Helen FieldsScience Writer

Plants are amazing. I said this to a friend yesterday and he corrected me: “Everything is amazing.” Which is true. Kidneys? Amazing. Meteorites? Amazing. DNA? Amazing.

But, for now, let’s talk about plants. They’re amazing. They can communicate by releasing chemicals. Messages like, “Come eat the tasty caterpillars!”

For ScienceNOW last week, I wrote about a study on tobacco plants that, when they’re being chomped by caterpillars, send out a chemical message that calls the caterpillars’ predators. Amazing, huh? Read about it here.

photo: Matthey Film

My coral reef is finished! I dropped it off at Now and Then, a store in Takoma Park, Md., that sells yarn (and lots of other neat stuff).

The only addition since my last update is the brown-black one at top left – that’s the tape from one audio cassette. It is not the easiest material in the world to crochet with. The finished product sure is neat, though!

A new study finds that bird lice have evolved cryptic coloration. (What you or I might call camouflage.) Read my tiny story about it here.

Sulfur-crested cockatoos are awesome. This is my favorite fact about a trip I took to Australia in 1996: instead of pigeons, the parks have flocks of sulfur-crested cockatoos. At least, the parks I remember. Ok, I actually have a lot of favorite facts about Australia, like the fact that the kangaroos in Carnarvon National Park were total pests and kept trying to steal food from the picnic tables. Also, we were on Heron Island during the time when the female sea turtles were coming on shore to lay their eggs and the babies from earlier nests were hatching out and swimming out to sea (where probably most of them became shark snacks).

Man. Australia was cool.

The National Building Museum is currently hosting an exhibit of Lego models of famous works of architecture. I haven’t been yet, because it costs $5, and I’m waiting for a time when I’m in the neighborhood with one of my parents – they’re members of the museum and can get in the exhibit for free. I swear when they first posted that exhibit, there was one day a month when it was free, but that information disappeared from the webpage long ago.

Anyway, I was cutting through the museum on the way to my bank the other day and saw this:

I didn’t look that closely – I just saw a big red box. It was only on the way back I realized it’s a Lego model of the museum itself!

The museum is in a beautiful building, which is used for inaugural balls and lots of other fancy events. It was built in the 1880s to house the U.S. Pension Bureau. It’s definitely worth a visit. The space itself is stunning, even more so because it’s tucked in a big square brick building, and they have exhibits about things you wouldn’t necessarily think were all that cool, like parking garages, or rest stops along Norwegian highways.

Here’s the inside:

Here’s what the actual inside of the museum looks like, for comparison:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Last week I reported on some strange rocks from South Australia that may preserve the oldest animal fossils. Or may not. Ok, nobody knows. But they look kind of like animals. Read about it here.

I like that the function of the journal article was basically to throw the idea out there, see if any other geologists come across anything interesting. There’s plenty of rock of the right age exposed on the planet; you just have to tell geologists to look for it, and other samples of these animals (or whatever they are) could turn up.

In the I know everybody category, the lead author’s name sounded vaguely familiar. Before I called him I looked at his website, and indeed – he went to Carleton College at roughly the same time as me. We have four friends in common on Facebook. Fifteen years ago, I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup. Today, his name just sounded vaguely familiar.

Back in April, I went on my first work travel in ages. A magazine sent me on a big, exotic trip to…West Virginia. Ok, it doesn’t sound so exotic, and it’s certainly not very far. But it was fascinating. I was in McDowell County, the southernmost part of the state. It’s a coal mining region – and there are a lot fewer jobs in coal mining than there used to be. In the 1950 census, the county had 98,000 people; in this census, they say they’ll be lucky to break 25,000. Two high schools were closing at the end of this spring to reopen in a new, consolidated school. (Read my story here.)

I had a wonderful couple of days in the town of Welch. People were very friendly. I realized after I came back that I’d managed to meet everyone who was running to represent the area in the state legislature. The Democratic primaries were coming up and there were yard signs all over town. One was the incumbent, so we stopped in to say hi at his office across from the beautiful old court house.

I met another of them when I had dinner with the Kiwanis Club. (I was like a visiting dignitary. I was hardly allowed to pay for any meals.) We ate at a drive-in, which also had indoor seating – not to worry.

I met the third candidate when I visited the high school, where he’s a teacher. The stop at Mount View High School was the reason I went to West Virginia. I was there to report on an after-school and summer program that’s designed to get high schoolers excited about careers in science and health. The program is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, whose magazine I was writing for.

Here’s the only motel in Welch, West Virginia.

That’s me with Cathy Morton-McSwain, my gracious host and chauffeur. She works for HSTA and drives all over the state visiting schools.

McDowell County really is beautiful. Spring was just arriving, the hillsides were green and lush, and everyone was so nice. I’d love to go back sometime. Here’s my story – enjoy!

