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Science

Defying the Laws of Gravity

Todays’ blog is brought to you by my garden’s hummingbirds. Now that the Buddleia is in bloom they are regular visitors. It takes some patience to stand under the bush (while cursing under my breath because my camera’s focus function has decided to be uncooperative, another spendy repair in the offing) and wait for the birds to appear. Of course they do not defy the laws of gravity, but it looks as if they do when they arrive and seemingly hang still in the air, sucking nectar.

Thoughts of physics reminded me of a photographer, Berenice Abbott (1889 – 1991) who excelled at photographing principles of physics. Her interest in documenting scientific principles and teaching the role of science in photography came late in her life, after she had already a stellar career excelling in all kinds of subject areas within the domaine of photography. Early in life she gained renown by her portrait photography of European artists and intellectuals of the Paris of the 1920s. In the 1930s she turned to documentary photography of the city of New York (funded by the FAP) and rural America in the aftermath of the Depression. Eventually she focussed on science, becoming the photography editor for Science Illustrated and producing scientific images for the textbook American High School Biology. The Physical Science Study Committee of Educational Services published a new physics book in the 1950s with all of the images almost exclusively by Abbott.

Circular Wave System Photograph MIT Museum

My kind of woman, always willing to take a risk to pursue her passion, never narrowly focussed on one single domain, and open to acknowledging the giants who paved the way (she had an absolute crush on the work of Eugene Atget, one of the pioneers of documentary photography.) In fact, she managed to rescue his collection of plates after his death and promoted his work throughout her lifetime.

I first saw her work at the MIT museum. One of the reviews of a solo exhibition claimed:

“Berenice Abbott’s science photographs invite us to contemplate the wonder of creation. As photographs utilizing the latest technology to illustrate scientific principles they are quintessentially modern, but the principles they illustrate came into being simultaneously with the Big Bang, so the images are also timeless, taking us both backward and forward throughout eternity. By making manifest the invisible forces that act upon the material world, they do for physics what the mandala does for Hindu theogony, or Kabbalistic diagrams of the sefirot try to do for the Ineffable.”

Hmm. Do we have to reach into the religious accomplishment-drawers to establish the value of photographic images? I’m certain she would have scoffed at that kind of comparison, seeing the wonder of creation too often subdued or undermined by a different kind of invisible hand – the economic and political forces that ruthlessly ignored the distress of the poor. As the photo-historian Terri Weisman explains, Abbott was interested in “how the things in the world reveal the world.” Abbot was labeled a communist by the McCarthy administration. Her life-long distrust of politics and economic institutions led to a catastrophe in late life: she had put her considerable life’s earnings converted to gold coins in a home safe and boxes stored in her house, all lost during a burglary in 1984. A great biography of Abbot can be found here.

The chain of associations while sitting under my butterfly bush eventually hit on the talents of a younger generation explicitly inspired by Abbott’s work and interests. Here are some ingenious images of the base quantities of physics generated by Greg White. As defined by the International System of Quantities (ISQ), these are time (second, s); mass (kilogram, kg); length (metre, m); temperature (kelvin, K); amount of substance (mole, mol); electric current (ampere, A); and luminous intensity (candela, cd). White captured all with props, ingeniously arranged and camera, no other manipulations. (Photos from his website, linked above.)

Electric Current
Length
Luminous Intensity
Mass
Amount of Substance
Temperature
Time

I’ll stick to capturing my little birds, wondrous in their own ways, and reading about all these interesting minds coming up with ways to depict the rest of the world. Not least because I always struggled with physics.


Hummingbird Music by Leonard Cohen, from the album Thanks for the Dance.

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The Punch of Numbers

Do you know that feeling when you are focused on a particular thing and all of sudden you have experiences that are either directly or vaguely related? You hope to get pregnant, (all those decades ago, for some of us,) and start to notice pregnant women everywhere, baby clothes stores popping up in unexpected locations, lullabies being broadcast on your classical radio station? I’m sure you can come up with multiple comparable examples.

Lately, I have been focused on numbers. Numbers people are asking those poor doctors, who struggle to paint a hopeful picture, which might or might not be misleading. Number of stages, of treatments available, number of side effects, number of years that signal a future, or not. Numbers that are given in averages, since that is what basic statistical evaluations will provide. Averages that some happily accept if they speak in their favor, or qualify with “each case is special” if they don’t. Averages that might rely on way too few data points, or be weakened by insufficient randomization. Averages that mean, honestly, nothing if they are not accompanied by information about variability, which patients won’t receive, or might not even know about and consider relevant, if they were not trained as scientists.

