On this holiday, even a dog can read the writing on the wall. Buster Brown and his pooch, Tige—the first talking canine in American comics—were created by Richard Outcault, the same artist who drew the Yellow Kid, after whom yellow journalism was na… — On this holiday, even a dog can read the writing on the wall. Buster Brown and his pooch, Tige—the first talking canine in American comics—were created by Richard Outcault, the same artist who drew the Yellow Kid, after whom yellow journalism was named (see earlier post).

The Valentine Heart

February 11, 2011

She placed the stethoscope on my chest and listened for my Valentine. Thump-thump! Thump-thump! Yes, it was still working. No loss of enthusiasm after more than 50 years of 24/7 duty, pumping 80 gallons an hour and pounding out more than 80,000 beats a day, 30 million beats a year, one-and-a-half billion beats since an obstetrician in Hartford, Conn., pulled the starter cord on my 10-ounce body engine shortly before the first Sputnik launch.

"Any more questions?" the doctor asked as the exam was ending. With the world's favorite love holiday coming up three days hence, I couldn't resist: "Um...I know this sounds odd...how much does a Valentine heart look like a real heart?"

The doctor laughed. "A human heart is more oblong," she said. "There is a slight indentation at the top where the left and right sides meet, but not like in the Valentine version. I do wonder where that came from."

The human heart, as you won't see it on a Hallmark card.

My thought exactly. It turns out there are a few theories. The one I'd like to believe is that the shape comes from the seed of an extinct plant called a silphium (or laserwort), a giant fennel that is said to have been used as a seasoning, a medicine and—here's the clincher—a combination birth-control pill and aphrodisiac in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and India.

The image of one of the silphium's heart-shaped seeds (or rather, the fruit that contained a seed) was even embedded in the coins in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene (in present-day Libya), near where the plants grew wild and in abundance. Cyrene's economy was built on exporting silphium. The heart's image as a love symbol was built on silphium's role in fueling a sort of ancient free-love era. I'm not clear on how the seeds were used for birth control, but the juice of the silphium was consumed by mouth and/or applied via wool to the, uh, female reproductive epicenter.

A coin from ancient Cyrene, bearing the seed of love and lovemaking.

Even though the seeds became worth their weight in silver, the plants vanished from the Earth in the first century A.D., a victim of overharvesting, overgrazing and the plant's stubborn resistance to being cultivated. According to Roman historian Pliny the Elder, the last plant was cut and sent to the emperor Nero as a "curiosity." Given Nero's reputation, I'm guessing he didn't just store it away in a curiosity cabinet.

Some people say it with diamonds, others with small candies that declare to the world, I (heart) LEDs (light emitting diodes).

Of course, the notion that the heart is the source of love and emotion has been disproven by science. Our brains actually run the show. But I (brain symbol) You seems a little, well cold-hearted. And who would go around describing himself—in a truly brain-felt confession, uttered with his brain on his sleeve—as brainbroken? Or, for that matter, taunt a guy whose girlfriend he'd just stolen by saying, "Hey, loser, eat your brain out!"

No, the heart symbol is with us to stay, and its history in literature, religion, bumper stickers and playing cards is worthy of a far deeper examination than I can provide in a short blog entry. But I will hold the silphium close to my heart as yet another example of how nature underlies so much of our language, symbols and beliefs.

The bleeding-heart produces some of the world's best natural Valentines.

Last Puzzler Answer:
The bottom of the Mariana Trench (the lowest spot on Earth) is 35,994 feet below the surface of the ocean. The peak of Mt. Everest (the highest spot) is 29,029 feet above sea level. So the trench wins this battle of extremes. Extra credit: The Mariana Trench is beneath the western Pacific Ocean, near Guam, so it is closer to Japan than it is to Chile or South Africa.

Today's Puzzler:
What famous natural landmark in North America is constantly moving backwards?

Birthdays:
Thomas Edison, the unstoppable Ohio-born, Michigan-raised inventor who's credited with developing the phonograph, the movie camera and the light bulb (among hundreds of other items), would have been 164 years old today. Edison's light bulb may be less impressive than his creation of the commercial power industry that delivers electricity to our homes. Not all of his ideas worked out: He was sure that Americans would want to live in molded-concrete houses and devoted much effort to pursuing that vision; he even became a cement baron whose company produced the world's first concrete highways and the concrete for the original Yankee Stadium. As noted by writer Bill Bryson, when Edison turned his attention to military matters, he "predicted that he soon would be able to induce mass comas in enemy troops through 'electrically charged atomizers.' He also concocted a plan to build giant electromagnets that would catch enemy bullets in flight and send them back the way they had come."

Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who established the theory of evolution through natural selection, would have been 202 years old tomorrow. All subsequent science—from fossil evidence to DNA research, the work of tens thousands of the top experts in multiple fields—has substantiated and/or expanded the observations he laid out in On the Origin of Species. Keep in mind that in science a "theory" is not a crackpot guess at how something might work but a reasoned hypothesis that has been tested through the scientific method over time and proven to be true.

Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist and dissident whose writings in the 1980s inspired the student pro-democracy movement and the Tiananmen Square protests, turns 75 tomorrow. Still a strong advocate of human rights and democracy—and astrophysics—he is now on the faculty at the University of Arizona.

We're not sure what did in this remarkable creature, who had become a regular visitor.

RIP, Barred Owl

February 8, 2011

Pamelia saw it first—a fluffy bundle lying still in the snow under a small spruce. "Craig, what is that?" she asked. The panic in her voice cut through me. "Is that our owl?"

Pamelia and I had been thrilled that a barred owl was living on the property. He would show up just before sunset. One of his roosts overlooked a shed in which field mice sometimes take up winter residence. Red and gray squirrels race up and down the surrounding trees. It was a fine place for an owl to hunt.

I did worry that the owl was perched out in the open. He seemed exposed, especially in an area patrolled by eagles and goshawks (one of which killed an American black duck here just over a week ago: http://naturalistsnote.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/final-hours-of-a-duck/). Owls generally aren't eager to reveal their presence. They often hunt at night, using their extraordinary hearing. The flat, round faces that give them their distinctive look also serve as satellite dishes, collecting sounds that pinpoint the location and movement of prey, even beneath the snow. But barred owls are something of an exception; they do come out in the daytime to hunt. They are bolder.

The owl hunting by the shed a few days earlier.

I made my way through knee-deep snow to get to the downed owl. He was indeed dead. One wing was propped on a branch. Part of his other wing was slightly covered with snow, suggesting he had died just before—or even during—the previous night's storm. I saw no blood or wounds. Pamelia wondered if he could have accidentally struck nearby power lines. Many millions of birds die every year from flying into buildings and other human-built structures. The storm would have made flying difficult. But Pamelia also remembered seeing the goshawk high in a tree near this very spot the previous day. He was probably responsible, we mused.

Owls are fraught with symbolism. Humans have long linked them not only with wisdom but also with sorcery and evil. The Romans, Aztecs, Mayans and others saw them as omens of death. Native American tribes have held a vast range of beliefs about owls, some seeing them as sources of protection, others viewing them as bearers of the souls of the dead, others linking them with special powers and fatal foreshadowing. Neither Pamelia nor I harbor superstitious beliefs about animals (or anything else), but she couldn't help being jarred by finding the owl on a day of great contemplation: her 50th birthday.

She pondered it all while under the tree with the owl yesterday. She found solace and wisdom in an account she'd read by naturalist writer Marie Winn of an owl being killed by another owl. While she walked back to the house with a feather in her hand destined for a painted memory study, trying to rid herself of the pit in her stomach, it came to her that, in her words, "this connection and recent layer of experience (along with having carried around a mortally wounded sea duck the week before as he took his final breaths) only further deepens and makes richer my own natural relationship with life—deep sadness or sparkling joy or mind-expanding contemplative solitude, participating and taking it all in. As I've long known, it's important to be wide awake during my fleeting and very puny existence. My life has emerged, just like the owl's, on a tiny planet in an infinite and fascinating universe. I get only one chance at this moment to be me, with eyes wide open, before my atoms sink back into the Earth's biological and elemental soup, this vast living system where the owl and I both came from. This always comforts me. Locking eyes with that owl was a marvelous life experience. Finding him dead on my 50th birthday, two days later, well, deal with it, Pamelia, his atoms are moving on, it's life at its core, what a gift."

The New Horizons spacecraft, en route to Pluto.

Pluto Follow-Up: Thank you to Laurel Kornfeld for writing in on behalf of Pluto and its worthiness as a planet. "Only four percent of the IAU [International Astronomical Union] voted on the controversial demotion [of Pluto in 2006], and most are not planetary scientists," she wrote. "Their decision was immediately opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto." She adds that astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson "admits that the debate is not over, that it might be too early in the study of planetary scientists for anyone to be defining what a planet is in the first place." If you'd like to continue to follow the Pluto debate, check out Laurel's Pluto Blog: http://laurele.livejournal.com/

Super Bowl Follow-Up:
Our chemical analysis of the two starting Super Bowl quarterbacks in the last post predicted a 10-point Packers victory over the Steelers. Green Bay won by six. Aaron Rodgers lived up to his uniform number, 12, which matches the atomic number of the explosive element magnesium. Score one for the predictive power of science.

