus in question is Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis, not-so-fondly-nicknamed Bd, and it infects the skin, needed in frogs for breathing. This causes electrolyte imbalance and eventually fatal heart attacks. Bd lives in the soil and water and threatens amphibians worldwide.
Sadly, we can’t give every frog a sauna or anti-fungal treatment, but there are other possibilities. My friend Anne Madden runs the Microbe Institute, where she’s been spreading the word about a bacterium (Janthinobacterium lividum) that can fight the fungus by producing a purple pigment called violacein. There are other bacteria that produce the same anti-fungal medicine, but we don’t know how many and where they live.
So the Institute is launching a citizen science project whereby you will soon be able to test your local waters and send them any purple-pigmented bacteria samples you find. A grant from National Geographic Society also supports a lesson plan on bioinformatics, PCR and DNA sequencing for a range of students, so they can learn while they save the frogs.
But that’s not all: what’s really captured my heart is Anne’s BioArt project, a collaboration between beneficial microbes and humans, modeled after the AIDS quilt. It turns out that in addition to saving the amphibian world, that purple pigment can dye fabric naturally, without a water-intensive setting agent.
The Microbe Institute will send you a scrap of the microbe-dyed purple fabric (they’ve sent me a lovely strip of delicate purple lace) to include in a square paper art tile. We’re to use the symbiotic glory of the bacterium/frog relationship as our inspiration, and our squares will be incorporated into a vast collage. Do join me in creating against destruction.
As for Anne, her passion for science is rivaled only by her talent for millinery. Check out her Microbe Hat project and spot those purple microbes at work in some of its creations.
This post ran ten years ago, about a landscape that existed where the Bering Sea now lies, and how humans have been plying it from then till now. Living far inland in a desert environment, I don’t think of the sea often, but when I do, my mind flies to this tundra island, once the land-locked high point on the Bering Land Bridge, now the middle of a cold and churning sea.
Twelve Siberian Yup’ik men motored into the Bering Sea with two aluminum skiffs to visit relatives on the US side of the Bering Strait. Their journey retraced a route that has been used since the Ice Age, one of the most important lines of travel in human history.
Leaving the Russian coast, they traveled 70 miles through notoriously difficult waters to St. Lawrence Island, which is a far-flung piece of Alaska, a treeless hunk of tundra 90 miles long and little more than 10 to 20 miles wide. They came to the island’s only two villages, where residents are also Siberian Yup’ik, speaking the exact same language as their Russian counterparts.
Yup’ik people and their early relations have been on St. Lawrence Island for at least 2,000 years, traveling by boat back and forth all the while, but that is relatively recent history. During the Ice Age, this was not water at all, but entirely land. St. Lawrence Island was a high point in the middle of the Bering land bridge, as far from any coastline as Cincinnati, Ohio. Though evidence has been submerged under sea levels that rose up to 400 feet since then, it is believed that this is how people first reached North America. Continue reading →
In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House Finches and House Sparrows. But! Last week, it did deliver us this:
Yep, that’s a Blue Jay — an iconic eastern bird, flitting through the mountains of central Colorado. It isn’t the first we’ve seen; we’ve had “Blue Jay” on our whiteboard of bird observations since last spring. Not that all of my friends believe it: I’ve had more than one person question the sighting, as though we can’t tell a Blue Jay from a Scrub Jay from a Steller’s from a Pinyon. But now we have definitive proof! (This, by the way, gets at the affirmative argument for capitalizing common bird names: There’s a difference between a blue jay — i.e., a jay that is blue — and a true Blue Jay.)
This was first published October 21, 2019 but the universe hasn’t changed much in the years since. I mean, a few stars may have come and gone but on the whole, the universe is too big to change that fast. But we, at least we in the US, we’ve changed though. We seem to have lost our good nature, we are in a frenzy of dire and bad thoughts: about political disaster, the apparent decline in national rationality, godawful heat and floods and storms and fire, and honestly every morning I have to haul myself out of the deepest despair over our decay and dissolution. This post is an unexpected antidote: everything, even the stars and galaxies and entire universe, is dying sooner or later and you don’t have to be a science writer to find that oddly comforting.
@nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta. “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years. The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the whole universe will change “over time scales which greatly exceed the current age of the universe.” That is, take the present planets, stars, galaxies, and universe and fast-forward them into the far future, farther into the future than the Big Bang was in the past, in fact, all the way to the end. It doesn’t end well. The paper starts small, though, with stars.
@shannonmstirone Replying to @nattyover: Today is one of those days when I’m comforted by knowing that one day our sun will die and our galaxy will merge with Andromeda and there’s no escaping, this is all temporary.
@shannonmstirone is Shannon Stirone, and she is also a science writer. The sun — after it blows up like a balloon and fries the earth along with most of the solar system — will shrink back down into a barely shining cinder. Our galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are going to collide and merge and become an entirely different galaxy. Our cosmic identities are temporary, change is inescapable.
@nattyover: Nothing more soothing than the thought of a neutron star sublimating
I read this and had to go look it up, and oh my goodness. Sublimation is when a solid goes straight to gas, no liquid melting in between; dry ice is solid carbon dioxide sublimating. Neutron stars are a stage in the deaths of stars much bigger than ours, so big they don’t shrink down to cinders but keep shrinking until their atoms are all jammed into nuclei, no atoms any more, just mostly neutrons, a billion tons in a teaspoon of degenerate solid neutron star. And then their neutrons decay, as neutrons do, into other particles, which decay farther until the stars have evaporated. They’ve sublimed.
@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the galaxies turning redder and redder until they finally blonk out.
Stars live by burning gas and when the gas runs out, stars turn red; so when galaxies full of stars also run out of gas, they also turn red. Eventually all the gas in the universe has been used up as fuel and has pretty much dissipated, and no stars ever form again, neither do galaxies. What’s left is the black holes that had been at the centers of galaxies, and finally, via Hawking radiation, even the black holes evaporate.
@AnnFinkbeiner: Or the heat death of the universe.
Meanwhile, the universe which has always been expanding, keeps on expanding. In the end the warm, moving, shining universe is cold and still and dark.
@shannonmstirone: Deep-death-time makes me happy.
Twitter Web App: Dear People of Twitter, a question if I may: in these trying times when you consider the inevitable dissolution of stars and galaxies and the final heat death of the universe. . .
Twitter Web App: 111 votes · Final results
Twitter Web App: . . . are you comforted? 71%
Twitter Web App: . . . or in existential terror? 29%
So. @nattyover and @shannonmstirone aren’t alone. Only 30% of my science-y Twitter finds the death of the universe to be terrifying and somehow, for some reason, 70% find it comforting.
@shannonmstirone: It throws me into existential comfort, most of the time. Sometimes the shortness of everything makes me feel like my actions are useless but most of the time I think it gives life greater meaning. Ending make things beautiful, so I’m going with—comfort.
@nattyover : But what is comforting about endings? Surely it’s the sense that we have a limited time to improve the lot of our family/species/planet/universe. The comfort-chain continues until that last one ends. So why is the heat death of the universe still comforting?
@AnnFinkbeiner: Maybe it’s partly the aesthetic and intellectual beauty of the idea.
@nattyover : Yes, maybe. Plus maybe there’s a multiverse 🙂
The multiverse is the idea that the universe is only one of a whole foam of universes; it is backed by math and physics but not by any evidence whatever. It does not sound reasonable. I wouldn’t know what to do with all those universes; I quote Princeton’s great cosmological theorist, Jim Peebles: “One shot is enough for me.”
@shannonmstirone: I’m ok with it ending because it’s the natural course. I think it’s beautiful that this is temporary. That we exist and maybe others exist and these wonders pop into existence and fade. We all have a time and then it’s over.
I never voted in this poll and in fact, have few feelings about the death of the universe. I probably lean toward “comfort:” I’ve written books about HIV infection and parental bereavement, and returning to cosmology stories is always a blessed relief. Cosmology doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t even matter. Projecting human history into its farthest possible future, cosmology will never matter.