Wouldn’t you know it, some complex issues around numbers promptly popped up in my daily readings.

A fascinating discourse on what numbers are used – and which are left out – in the reporting on countries’ death rates from Covid-19, for example. Here I learned about how informations is given in absolute numbers, by news outlets all across the world, telling us how many people died in each country. Huge numbers, to be sure, unfathomably horrifying numbers, if you look, for example, at India. Has anybody noticed that the relative number, when counting numbers of the deceased in proportion to the size of any country’s population, (India has 1.392 billion inhabitants) spells out that pandemic loss of life in the United Kingdom was much higher than what is happening in India? Even if you account for bad data collection and multiply the official numbers given by the Indian government by a factor of four?

Then again, (and I am summarizing what I learned) the numbers that are not captured, either by design or by the difficulty of collecting them, could tell a more complete picture. How many people were sent back to their Indian home villages, dying of poverty-induced hunger or disease, or accidents in dangerous travel condition? What hit did an economy take that had not provided an even barely adequate health care system in a country that has no social safety net?

Closer to home, what numbers were or are suppressed in regard to heightened endangerment of susceptible populations? The elderly are still dying in great numbers in nursing homes, but no-one mentions them anymore after the first wave subsided. The poverty divide, etched along racial lines, is not often captured in the numbers presented in the general news media. (You can get to them by going to governmental/CDC website, which I strongly discourage, given the depressing nature of the data.)

What other numbers never enter the printed press or the evening news? Have you had daily updates on tuberculosis cases, even if every year it causes the death of around 1.7 million people? Or the 1.4 million people who die every year in car accidents?

Was it just that the pandemic was new, affording heightened attention? Or did publication of these numbers have to do with the need to keep populations sufficiently fearful so that they would passively accept heightened lockdown measures and other deprivations, sparing the government the economic and political cost of enacting them by force, police measures included?

Numbers as a form of indoctrination might make you shrug, or confirm your beliefs about statistics as the biggest lies of all. They do have consequences, though. If people who work one hour per week are taken out of the unemployment numbers because, they have, after all, worked!, it points a certain picture that might benefit governmental goals and policies. These, in turn, might hurt some populations and help others, depending what kind of government we elected.

The consequences can be deadly. Here is an example of the typical number problem in service of Nazi Eugenics presented to my parents and their age-mates in the late 1930s in every German middle school book.(Source here.)

“To keep a mentally ill person costs approximately 4 marks a day. There are 300,000 mentally ill people in care. How much do these people cost to keep in total? How many marriage loans of 1000 marks could be granted with this money?”

I do not have to spell out the pathway from these seeds of numerical indoctrination to the T-4 Euthanasia program of 1940, which murdered 200.000 disabled people in the next 5 years.

Given how much of a punch numbers can pull, it is truly important to figure out how they were collected, which were included and which ignored, who collected them, and what purpose they serve. Now I am stuck with the question how all the media seem so seamlessly clued in as to what is desirable to report and what not, even outside of state-sponsored broadcasting. A better preoccupation than worrying about medical numbers, I guess.

Here are fewthrown out by W.A.Mozart, some happy numbers (Figaro) , and some cruel ones…(Don Giovanni.)

Here is a short article on Mozart’s fascination with numbers, as well as that of other composers. In case you need to read something a little more cheerful.

Photographs today are of patterns that invite counting.

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Scents and Sensibility

When you catch me reading Popular Mechanics you know something is off. Well, you should know if you are a regular reader. In fact, all of today’s musings came about because something was off: my (insensible) assumption that irises have no smell. From flowers to a popular mechanics article – it’s been an interesting ride. Let me drag you along.

I have been photographing irises in my neighborhood across the last week, thinking I might do a bit on painters who were drawn to these showy plants. Along the way I was wondering why some flowers smell and others don’t, believing that the latter was true for irises. It turns out they do smell, if faintly, as long as you stick your nose into the blossom. It also seems to be the case that the rarest of perfume ingredients is delivered by irises, although by their roots – orris roots. The reason the stuff is so precious has to do with the fact that when you harvest the rhizomes you have to store them (insect- and fungus-proof) for 3 to 4 years in order for them to develop some scent.