Answer to Last Puzzler:
From smallest the largest, the planets of our solar system go in this order (starting with Pluto, the smallest of all, if you include that): Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter. Here's a fun website that allows you to compare any two planets: http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/messenger/psc/PlanetSize.html

Today's Puzzler:
Which is greater: The height of the world's tallest mountain (Mount Everest) above sea level or the depth of the deepest spot in the ocean (the Mariana Trench) below sea level? Extra credit question: Is the Mariana Trench closer to Japan, Chile or South Africa?

Birthdays:

Jules Verne, the French writer who pioneered science fiction and sparked imaginations the world over with books like A Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days, would have been 183 years old today. At boarding school he is said to have been taught by inventor Brutus de Villeroi, who went on to design the U.S. Navy's first submarine and perhaps provided Verne with the inspiration for the Nautilus, Captain Nemo's submarine in the author's best-known work, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. That title, by the way, refers not to the depth to which the sub descended but the distance it traveled while undersea. The length of a league has varied from culture to culture (it was based on the distance a person or a horse could walk in an hour), but in France in Verne's day it was 4 kilometers, or about two-and-a-half miles. Twenty thousand of those would be 50,000 miles.

Thomas Selfridge, the San Francisco-born aircraft designer and dirigible pilot who became the first person ever killed in the crash of a powered airplane, would have been 129 today. Selfridge was a passenger in a double-winged plane piloted by Orville Wright at an Army base in Fort Myer, Va., on Sept. 17, 1908, when the aircraft—a Wright Flyer, the same type Orville and his brother Wilbur had flown historically at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903—developed a series of problems that started when a propeller broke. The plane nosedived from 75 feet. Orville Wright suffered major injuries that kept him hospitalized for seven weeks. Selfridge died from a broken skull. He remains a reminder of the cost of scientific exploration.

Chester Carlson, the Seattle-born physicist and inventor of the process we call Xeroxing, would have been 105 today. Forced at age eight to start working to support his illness-wracked family, Carlson nevertheless continued his education, fascinated by science and the idea of inventing things. He seemed destined to become the pioneer of copying: He loved typewriters, his favorite toy was a rubber-stamp set, and his work at a patent office taught him the drudgery of making multiple copies of documents using carbon paper. His work ethic (he even put himself through law school) kept him going even when there was little early interest in his "electrophotography" copying process. After he hooked up with a corporate partner, that process was renamed xerography (combining the Greek words for dry and writing) and the first commercial photocopying machine, introduced in 1949, was called the XeroX.

Apologies, Bill Murray, if this tale sounds familiar to you and your weather-forecasting woodchuck.

Groundhog Fever, Pluto, and the Hidden Chemistry of the Super Bowl

February 4, 2011

Welcome to Déjà Vu Theater. In belated honor of Groundhog Day, and to recognize the birth, 105 years ago today, of Clyde William Tombaugh—the U.S. astronomer who discovered Pluto—we're going to start off this episode by re-running a post that a few of you (but probably only a few) have read before. I wrote it one year ago, after attending a talk in New York by my favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the topic of Pluto and its demotion from full-fledged planet to dwarf planet. Here we go, back in time...

Tyson was a knockout in telling the crazy story of Pluto's demotion.

We at The Naturalist’s Notebook love outer space—the beauty, the mysteries, the vastness. Scientists estimate the number of stars in the universe as one sextillion, or 10 to the 21st power. “That’s a thousand times more than all the words ever uttered by everyone who has ever lived,” said astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson the other night when I listened to him give a talk at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York.

Think of it another way some clear night when you’re gazing up and pondering: One sextillion letters, typed without spaces and each representing a different star, would fill two thousand trillion issues of the magazine I work for, Sports Illustrated, with nothing but text. And if you stacked up all those issues, the pile would extend 1.6 billion miles into the sky—more than halfway to Pluto (when it’s closest to the Earth).

Pause to absorb that.

Pluto, the endearing chunk of rock and ice that has long been a symbol of distant isolation, isn’t really that far away compared to the stars. At The Naturalist’s Notebook last year we discussed how long, at the speed of an airliner traveling 24 hours a day, it would take to reach celestial bodies. To get to Pluto you’d be buckled into that airplane seat for 685 years. Not bad, when you consider that to reach the nearest star (other than our Sun), you’d be riding the plane for almost 4.6 million years.

Pause to absorb that. And I don’t mean the question of where your luggage would end up.

In any case, what drew me to the Barnes & Noble was not Pluto’s weak gravity but deGrasse Tyson’s irresistible pull. The host of NOVA’s “Origins” series on PBS is an engaging, insightful and frequently hilarious speaker who makes science more understandable to the average person—one of our hopes for The Naturalist’s Notebook, as you know if you’ve stepped inside our quirky coastal Maine shop and exploratorium.