@AnnFinkbeiner: I think the comfort comes not only the beauty of the ideas but also from their gentleness — coming apart, fading, reddening, sublimating. The universe is full of violence, but these deaths are so peaceful.
@shannonmstirone: Exactly. I love the thought of everything quietly spreading apart over time. Fires cooling and going dormant. It’s maybe the saddest most final ending, but what a lovely way to go-to end with a flicker after all the violence that started everything. It’s built-in poetry.
@nattyover: I don’t know y’all, these are all very nice sentences that are making me wonder if the allure is entirely literary.
Oh you hard-eyed @nattyover, I love you.
@shannonmstirone: Thinking of starting my own public television show that is only 2 minutes long and it’ll just be a list of all the ways things die in space.
Thinking of how to fund @shannonmstirone’s TV series, How Things Die in Space.
__________
Should you want cosmological information on this subject that’s reliable and comprehensible, another science writer, Katie Mack, who was originally part of this Twitter conversation, has a book called The End of Everything.
__________
Photos via the amazing Public Domain Review: by the playwright, August Strindberg (Miss Julie). Strindberg laid out light-sensitive photographic plates on the ground to see what they’d record of the night sky. Turns out, what he recorded was not stars but the dust and various molecules in the atmosphere, interacting with the chemicals on the plates. Not stars but dust: there’s a lesson in here somewhere.
This is from April 17, 2017. Since then other irreplaceable neighbors have moved away, in particular, two who were my age, a little older, who moved into retirement places. I miss them because of their own lively, interesting, lovely selves but also because I felt they were a protection, that as long as I could see their cars out front and their lights on, things were going to be ok. Like, they’d lived it, knew how bad it could get, and still knew how to make things ok. I still see these beloved neighbors, of course, just like I still see the neighbors in this post and even if their campfires are geographically inconvenient, they’re no less campfires.
I have neighbors who were also friends who have just moved away. I look at their house now and they’re not in it, it’s empty, they’re gone. I’m sad. Why should I care so much? It’s what urban America does, it moves away — stays a while, then moves somewhere else. I’m used to it. These people whose daily cycles, real worries and deserved joys, faults and virtues, parents and children, and cars and gardens I know so well, I now know at best via Facebook, maybe Christmas cards, “we should get together again sometime.” Fine. That’s the way it is. I’m still sad.
Meanwhile, I’ve given some thought to what you might do to be the kind of person whose neighbors are sad when you to move away. I started looking for research on the social psychology of groups but it’s the wrong field; it’s about how groups function for good or ill, and not about how to be a certain kind of person. Maybe I’m talking about moral philosophy. Maybe Aristotle covered this; maybe Montaigne did; I don’t think Kant did. But I’m not looking it up. Instead I’m going to make a specific list of action items and we can theorize another time.
Show up on the doorstep with a plate covered with plastic wrap and say – obviously lying – you had some banana bread with chocolate chips left over, or you made too much turkey with portobello mushrooms.
Wear understatedly elegant clothes so casually that your neighbors will feel that just by living on the same street, they too are understatedly elegant.
Have occasional parties whose guests you are so surprised and delighted to see that they feel they’re honoring your party with their presence. Give them cheese with a little ash line in it, French bread you bought at a bakery on the eastern shore, plus a lot of cheap champagne, plus green olives, and in particular, hot crab dip. Propose toasts almost randomly, but give the reasons for the toast in great and particular detail.
Help your neighbors hang heavy pictures on two hooks so that if a picture is bumped or dusted, it can’t tilt. Your neighbor never would figure this out in a million years.
Smile easily.
Be honest with your neighbors when the goldfinch feeders they’re using are the kinds goldfinches don’t like. Then get on the internet and help find the right kind.
Help a neighbor arrange the old photos of her mother on a poster for her mother’s memorial service. Know your graphic design and the best glue choices. Know that during the design and glue process your neighbor will want to take breaks.