My general question about smell vs no smell had a pretty straightforward answer: if plants are pollinated by birds (wildflowers, hibiscus and many other tropical plants, for example) then scent is unnecessary since birds don’t have an olfactory sense. If plants need insect pollinators, then they want to smell good to guide bees or other critters to the blossoms. And here it gets truly interesting: there is an insane calibration going on between what insects are around, when they are around, and how the plants maximize their attractiveness in idiosyncratic ways. (I was told across the dinner table that all that is taught in 5th grade – well, I must have played hooky…)

Let’s start with time: flowers who are pollinated by moths or bats smell the strongest in the evening into the night. Others prefer morning or afternoon, depending on who is most active during those times, bees and butterflies included. The period before blossoms open widely, and when they are almost spent and have been already sufficiently pollinated, matter as well. During these times the plant produces few volatiles (as the scent molecules are called in science speak), sparing their pollinators effort without reward.

Each scent sends specific signals, often across long distances, attracting those who are the best match. Species pollinated by bees and flies have sweet scents, while those pollinated by beetles have strong musty, spicy, or fruity smells. Successful pollination is of course essential to agricultural crops and fruit-bearing trees, so maximizing your chances of getting the right insect to the right plant is what scent is all about.

Next, leave it to us humans to put a wrench in the works. Flowers smell far less intensely these days than they used to. Selective breeding of flowers has focused on many attributes, all of which seem to have had a detrimental effect on the genetic make-up responsible for odors. Breeders in the cut-flower and ornamental plants market have concentrated on aesthetics (color and shape,)improved vase life and shipping characteristics.So long, scents….

Which finally brings me to Popular Mechanics, where I found, while learning about all this genetic engineering, an article that talks about genetic engineering of scents in reverse order. The plants are no longer among us, but scientists are able to recreate their scent with pretty nifty synthetic chemistry. Scientists from a Boston-based synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, a smell researcher and an artist teamed up to re-create the scents from extinct plants. They got DNA extracted from specimens of three plants stored at Harvard University’s Herbaria, and used synthetic biology to predict and resynthesize gene sequences that might be responsible for the smell. Using Ginkgo’s findings, Sissel Tolaas used her expertise to reconstruct the flowers’ smells in her lab, using identical or comparative smell molecules.

The smells they tried to resurrect were from plants that where killed off by human expansion: Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a plant from Hawaii last seen in 1912, destroyed by cattle ranching; Orbexilum stipulatum, a scurf pea that was drowned when a dam built in the Ohio River flooded its habitat in 1920; and the Wynberg Conebush, native to South Africa, superseded by vineyards in Cape Town. The collaborative work was eventually made into an interactive art exhibit, Resurrecting the Sublime, which can be visited here, should you want to travel again. The video in this link tells the whole story.

Nature. Science. Art. All you’ve come to expect to read about in this space. Just tell me, how do I fit in the politics?

Music today is from a few centuries apart. Haydn addressing the flower and Ibarrondo perhaps a woman, but we can pretend it’s the flower. Enough flowing ruffles in the composition to match the blossoms….

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Shift in Beliefs

Let’s assume you are – unjustly – accused of a crime since you happened to be on site when the police arrived. They drag you with them to be interrogated, convinced you are lying when you profess your innocence.

Do you have a clue what behaviors to avoid so you won’t reinforce the false assumption that you are lying? Should you avert your gaze or consistently meet the interrogator’s eyes? Should you sit extra still since fidgeting might be misinterpreted? Should you avoid rapid blinking or fiddling with your hair, yawning, complaining or covering your mouth while speaking? Should you cross your arms or your legs or avoid either? Should you concentrate on the pitch of your voice unless it is too high or too low? Should you be strongly emotional or rather reserved? As you might have guessed, these behavioral cues are believed to be evidence of lying, to the point where police and administrative agencies like the TSA print them on training manuals available for agents tasked with lie detection.

There is just one problem: a l l of them are believed to be behavioral signs of lying and n o n e of these have been proven to be reliable indicators of lying. Decades of scientific research both in the lab and in real-life, field scenarios debunked the notion that behaviors of certain kinds enable lie detection. (I am summarizing the long version of the findings which can be found here.)