DeGrasse Tyson was at B&N to talk about his book The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, now available in paperback. His recounting of the global uproar he helped create by contributing to Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet in August 2006 was a brilliant off-the-cuff riff on everything from the flood of angry mail he received (“Some people like Pluto,” wrote a young girl. “If it doesn’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive”) to the Disney-prompted romanticizing of what had been the ninth planet (“I think if we’d demoted Neptune, no one would have cared,” said deGrasse Tyson) to the time he posed for a photo with Bill Nye the Science Guy and White Stripes guitarist Jack White (“a big fan of the universe, by the way”) to the mind-boggling accomplishments of his favorite scientist, Sir Isaac Newton (“who did not invent the Fig Newton—that name comes from Newton, Mass.”).

In a future posting I’ll go into some of the other topics deGrasse Tyson addressed, but in the meantime I’ll just recommend that you buy a copy of his book (from The Naturalist’s Notebook, if you wait until we reopen for the season) and leave you with the response he gave when he was asked if he believed there was life on other planets:

“Science is not a belief system,” deGrasse Tyson said. “People ask me if I believe in the Big Bang Theory. I say, That’s what all the data tell us. You can choose to ignore all the data and believe something else, but that’s not science. That’s something else. Like politics.”

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Pluto Update: Despite its demotion, the ex-planet is still of scientific interest. A NASA probe called New Horizons is en route to Pluto right now. It was launched in 2006 and will arrive in 2015 after a 3 billion mile voyage.
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Super Bowl Chemistry

Aaron Rodgers wears the atomic number of magnesium, an element as explosive as the Packers offense.

The big game is Sunday: Packers vs. Steelers. You've heard and read everything you wish to about the teams and players—except this: the chemical breakdown of the quarterbacks.

We're talking elements: No. 12 on the periodic table, magnesium, represented by Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who wears No. 12 on his jersey, against No. 7, nitrogen, embodied by Pittsburgh QB Ben Roethlisberger, who dons that digit.

Who has the edge?

Magnesium is a strong, light, structural metal that is flammable and highly explosive—all of which makes Aaron Rodgers and the Packers sound tough to beat. On the other hand, nitrogen, like the Steelers defense, is everywhere. It makes up 78 percent of the air you breathe and, in the soil, is a crucial nutrient for plants. Talk about a great cold-weather player: Nitrogen has a boiling point of minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit and is used to preserve biological samples.

A Ben Roethlisberger—er, nitrogen—molecule.

Of course, the Super Bowl will be played in an climate-controlled stadium in Dallas, so cold won't be a factor. Magnesium has more protons (12) and electrons (12) than does nitrogen (7 of each), suggesting a possible 24-14 Green Bay victory. Magnesium and nitrogen can chemically combine to form magnesium nitride, a greenish yellow power. The Packers' colors are green and yellow. Hmmm...the elements do seem to suggest that Aaron (Magnesium) Rodgers and his team will defeat Ben (Nitrogen) Roethlisberger and the Steelers come Sunday night. But unlike chemistry, football is unpredictable. No one ever got rich betting on the Super Bowl based on atomic numbers.

Answer to Last Puzzler:
If you went back 12 generations, with you counting as generation 1, your parents counting as generation 2, your grandparents counting as generation 3, and so on, that 12th generation would be made up of 2,048 direct ancestors of yours. (Just keep doubling the number for each generation to get the answer.) Each of those ancestors, who would have lived in the early 1600s, during the final years of Shakespeare's life, contributed to your DNA makeup.

Today's Puzzler:
Rank our solar system's planets by size, from smallest to largest. Here are the planets, listed alphabetically: Earth, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus, Venus The answer will be in our next post.

Birthdays:

Elizabeth Blackwell, the English-born doctor and women's rights leader who was first female physician in the United States, would have been 190 years old yesterday. Blackwell's eight siblings all died while she was growing up, as did her father after he moved the family to the U.S. Despite discrimination by classmates and teachers, she graduated from Geneva Medical College in New York, becoming the first woman ever to complete med school. She later founded Women's Medical College in England with Florence Nightingale and was commemorated on a 1974 U.S. postage stamp.

Ludwig Prandtl, the German scientist who's been called the father of modern aerodynamics, would have turned 136 today. Prandtl worked on mathematical theories of lift and drag and devised the underpinnings of supersonic wind tunnels. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor, but don't try to look for it with your telescope. The far side of the Moon never faces the Earth.

Look! I've discovered homo Frosty-cus! Where archaeology meets the Weather Channel, you get...a postcard by Czech cartoonist Miroslav Bartak. I have a small collection of them because I enjoy his Gary Larson sensibility. Bartak, now in his 70s, is a… — Look! I've discovered homo Frosty-cus! Where archaeology meets the Weather Channel, you get...a postcard by Czech cartoonist Miroslav Bartak. I have a small collection of them because I enjoy his Gary Larson sensibility. Bartak, now in his 70s, is a former seaman who decided to go ashore at age 30 and follow a childhood passion that his less artistically minded parents hadn't let him pursue. Good move.