Sit on your front porch having a glass of wine and when your neighbor asks if it’s ok to join you, say “oh yes, please, we’d love that,” and mean it, even if you’re tired and your dinner should come out of the oven in five minutes. Just go inside for a minute and turn the oven down.
When you go over to your neighbor’s and find a visitor who is knitting, ask the visitor to help you start a shawl because you have yarn so beautiful you bought it even though you don’t know how to knit. Be amazed at the visitor’s teaching abilities.
Know one sparrow from another.
Ask your neighbors — in the kindest, most careful possible way — questions that are a little impolitic. Where did you grow up and why did you leave? Did you get along with your parents? How many times have you been married? Why did you quit that job? Listen carefully and then recount your own small town, your relationship with your mother, the number of your ex-spouses, and your job history. These are all just stories, after all, and what do people have to share except their stories?
Emit the kind of rays that a campfire does, so that people just naturally want to come sit by you, and so that just by looking at your house and knowing you’re there, your neighbors feel protected, surrounded by warmth, safe as houses.
I was at the Seattle Pride parade last weekend, where I saw multiple people wearing t-shirts that said “Y’all means All.” It reminded me of how my husband got me using this gender-neutral, inclusive word. This post first ran a few years ago, and it’s as relevant as ever.
Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants.
After hearing him say y’all for something like the tenth time in a week, I asked him why he’d suddenly adopted this word, which seemed out of place spoken by someone without a southern accent. He explained that he’d started using y’all with the college ski team that he coaches. Most of the skiers are women, and he thought it would be lame to refer to them as “you guys” — the phrase more widely used here in Colorado. “English really needs a plural you,” he says.
He has a point. All of the languages I’ve studied — German, Italian and Spanish — have a plural you, and while that extra pronoun was frustrating to me as a language student, I’ve encountered plenty of times when I’ve wished for a plural you in English that wasn’t gendered or regional.
According to Mental Floss, “y’all” is just one of eight ways to construct the plural “you” in English. Others include “you-uns,” “you guys,” “you lot,” and “yous.” None of the terms on this list roll off my tongue any easier than the others.
Most of the times when I long for a plural you, it’s because I’m greeting a group of friends. My fallbacks are usually “hey guys” or “hello everyone,” but neither feels as satisfying or apt as the Swiss German phrase, “Grüezi Mitenand!” (Hello everyone!)
Why? Mostly, I’m reluctant to adopt a dialect that doesn’t feel like mine. But I long ago decided that “howdy” was a perfectly apt greeting for a stranger encountered in the wilds of the West, so perhaps it’s time I follow Dave’s lead and take up y’all too. So what if I’ve always associated the word with rednecks and cowboys? If y’all is a redneck term, it’s a gender neutral, feminist one. Just ask Tami Taylor.
Almost 15 years ago I traveled to a polar ice sheet with two key researchers who have since passed away. First, José Rial, who I followed to Greenland, was taken by cancer. His death was followed by his friend Konrad Steffen, one of the great Arctic ice scientists and explorers, who fell into a crevasse just outside the camp where I’d spent time with him. This post, which ran in 2020, is a toast to them.
On the Greenland Ice Sheet I sat at a circular table in the cook tent of a seven-person research station. Wind banged and thrummed outside. A storm had been on us for days. After going out to pee, you’d stomp back inside sequined with the frozen glitter of your own urine. Around the table talking climate change were a couple NASA scientists and a small team led by Konrad Steffen, one of the lead cryosphere authors for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There was also a climate change chaos researcher named José Rial from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’d been planting microphones on the ice, listening for bubbles and quakes, trying to determine patterns in what other scientists dismiss as noise. While the others talked at the table, Rial remained buried in his laptop.
The wind hit the tent like a crashing sea, sometimes overwhelming the conversation, which was about our steadily warming climate. A young French snow researcher got worked up, cursing at how we’re pushing this planet into the hot zone. Rial, in his 60s, the camp elder, said nothing.