Many international police departments have acknowledged these facts and are retraining their personell. Not so in this country where police and TSA stick to their old assumptions, regardless of the tragic consequences. People have served decades for murder in prison because they were found too stoic or too hysteric during interrogations, only to be later exonerated by other evidence.

In fact, departments are offering workshops and courses, spending inordinate amounts of money on them, that are reinforcing the old stereotypic beliefs, offering pseudoscience if not outright junk science as an alternative to the real thing. You wonder why. Why is there no shift in beliefs? Seriously, what is the motivation? Particularly since we have indications that there are other, more effective ways to actually spot lies, ways that do not focus on behavior but verbal cues? Give a suspect more time to speak freely in interview and they are likely to provide contradictions if lying, allowing the interviewer to spot liars accurately way above chance. Or access spatial memory, by having suspects draw maps of the crime or alibi scene. It turns out truth tellers report many more details in comparison to liars. UK police now regularly use this sketching method, having seen a significant improvement in lie detection.

Here are a few hypotheses about administrative preference for pseudoscience from researchers in the field who struggle to find more reliable ways of detecting lies.

  • “…unlike scientific knowledge, pseudoscientific claims offer immediate and easy solutions to complex challenges. They are thus particularly enticing. For example, the work of security and justice professionals could be facilitated by the use of highly accurate lie detectors during their daily face-to-face interactions. While science cannot offer such devices because they simply do not exist, pseudoscientific claims can be tailored to the needs of professionals and appear to be nearly infallible. Practitioners with limited knowledge of science and seeking a silver bullet might find these claims quite appealing.” — Science is complicated. Even if you are open to science you might nonetheless bite when someone dangles a simple solution in front of you cloaked in scientific jargon.
  • “The lack of specific or general scientific knowledge could partly explain why some organizations turn to pseudoscience and pseudoscientific techniques. “if organizations in the fields of security and justice do not lack specific or general scientific knowledge, they might turn to pseudoscience because they ignore the importance of science to improve their professional practices.” — Our national failure to provide good science education has long-lasting consequences.
  • “Some organizations in the fields of security and justice have probably turned to pseudoscience because they underestimate the disadvantages (and overestimate the advantages) of using programs, methods, and approaches that, on the surface, seem scientific but, in reality, are not.” — This is possible, but two other factors need to be added when comparing how backward we are as a country compared to others in their approach to adequate interviewing. One factor is sheer size: to re-educate a few hundred or even a couple of thousand officers, sheriffs and the like in, say, Great Britain, is easy compared to the number of police we have in this country. The outreach would be an enormous undertaking. Which brings us to the second factor: we have no centralized control of the police in this country. There are so many diverse organizations, so many different power hierarchies, varying from state to state, that unified reform is practically unthinkable, even if the will existed.

If I say it’s harrowing yet unsurprising, in a nation where science bashing is fashionable and power structures are cemented in, I ain’t lying.

Photographs today are of a place that calms me down when I am thoroughly irritated as when thinking through the issues above.

Music by contemporary composer David Lang, about what else, cheating, lying, stealing…..

And a shout out to the kind beings who drove me out there and back, patiently shuffling alsongside of me…

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Size Sizzlers

Remember all those times you were told size doesn’t matter? They lied.

No lies about size, though, when it comes to gorillas beating their chest. It turns out that those percussive sounds of gorillas drumming against their upper chest reveal accurate information about their size. The bigger the gorilla the lower the frequency of the sounds, possibly because bigger gorillas have larger air sacs near their larynx. This means that chest-beating isn’t just a visual display, but what a study calls an “honest signal of competitive ability.” And wouldn’t you know it, the bigger males attract the females, after all.

Gorillas stand up and thump their chests with cupped hands, not fists, which allows for a sound that can be heard up to half a mile way, signaling to females from other troops where the best mating choices lie. Not only that, it also informs other males if and when to choose to get into dominance fights – thus actually preventing aggression, since it makes smaller gorillas think twice. Or whatever the equivalence is in gorilla decision making….

They don’t thump all day; and apparently each one has a signature rhythm that allows them to be identified.And they are not the only ones. Honest acoustic cues to size can be found in the bellows of alligators and the vocalizations of North American Bisons, to name just a few, with those who have longer vocal tracts mating more successfully.