Snow Joking Around

February 2, 2011

On this day of the Monster Storm, the Beast, the Big One—whatever the forecasters are calling this ice-and-snow-palooza in your part of the country—it's worth noting that we homo sapiens have survived worse. A lot worse.

Last year, through DNA testing done as part of the National Geographic Genographic project on human migration (https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html), I discovered that I had ancestors who lived through the most recent Ice Age. Well, of course I did. You did, too. That's why we're alive today. Our ancestors from roughly 20,000 years ago were strong, smart or lucky enough to have survived through many thousands of years of severe cold in a world in which much North America and Europe was covered with ice up to a mile thick.

I admit, this does make for a potential Geico ad: Surviving the Ice Age? So easy a cave man can do it!

Frozen in time? I would ask this guy what the Ice Age was like, but humans hadn't developed modern language skills back then.

In truth, throughout the 3.8 billion years of life on Earth and the 200,000-plus years of modern humans, surviving has never been easy. As Bill Bryson writes in his delightful A Short History of Nearly Everything, describing how unlikely it is that any one of us is alive today: "Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you."

My ancestors, according to the DNA research, had long since migrated out of East Africa, through the Middle East, and were already in Europe when the latest Ice Ace started. They moved down to the warmest place they could find—the current location of Spain or Portugal—to ride it out. It's wild to imagine what their daily existence was like. If I were a history teacher, I would try to bring the past alive by reminding students that their ancestors lived through not just Ice Ages but also the times of the ancient Greeks, Napoleon, the Civil War...everything, going back way, way, way farther than those examples.

In any case, it's just something to think about on a snowy day. Whether you're shoveling, ice-scraping, removing your car from a snow bank or enduring a power outage, right now you're still one of the 6.9 billion luckiest people on Earth.
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Speaking of Humorist Gary Larson...
Today's also a good day to recall Larson's Far Side cartoon of a really tiny old man and woman sitting in front of their house—while inside a snow globe. A giant human hand is moving toward the globe and the caption reads, "Dang, Ma, blizzard's a comin.'"

Another Cold Thought
Today would have been the 114th birthday of ice cream impresario Howard Johnson, the grade-school-educated Massachusetts native who invented the chain restaurant and ate a cone every day until he expired at age 75.

This barred owl has been hanging out near our house for the last two days, probably hunting for small squirrels, mice and mourning doves. This type is also known as an eight-hoot owl, or just the hoot owl. The name barred owl comes from the horizont… — This barred owl has been hanging out near our house for the last two days, probably hunting for small squirrels, mice and mourning doves. This type is also known as an eight-hoot owl, or just the hoot owl. The name barred owl comes from the horizontal bars under his bill, which you can't see in this photo but which help in identifying him. So do his eyes: His are brown rather than the yellow found in most owl species.

Bald Eagle Call:
We've noticed that birds of prey that live near us seem to take advantage of inclement weather. I don't know if it's because falling snow makes them harder to see as they approach, but our bald eagles and hawks have been going after waterfowl and smaller birds with an increased aggressiveness. Yesterday we listened to multiple eagles "talking" for much of the afternoon. Click on this link to hear exactly what we heard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlq2kcYQcLc

The Puzzler Answer
(from last post): What fruit has its seeds on the outside? The strawberry. Now, let me clarify this and confuse you at the same time. In scientific terms, if I understand my own research correctly (and I know a few of you who will straighten me out if I don't), the red, fleshy part of the strawberry—what we call the fruit—is more properly called the "recepticle." What we call the seeds are, in fact, the fruit; they consist of seeds encased by ovaries, the defined structure for fruits of flowering plants.

This much I'm sure of: Don't try to serve a guest a shortcake made of strawberry ovaries.

Today's Puzzler: Here's a challenging one. You're tracing your ancestry. As you work back in time, filling out a family tree, you find that each generation has twice as many of your direct ancestors as the generation before it: Your parents (2 direct ancestors) both had parents (total of 4 direct ancestors) who all had parents (total of 8 direct ancestors) and so on. Let's say that your family has produced three generations per century. How many direct ancestors did you have 12 generations ago, around the year 1600? (Count yourself as generation 1, your parents as generation 2, your grandparents as generation 3, and so on. The answer will be in the next post.)

Birthdays

Thomas Cole, the English-born American founder of the Hudson River School art movement and one of the painters who made Mount Desert Island famous, would have been 110 years old yesterday. The gorgeous, rugged landscapes painted by Cole and other artists from New York in the early 1800s made people aware of MDI and turned the area into a magnet for vacationers. It's not outlandish to suggest that without Thomas Cole, The Naturalist's Notebook might not exist today—at least not in Seal Harbor, Maine.