There was a brief moment in my life when I thought it was obvious what an internal world model is. Self-evident, even! It’s the homunculus version of the cosmos as represented inside the confines of our skulls. Like this Emily Dickinson poem I found in one of Maria Popva’s always illuminating articles about consciousness:
The Brain — is wider than the Sky — For — put them side by side — The one the other will contain With ease — and you — beside —
The Brain is deeper than the sea — For — hold them — Blue to Blue — The one the other will absorb — As sponges — Buckets — do —
On the basic structure of reality, my internal representation of the world is probably fairly consistent with yours. For you, me and the late, great Emily Dickinson, the colour blue appears in ways that are consistent and determined by the laws of physics. But once the photon is captured by the rods and cones and passed along the optic nerve to the brains, we are also pretty consistent in assigning that information to a group of neurons that assign orientation, edges and meaning to identify whatever blue shape we’re looking at.
There are other ways our internal models share a base reality. Regrettably marketing and publicity is one factor – I imagine your idea of “Jennifer Aniston” is remarkably consistent with mine (unless you know Jennifer Aniston personally, in which case your truth will diverge sharply from my highly PR-managed perspective).
In all our personal dealings our internal world models will diverge sharply. I have a very different set of representations linked to the concept of “grandmother” than you do, thanks to the fact of our uniquely different grandmothers. I used those examples because there have been claims (and refutations and resurrections) that specific single neurons in both your brain and mine are devoted uniquely to representing these people in our mind’s eye.
This all goes some way to understanding what the people at BrainWorlds – an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Freiburg – are up to. They want to know: how are these worlds constructed? Is there an identifiable physical substrate that underpins their construction? Like the way the brain perceives blue? Or like the way the brain (maybe) conceives of Jennifer Aniston?
Some things must be hardwired: take an insect’s ability to understand “up” and “down” straight out of the gate. They don’t go to insect school with little insect physics teachers teaching them navigation and how to account for wind speed. So that information has already got to exist there in the physical structure.
What drove me to attend a BrainWorlds conference was a throwaway comment I had heard at a previous conference. Amid all the existential risk chatter and fears of AI super intelligence, he was dismissive. “Talk to me when AI has an internal world model,” he scoffed.
I was immediately intrigued. As someone who knows nothing, zero, about the weighting systems of neural networks or backpropagation (in fact I’m a bit like ChatGPT about all this AI terminology in that I can complete all the right phrases but fuck me if I know what I’m actually talking about) – I felt like I suddenly had a handle on something broadly understandable. AI is autocomplete, roughly. We are not. (Well, except me when I’m talking about AI.) And maybe this is what’s special about biological intelligence. It takes in new information and integrates it through the complicated little simulated universe in our skull for analysis. An internal world model contextualises information. An internal world model lends us common sense. AI’s lack of one is why AI is considered brittle and lacking in common sense.
(In fact there’s a whole very interesting area of neuroscience devoted to this: the idea that we build a miniature model of the world in our brain that runs largely on autopilot unless the stimulus we receive from the outside world contradicts the expectations set by that model.)
This simulated universe is our internal world model and every living creature has it. And in order to make AI that we can trust not to hallucinate, we will need to find a way to give it an internal world model.
I was so excited by this piece of solid information in my grasp.
Then I brought it up to my tech friends, the sorts of people who know what backpropagation means because they have a robust mental model of it, not just what the words mean but some of the mathematics too.
They immediately said the concept of an “internal world model” was meaningless, because of course AI has an internal world model of its own, what the hell do you think all those nodes and weights and back propagation algorithms are but a model of the world. In a brain that’s not like ours.
And then I realised I need to update my internal world model of what an internal world model is. And then I realised that I needed to update my internal representation of my self as I exist inside my internal world model, from a self that understands what an internal world model is to a self that does not.
I am typing this from under my bed. This is where I live now, subsisting on a diet of centipedes, spiders and the occasional mouse. I’ve had enough world and I would please like to speak to a manager now.
[this is cross-posted from my Substack, which I have just started after one and a half years of biting my nails about it]