And if you don’t have a voice? No problem! Funnel-web building spiders, for example, use their body weight directly. It determines their web vibrations, so that conspecific receivers can reliably predict a potential opponent’s competitive abilities. Get that net swinging!

And then there are the Indian jumping ants. They are the first species that we know of that can voluntarily shrink their brains up to 25% – all in the service of their ovaries that swell up to five times their earlier size when energy used for the brain is rerouted. They do this when a queen dies, eliciting competition between these emerging pseudo-queens, one of whom takes the prize with the biggest reproductive system. Normally colonies die off when their queen goes. This system makes these specific colonies functionally immortal.

Not only that. If they didn’t make the cut, they can regrow their brains and revert to the previous existence as a worker ant. Oh, as a dear reader recently declared about nature’s tricks: ASTOUNDING!

Now all we need to learn is how to prevent our own involuntary shrinking of brains by any degree…

Here is traditional Rwandan music to end the week. Enjoy the sunshine!

Photographs are of things that are small and beautiful and blissfully silent.

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Magicicada Mysteries

If creepy-crawlies give you the creeps you might consider skipping today’s blog. Not for the faint of heart. But, oh, so fascinating in terms of what nature has, once again, to offer, and in terms of the utter cluelessness of science in answering some very big questions. Skip right to the end to listen to Bartok’s piano piece which will enrich your day.

2021 is the year where the central and eastern U.S. is expecting a mass emergence of cicadas, millions and millions of them who leave their burrows underground and climb the trees in synchronized fashion, for a 6 week-short life- span of reproduction after having been underground for 17 years.

They are known as periodical cicadas. Only 7 of the 300 species of cicadas worldwide have this strange life rhythm, waiting for 17 or 13 years, respectively, to then come up all at once. While developing underground they suck the liquid of plant roots, apparently counting the seasonal pulsed of fluid flowing from those roots – when the plants have completed 13 or 17 cycles and the temperature has gotten warm enough (65º/18º) they know to emerge. During the long time underground they molt their shells 5 times – and not all at the same speed. But somehow towards the end of that interval the more developed nymphs wait and the lagging ones catch up, so the they are all ready for time x, ready to fly and populate the trees where they mate and lay eggs. No one knows how they pull that off.

Unlike locusts that devour crops, cicadas are good for our ecosystem. Their weight en masse in the trees helps to prune weak branches, they release tons of nutrients into the soil after death and they serve as an abundant food source for all kinds of predators, four-legged and winged varieties included. This despite the fact that the sheer number of bugs (as many as 1.5 million may crowd a single acre) has anyone of them at practically zero risk for being breakfast, lunch or dinner. Although interestingly – and here is one of the unanswered questions – bird populations that are normally predators of annual cicadas decline just at the point where the periodical cicadas emerge. In the years before and after these birds a back to their normal population density.

So why these prime numbers – 13, 17, – for the emergence? We do not know for sure. Some mathematicians have offered the following hypothesis:

Both 13 and 17 are prime numbers, meaning they’re divisible only by 1 and themselves. This means that emergences rarely overlap with predator population cycles that occur in shorter intervals. For example, if cicadas emerged every 10 years, they’d be susceptible to predators whose population boomed on a cycle of one, two, five or 10 years. If they came out every 12 years, they’d be a tasty snack for any predator on a cycle of one, two, three, four, six or 12 years. Thirteen years, though? Only one and 13. The same goes for a 17-year cycle.

Climate change might put and end to that, too. Scientist are seeing shorter emergence cycles on the horizon for cicadas, prompted by ever warmer temperature and speculated to come down to something like 9 years in the future – no longer a prime number. This implies far more exposure to predators, obviously.

Cicadas have one natural enemy that is not affected by time spans at all: a fungus named Massaspora which does an ugly job on them. Its spores colonize the backend of the bugs, disintegrating it while the cicadas are alive, while injecting the them with a compound similar to amphetamine that keeps them moving while dying. Thus they disseminate the spores across a larger area. For male cicadas it also has the weird effect that they start flicking their wings like females, attracting other males who then try to mate, getting immediately infected. Told you it would get creepy.

The short clip below is a marvel of time-lapse photography showing the life cycle of cicadas.