Thomas Cole's oil painting called View Across Frenchman's Bay From Mt. Desert Island After a Squall, from 1845

Charlotte Auerbach, the German-born scientist who discovered that chemicals can cause genetic mutations, would have been 112 today. A victim of anti-Semitism, she fled Nazi Germany for England and ended up inventing the science of mutagenesis, which studies how a living organism's genetic information can be changed. Given the above discussion of fruit, it's worth noting that she did her most groundbreaking research on fruit flies and how they were affected by mustard gas (which, as botanists could tell you, has nothing to do with the mustard plant; the toxic warfare agent, a manmade sulfur compound, just happens to have an odor that resembles that of mustard).

Francois-Alphonse Forel, the Swiss scientist who devoted much of his life to studying lakes and is considered the father of limnology—the study of inland waters—would have been 170 today. Limnology (limn comes from an Old English word meaning to illuminate) is now an important and illuminating branch of environmental science.

Enjoy the storm. Here in Maine, just before 11 a.m., we've already gotten more than six inches of fresh snow, with more dumping down and a total of up to 16 inches predicted.

Of Mice and Moon

January 31, 2011

Would you ever pick up a mouse? You would if it were a Douglas Engelbart mouse.

Engelbart grew up in a small town in Oregon as the son of a radio-shop owner. In World War II he joined the Navy and became a radar technician. While sitting in a hut on stilts in the Philippines in 1945 taking a break, he read an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine that changed his life and led to an entirely new type of rodent. The article, "As We May Think," was written by Vannevar Bush, a scientist who had helped oversee the development of the atomic bomb and soon would be one of the advisors urging Harry Truman to drop it on Japan to shorten the war.

Ironically, Bush was concerned that science was increasingly being used for destructive purposes and that important knowledge wasn't being disseminated. He envisioned a collective-memory machine that would use microfilm reels to make the world's collected information more accessible to people. He in effect anticipated personal computers and the Internet.

Engelbart became fascinated by the idea of collective intelligence and globally shared knowledge. He became involved in the development of computers and turned out to be a visionary in that field. He invented hypertext, the links you click on to jump to a different page on the Internet. He also got a patent in 1970 for what he called "an X-Y position indicator for a display system." That is, the computer mouse.

It was made of wood, with metal wheels. Engelbart, who turned 86 yesterday, has said that the device became known as a mouse "because the tail came out the end." He never made much money from it; not realizing its value, his research group at Stanford licensed it to Apple for a pittance.

Interesting Mouse Notes:
Mouse comes from a Sanskrit word that means thief. A male mouse is called a buck, a female is a doe and a baby is a pinky (or a kitten). Unlike humans, mice can produce their own vitamin C, and thus came to North America on ships without developing scurvy, as many of the C-deprived sailors did. And if you're trying to find where mice have been, try a black light bulb; mouse urine is fluorescent; if will glow in black light.

How to Read the Moon Like a Book (Even in Arabic)
Pause to look at the southeastern horizon before sunrise tomorrow. You'll see Venus, currently 100 times brighter than any other object in the pre-dawn sky (other than the moon). Our neighboring planet is now higher in the sky than it has been at any point in the last three years.

Terrible picture (for some reason my camera fares poorly when shooting through a double-paned window in nearly pitch-black conditions), but this is what the moon and Venus looked like before dawn this morning. Can you tell whether the moon is in a p… — Terrible picture (for some reason my camera fares poorly when shooting through a double-paned window in nearly pitch-black conditions), but this is what the moon and Venus looked like before dawn this morning. Can you tell whether the moon is in a phase of waxing (getting bigger each night) or waning (getting smaller)? Read on.

This morning Venus was above and to the right of a crescent moon that looked like a C tilted slightly to the left. Here's a photo.

When many of us see this star-and-crescent configuration, we can't help but think of the Moslem world. Because the astronomical image was used on the flag of the Ottoman Empire, it became an unofficial symbol of Islam. Some variation of it appears on a dozen national flags, including those of Tunisia, Turkey, Pakistan and Algeria. When Tunisian Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi returned to his government-toppling country yesterday after a 20-year exile, he posed at the airport with the star-and-crescent flag.

The flag of Tunisia is one of many bearing the star and crescent.

But I'll bet that—like most non-astronomers—Ghannouchi doesn't know whether the moon is coming or going. That is, whether it is waxing (getting bigger each night) or waning (getting smaller). A trick for figuring it out comes from Central Park in the Dark,, one of several terrific books by the superb naturalist writer Marie Winn (http://mariewinnnaturenews.blogspot.com/). She recalls her father telling her to focus on whether the moon's curve looks like a C or like the curved side of a D. If it looks like a C (as it does in the star and crescent above), then the moon is getting smaller. If it looks like the curve on a D (as it does in the Dreamworks animation logo of a boy fishing while sitting on the moon), then the moon is getting bigger.