This week Sarah Zielinski, a fellow science writer who writes this blog, is fact-checking a story of mine over at Smithsonian. To do this properly, she felt she had to go to the Library of Congress and look up a particular book of poems about geology. (This will make more sense when the story comes out.) She picked out some of the most cringe-inducing couplets and made a poll, so you can vote on the worst. Enjoy!

Robert Krulwich is one of my media heroes. He’s been working in radio forever, telling entertaining stories about topics that are difficult to explain. These days, he reports for the science desk at NPR and cohosts Radiolab, which is produced at WNYC in New York.

Two summers ago he gave a commencement address at Caltech about  how important it is for scientists to tell stories about their work. As an example of how to do it right, he used a story from Smithsonian. And it’s by me! He doesn’t name me, but he quotes extensively. (Yes, I do pick funny quotes, thank you for noticing.) You can listen to the whole speech here – he starts talking about my story at 19:45.

This was possibly even cooler than being anthologized.

My own personal Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef now has four pieces:

I’m pleased that I haven’t bought any new yarn for this. The caution tape is recycled, of course, and the bright orange and red acrylic yarns came from the great-aunt of a fellow science writer. They gave me the dark blue at the coral reef workshop, and the light edging on that piece came from the yarn stash of another fellow science writer. Good times!

A friend brought me a box of cassette tapes that she was about to throw out, so I may see what I can do with that next. When all this is done, I’ll drop it off at a local yarn store or take it to the museum, and it’ll all be on display starting in October! It’ll be fun to see if I can find my pieces on the community reef.

Read about the Smithsonian’s display of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef here.

The National Geographic Museum used to have a permanent collection. I remember going in high school, looking at the nifty globe and various exploration-related things. (Ok, I admit, my memory is pretty shaky on what was actually in it. But it was cool.) A while back they took all that stuff out and switched to only doing special exhibits. Right now, there’s a fabulous display of Joel Sartore’s photographs of rare animals around the outside of the building, but I really don’t think my pictures of someone else’ pictures would add up to a very good blog post. See some of them here or – hey, Joel is a good guy – buy the book.

Anyway. The other day I stopped in to see a traveling exhibit called “Da Vinci-The Genius.” It consisted mostly of models of devices Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks. He was a creative guy.

Like this one, the aerial screw:

The idea is that four guys would stand on the platform and push on the bars to make the screw turn and lift you through the air. (An actual one would have been much larger.) This is the thing that led to the stories that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter.

I think “invented” is a pretty strong term, considering this would never have worked and was also, as far as anyone knows, never built. “Dreamed up something helicopter-like” is more like it.

Here’s a diving suit he dreamed up:

And a tank – one of many, many military machines in his notebooks:

Yes, a real one would be a lot bigger – presumably there’d be guys inside, firing those guns that stick out in every direction. He also came up with that bridge in the background. The idea was that soldiers could put it together in the field; the logs are notched in such a way that it doesn’t need any nails or pegs or rope or anything. So they could build it with logs, cross a stream, and dismantle it again.

One of the irritating things about the exhibit was the absence of actual artifacts…and presence of fake artifacts. I’m not talking about the models, which are obviously modern, and the point of the show. But right near the entrance, they had glass cases with reproductions of a couple of his notebooks, only you’d have to read the entire text next to them to realize they were reproductions. Yes, logic suggests they would be reproductions, since an actual Leonardo notebook would require a major security force, but still. I thought it was a little tacky.

Then there were also reproductions of paintings. It’s fine that they didn’t have any – he didn’t do very many, and it’s hard to get hold of them. But the wall text tells you, “Leonardo’s original works are considered too priceless to move from their permanent locations.” Right. So, explain to me why I saw the Lady with an Ermine, which belongs in Krakow, in San Francisco in 2003? It’s fine not to have them, but don’t make up reasons.

Also, having seen the Lady with an Ermine in person – in San Francisco and then, five years later, in Krakow – the digital reproduction is so lame as to not really be worth displaying. The original practically glows. It’s stunning. That Leonardo knew how to handle paint. The digital version? Not so much. It’s just, you know, a flat copy of a painting.

So, I’d say the exhibit is worth dropping by if you’re in the neighborhood, because the models are neat, and you can play with some of them, but not worth a special trip to D.C. The exhibit is created by “Grande Exhibitions – Creators of museum quality traveling exhibitions.” Here’s their website for this exhibit.

I actually was much more excited about the exhibit across the hall, Design for the Other 90%. It’s about products designed to solve problems for poor people, mostly in the developing world. Like a cheap water pump that brings up clean water from the aquifer, or an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble shelter. One of my favorites was a water barrel shaped like a very wide tire, so you could put a rope through the center and roll it home instead of having to lug it. But the exhibit didn’t allow photography, and I am a rule-follower, so you’ll have to go see these things yourself. It’s put together by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.