Photographs are of Maryland and Massachusetts birds, cardinals in particular, that will be in shorter supply this year.

And maybe not the best way to play: saxophone amidst the cicadas.

Here is a different musical take: “The most obsessive admirer of bugs was Bela Bartók. The Hungarian composer evoked the cicada in his 1926 piano suite Out of Doors, the fourth movement of which is called “The Night’s Music.” Here Bartók piles up tone clusters to create an eerie evocation of frogs, birds and cicadas that are audible right from the very beginning.”

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Masking Up

Something curious and creative today: a German artist’s work, created long before Covid-19 entered our lives, that is focussed on masks. I might have been particularly attracted to his digitally altered portraits because of my own work in a similar domain (I wrote about the mix here.) I believe though, that there should be general delight in his compositions, because they are witty, technically accomplished, and certainly exhibit fluent bending of art historical styles. They also make you think about – or they made me think about – the role that facial expressions play in deciding whether a portrait is outstanding or middling at best.

Just for the fun of it, I have superimposed Hermes’ digital portrait onto parts of my contemporary photographic portrait. An urge to play!

Volker Hermes, born in 1972, as it turns out just a few kilometers from my childhood village, decided to reinterpret classical portraits from the historical archives by obscuring the faces, sometimes partially, sometimes beyond recognition. He uses what he finds in the portraits themselves, parts of the jewelry, accessories, hair, or clothing to create the mask. It directs our attention first to the now invisible face, and subsequently, perhaps, to the remainder of the figure – symbolic aspects within the dress-up, gestures, background.

His series Hidden Portraits displays enormous range, as best seen in this link, that will give you an overview. Do check it out, one portrait is more inventive than the next.

Good portraiture depends on both, capturing a likeness, however fleeting, and also an essence that reveals more than a mirror. Neither is available to the viewer if the face is obscured, leaving us with nothing but style and baubles, status symbols or flower code, ultimately nothing but a husk. Something that might or might not have been great art, depending on what the face accomplished for the viewer, is reduced to costume design, with the stroke of imagination and photoshop. Well done.

In real life we have probably all grappled with the problems that arise when faces are partially obscured. A person’s face readily exposes their identity, gender, emotion, age, and race, all of which are harder to discern when the face is covered by a mask. Not only are we worse at recognizing faces; the way we usually perceive them, holistically, is also disrupted, which leads to qualitative changes in person perception. It can interfere with social interactions, for sure.

Hey, you might say – and I’d join you in a second – at least masks game those intrusive facial recognition systems, which use algorithms that analyze our facial geometry – disrupted when mouth and nose are obscured.

I wish.

“…these types of errors are likely temporary, as companies that produce facial recognition technology are racing to update their algorithms to better adapt to face coverings. As Recode previously reported, firms were already touting their algorithms’ ability to account for masks as early as February, and Panasonic indicated it had cracked the mask problem even earlier. Since the pandemic started, a slew of facial recognition companies, including UK-based Facewatch, California-based Sensory, and the China-based firms Hanwang and SenseTime, have all begun to tout their ability to recognize people wearing masks.” (Ref.)

Well, masks do protect us from infection. Grateful for that. Although even that can backfire, wouldn’t you know it. The mask-induced, remarkable decline in active cases of the flu this year has scientists scratching their head. The dearth of data makes it difficult to predict what strains should be included in the vaccine preparation for next year, making them likely much less effective.

Looks like we might be wearing masks for years to come….. might as well embellish them in ways suggested by Volker Hermes.

Let’s have a rousing start into this week with Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.

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Plagues Be Gone

As we enter Passover I am fondly remembering the glee with which the kids recited the 10 plagues at the annual Seder table. That part of the service is accompanied by dipping your finger into red wine and, if you’re 8 years old, wildly flinging the drops across the table instead of gently letting them fall onto your plate. Washer women (well, people) of the world unite!

Remembering the plagues that befell the Egyptians who held the Israelites in slavery – water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and the killing of firstborn children – is an important part of Jewish tradition, mindful of suffering and existential threat across history, as well as the belief that G-d’s protection will eventually come through.

I was reminded of the plagues when I ran across new research that claims to affect the breeding and feeding behavior of disease-transmitting mosquitos, by blasting them with techno music. Apparently the dub beats interfere with wing beat synchronisation of the mating couples necessary for success. Wouldn’t that be a grand alternative to chemical eradication? The video in the link above shows the lab work, short and fascinating.