Marie's erudite dad threw in some Latin words to help her remember the C from the D, but I'm really simplifying for the Latin-impaired.

Here's another way to think about it. Start with a totally dark moon. Watching night after night, you will see that light creeps across the moon's face from right to left. The first sliver that appears is the Dreamworks logo—on the right, shaped like the curve on a D, as in Dreamworks, the Steven Spielberg company that always gets bigger, just as the moon is getting bigger when it's shaped like this. When the moon is down to its final, shrinking sliver, it's on the left side and is shaped like a C—hey, moon, C ya! You'll be invisible tomorrow!

For what it's worth, right to left is the same direction a person reads Arabic, the language of Tunisia and many other countries with the star and crescent on their flags.
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The Quiz Answer
(from last post) What do you call those gatherings of animals? A herd of elephants A mob of kangaroos A squabble of seagulls A convocation of eagles A school (or pod) of whales

Today's Puzzler
What is the only fruit with its seeds on the outside? (Answer in the next blog post.)

Dinosaur Joke Contributed by a Naturalist's Notebook Correspondent: Q: Why can't you hear a pterodactyl going to the bathroom? A: Because the P is silent.

Birthdays

James Watt, the famously anti-environmental Secretary of the Interior during the early years of the Reagan administration, turns 73 years old today. Watt, a political appointee with no scientific background, believed that the government shouldn't stop private companies from developing public lands. He set a record for the fewest endangered species protected and summed up his environmental approach thusly: "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber." Constantly embroiled in controversy (he even tried to ban Independence Day rock concerts on the mall in Washington, D.C., because he felt that groups such as the Beach Boys and the Grass Roots promoted drug use, alcoholism and crime), he became a lobbyist after leaving office and was eventually indicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in an influence-peddling scandal. (He took a plea deal of a fine, five years' probation and public service.) As recently as 1991 he told a cattleman's group in his native Wyoming, "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used."

Twelve days ago we missed the 275th birthday ofa more accomplished James Watt, the Scottish inventor and engineer for whom the unit of power called the watt is named. This Watt vastly improved the steam engine, turning it into the force that powered the Industrial Revolution. He also came up with the concept of horsepower, which compared the output of a steam engine with the might of draft horses. As you'll recall from a blog post of about 10 days ago, Andre-Marie Ampere, for whom the measure of electrical current called the amp is named, was also born in January, 39 years after Watt. To calculate watts, you multiply amps by volts, which are named after Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, a contemporary of Watt's and Ampere's who invented the first chemical battery.

Wednesday's sunrise over Mount Desert Island.

Yellow Journalism? A Look at the Color of the Sun, the Super Bowl and Nat Geo

January 29, 2011

Yellow catches the eye. That's why it's the color of taxis, school buses, road signs, road lines, McDonald's arches, NFL penalty flags, blinking caution lights, Cheerios boxes and the trademarked border of National Geographic. It's also a color of deception, happiness, jaundice and—this year, for the first time ever—both teams in the Super Bowl.

It has roots in nature and epic poetry. Yellow was first mentioned in English a thousand years ago in Beowulf, to refer to a shield made of yellow linden wood—what we would call basswood. From that heroic start, it tumbled into the realm of flawed mortals. It became a synonym for cowards; in the Middle Ages the French painted the doors of traitors' houses yellow. Slanted, sensationalized journalism became known as yellow journalism, a term coined in the late 1890s to describe the circulation-boosting tactics of two rival New York newspapers, both of which ran a comic strip featuring a popular character called the Yellow Kid. "Yellow Kid Journalism" dropped the "Kid" and left us with a term that still applies to certain news outlets today.

Yellow is relatively rare in the sports world, but the Pittsburgh Steelers use it (in combination with black) and so do the Green Bay Packers (in combination with green). The Packers actually wore navy blue and gold (the colors of team founder Curly Lambeau's alma mater, Notre Dame) before switching to green and "taxicab gold"—i.e., yellow—around 1950. Good call: Yellow is a nice aged-cheddar hue for fans who call themselves Cheeseheads.

The Steelers have occasionally used this yellow helmet instead of their usual black one; of the three stars of color in the logo, yellow represents coal, orange represents iron ore and blue represents steel scrap.

Yellows in nature can trick the eye. The sun, seen from space, is a bright white star. We see it as yellow for the same reason we see the sky as blue: Our atmosphere scatters the blue component of sunlight. We're left with light that's more yellow, from the middle of spectrum. (Traditional light bulbs also give light from this yellow range.)