Do those plague narratives, faithfully handed down from generation to generation, have any grounding in fact? Archeological research offers some options.

  • The first suggests that the volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini in the south of Greece around 1620-1600 BCE sent ashes to Egypt. They included the mineral Cinnabar which would have turned the rivers red. The generated acidity would have made the frogs jump to their death. Insects buried larvae in dead bodies which increased the noxious insect population. Acid rain could have caused the boils on people, poisoning the grass and in turn the livestock, with hail increasing humidity that fostered locust breeding. Volcanic eruption would also account for the many days of darkness that we hear about.
  • The second theory suggests red algae as the causal culprit.

“Red algae could have sucked oxygen out of Egypt’s waterways, killed the fish and turned the water red. Just as in the volcano theory, frogs then leapt out looking for food, and died. Without frogs to eat the insects, the pests proliferated and feasted on corpses, a feeding frenzy for flies and locusts. The paper argued that the lice could have been a type of insect called culicoides, which can carry two diseases that could explain the livestock deaths: African horse sickness and Bluetongue. The boils on humans could have been caused by glanders, an airborne bacterial disease spread by flies or tainted meat.”

In this theory the darkness was coincidentally caused by a sandstorm. It would have left the crops moldy, which could have produced airborne toxins that might explain widespread childhood death.

  • The third claim concerns climate change. Research on stalagmites —elongated mineral deposits that form out of calcium in precipitation — suggested that there had been a dry period towards the end of the rule of Pharaoh Ramses II. That change would have dried up the Nile and significantly slowed down the flow of water, ideal conditions for red algae to develop.

The central religious message of punishment for the oppressors’ reluctance to abandon slavery does, of course, not care about scientific models. The core insight that people cling to their power, their advantage, their “traditional rights,” at the expense of those they harm, exploit, abandon is a universal one, true for us today as much as for those 3500 years ago. The desire to believe that the harm that befell the Egyptians was G-d given punishment is, in my view, our clinging to the ideal of a “just world.” I’m convinced it takes our own actions to ensure that justice is restored – and this year we might as well start by eliminating a source of enacted racism and reluctance to yield power: the Filibuster. 11th plague, be gone!

Music today is one of the most transcendental movements I know, written in Bartok’s last year of life while dying from leukemia. It has insects chirping in the middle, thus the connection, but it also radiates a kind of grounding that religious tradition can install.

Chag Sameach to all who celebrate Pesach, Happy Easter to others and Happy Spring to the rest!

Photographs are of butterflies rather than creepy crawlers. I assume you’ll thank me.

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Squirrels on Ice

Kissed by privilege. Not only do I live in a place surrounded by old-growth trees, but from my bed I look directly onto a balcony that has become a cafeteria for all kinds of creatures during the cold months. The crows visit, as do the thrush and the nuthatches, the juncos and the towhees, some sparrows and the occasional shy chickadee. And then there are the squirrels, scrambling up the side of the house.

We had put seeds and nuts out onto the railing before the snow hit. The squirrels lost no time to dig them all up and either eat them right there or abscond with them to refill empty caches. It brought nature as close to me as possible, a source of considerable joy and distraction. Photographing with my small digital camera – I am not allowed to lift or hold the large one until the incisions are healed – through the window yielded some fun images.

It also made me think about the double-edged sword of the fragmentation of boundaries between human and animal territory with our human incursions into nature’s spaces. On the one hand, you gain so much knowledge if you can observe and research animal behavior of populations close to you. On the other hand, we all know how pandemics are generated if territorial lines are crossed. I feel like Cassandra just mentioning the fact that 7 Russians were the first humans found to be infected with the H5N8 bird flu last week.

Let’s start the week on a more optimistic footing, though. Here are two amazing things about squirrels.

They have not only the capability to listen for and identify predators’ calls, like owls and hawks, predators that could become dangerous to them. They also eavesdrop on the general bird population around them. If other birds continue to chatter unperturbed, the squirrels relax.

“Eavesdropping on alarm calls or eavesdropping on chatter is a cheap and easy way to supplement the information they have access to. Because it’s free. It’s produced by other individuals in the environment. It’s publicly available to any organism that has the cognitive ability to recognize and interpret that information.”

Nifty, but nothing in comparison to what other squirrels’ brains have to offer in the fight against human disease, Alzheimers in particular. Recent research of the brain of arctic ground squirrels revealed some facts that no one ever anticipated.

These critters, at home in Siberia, Alaska and Canada, burrow about a meter under the tundra surface to hibernate for 7 months. During that process, their body temperature plummets, below the freezing point of water!, and their brains stop producing a lot of neural activity. Structurally their neurons shrink and the connections between neurons shrivel away. Think of it as if a tree crown sheds all of its twigs and branches, just leaving a few big limbs intact.

But here comes the amazing part.  When the squirrels wake up, they grow back, within only two hours, not just all the synapses lost during hibernation— their brain cells now boast many more links than those of an active squirrel in the spring or summertime. A day later, their brains prune many of these ties, probably recognizing them as superfluous, and so end up in exactly the state before they started hibernation. The details of this process can be found here. The implications for brain plasticity and potential application to brains that have lost a lot of their dendritic connections (dementias) are now explored by scientists around the world.

Maybe my own synapses start firing again, one of these days, emerging from this semi-hibernating interlude. And I will walk in nature again. Which reminds me of one of my favorite poems about walking while stewarding nature’s cycles or mythology, your pick. It was written by former Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. The story of Demeter and Persephone really focusses on the eternal cycle of sowing, growth, harvest, withering and dying back, questions as to the nature of human life and death, including the possibility of resurrection from Hades. A mother, Goddess of the harvest, Demeter, carries her tears with her grains, missing her abducted daughter. The pomegranate seeds, mentioned late in the poem, hold life but also the banishment to the underworld, if you remember Persephone’s fate. A temporary excursion into the realm of the dead, just like squirrels in hibernation….

Music by Stravinsky, I’m indulging in the incomparable German version with Fritz Wunderlich.

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Spinach to the Rescue

If you think my interests run eclectic, you might not be wrong. But why spinach? Let me count the reasons.

  1. Spinach belongs to the chenopodiaceae family, also known as goosefoot (the family includes beets, chards and quinoia.) I am currently saddled with a post-op drainage bag dangling from my ribs that my husband lovingly dubbed The Goose for the honking noises it makes every time I cough (which is about every two minutes; if we lived in ancient Rome where geese were used as guards, we’d be all set for invasion by the Gauls.) My fantasy is that if I consume enough spinach, that goose will acquire feet and waddle away sooner rather than later.

2. Spinach originated in Persia and spread to Europe in the 12th century, later circling the globe with a reputation for strengthening health (and muscles – alas, my brain is currently not muscular enough to come up with an appropriate Popeye the sailor joke.) That reputation is based on facts – among other things, spinach is rich in iron, important to replenish after you lost a lot of blood. Iron plays a central role in the function of red blood cells which help in transporting oxygen around the body, in energy production and DNA synthesis.

3. Spinach was recently in the news in the context of scientific advances explained in ways that caused serious eye rolling in yours truly. The study, by the way, is 5 years old, but caught someone’s attention some days ago and has ever since made the rounds in competition for clever titles: MIT scientists hack spinach plants to send email. Spam’s new frontier? Now even spinach can send emails. You get the idea.

The premise is clever: researchers engineered the roots of spinach plants to contain microscopic nanosensors that are capable of detecting nitroaromatics — chemicals that are often found in explosives and man-made industrial chemicals. Spinach absorbs and constantly recycles groundwater, being in a good position to detect changes in pollution or the presence of explosives devices. (Although, honestly, how could you prepare the ground to plant spinach if there is a danger of landmines, without exploding them? Hoping that they are buried deep?)

When the nanosensors detect those compounds, they can send a signal to an infrared camera, which can shoot out an email alert. So far so good.

Now comes the eye rolling part: “This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier,” said Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT and a co-author of the paper.

Spinach-human communication? That’s like saying my thermostat is talking to me when beeping that the room temperature falls above/below its setting. Signaling a measurement is not exactly opening a channel for conversation! Then again, the urge to talk to plants is nothing new…

Let’s consume, not converse with spinach. My humble suggestion.

Archival photographs are of fields where spinach could be planted…

Music is a 1947 recording that might or might not be about spinach, banned by the American Forces Radio Network, (AFN) Europe until 1975.

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