What about yellow objects like bananas, egg yolks and autumn leaves? I learned about this a few years ago when writing a magazine travel article about fall foliage (http://www.viamagazine.com/destinations/ports-fall). The yellow comes from a natural pigment called xanthophyll. It is not as strong a color pigment as green chlorophyll. When green bananas or green birch leaves turn yellow, what's happening is that—as part of the process of ripening, or of seasonal change—the chlorophyll is breaking down and disappearing, allowing the yellow color to show through.

Fall maple leaves along Ocean Drive in Acadia National Park

All of which brings us back to a yellow we immediately associate with nature: The border that rims the cover of National Geographic. Exactly 123 years ago this week, a group of 33 men from various professions—all of them interested in expanding our scientific and geographical knowledge—met in Washington, D.C., and founded the National Geographic Society. No organization has done more to promote scientific exploration, nature photography and public awareness of the natural world. Far from yellow journalism, the work displayed in the society's magazine made Nat Geo (as it now likes to call itself) a pioneer in photojournalism and has earned it more than 20 National Magazine Awards. The yellow cover border is now so familiar that it can stand alone as a logo.

One of the many fascinating details in the history of the National Geographic Society is the role of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Bell, his father-in-law and his son-in-law were all presidents of the society. The son-in-law, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, edited National Geographic for 55 years, and his son and grandson later held that position. Bell himself wrote for the magazine, but under a pen name: H.A. Largelamb, an anagram of A. Graham Bell.

I'd love to hear from any of you who has a favorite image of yellow—in nature, painting, literature, your kitchen cupboard, whatever. I'd also like to hear whether any of you can come up with as good a pen name as Bell by rearranging the letters in your own name. I shuffled mine around and transformed Craig Neff into C.F. Finrage (potentially useful when writing caustic H.L. Mencken pieces), A.C. Fernfig (perfect for authoring botanical treatises) and Nic Gaffer (for my gritty crime novels).

Math becomes a challenge when rearranging Pamelia Markwood into a pseudonym. The number of possible combinations when you're working with 15 letters is more than 1.3 trillion. (You figure that out by multiplying 15 times 14 times 13...etc. all the way down to one—a calculation that mathematicians would call 15 factorial.) Nevertheless, Pamelia could go by A. Wormkip Alamode, Mama Pie Workload, Mope Walk Diorama, Dr. Koala Ammowipe, O. Pami Meadowlark or Pia Makemaw Drool.

If you want to cheat a little in rearranging your name letters, go to a website that will do it for you: http://freespace.virgin.net/martin.mamo/fanagram.html And for what it's worth, if your name were Yellow, you could go by the anagram Lye Owl.

Today's Quiz Match the animals on the right with the collective noun used for a group of those animals (such a flock of geese or a herd of cattle). The answer will be in the next post.

1) Herd..................a) Mudhens
2) Mob...................b) Eagles
3) Convocation.......c) Seagulls
4) Fleet...................d) Kangaroos
5) Squabble............e) Elephants

This is a coot—or mudhen—we saw at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge in California on our fall bird adventure. What would you call a whole bunch of them?

Birthdays

Lawrence Hargrave, the English-born aviation pioneer and inventor of the box kite, would have been 161 years old today. Fascinated by the flight of birds, he vowed to "follow in the footsteps of nature." He did most of his work in Australia, at a windy site now known for its hang gliding. He wrote frequent letters to the press endorsing Darwin's theory of evolution, and emphatically opposed the use of aircraft for war.

Lawrence Hargrave commemorated on Australia's $20 bill

Allen DuMont, the American scientist and inventor who not only improved the cathode-ray tube to make it practical for use as a television screen but also sold the first commercially viable TVs, created the first television network and provided the first funding for educational broadcasting, would have been 110 today. Having developed science interest as a boy by reading extensively while bedridden with polio, he started a research lab in his garage with $1,000, half of it borrowed, and eventually became known as the father of commercial television.

Ludolph van Ceulen, the German/Dutch mathematician who spent most of his life calculating the value of pi, would have been 461 years old yesterday. A true man of numbers, he had his tombstone engraved with a 35-digit approximation of pi, the constant (roughly 3.14) that tells us the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

Giovanni Borelli, the Italian mathematician and physicist who was father of biomechanics (the study of how the theories of physics and mechanics apply to the body), would have been a spry 403 yesterday. He was the first to declare that muscles only contract. Some of his scientific discoveries did not entirely please religious leaders of the time, but he was protected from the Inquisition through his friendship with a former Swedish queen.

Happy Spring Note?
The Naturalist's Notebook's Nova Scotia correspondent reports that this week she saw geese flying north.

News, Notes and Photos from the Field (Craig and Pamelia's Blog)

Craig & Pamelia's Past Posts

Darwin's Past Posts