Helen FieldsScience Writer

I’m writing a whole batch o’ quizzes for the Science Channel (it’s part of the Discovery empire, which is based just up the road in Silver Spring). Three more went up today! You can test your knowledge on:

Dinosaurs! This one is probably the funniest. And the one with the most questions about Jurassic Park.

Taste! I quoted a They Might Be Giants song in this quiz. An obscure They Might Be Giants song.

Bugs! A month or so ago I heard a talk about insect diversity. The guy said, “To a nearest approximation, all species on earth are insects.” I didn’t get to use that quote in the quiz, so I’m happy to be using it now. Bugs are awesome.

I just came across a charming story in Air & Space magazine. It’s by Don Piccard, an American balloon pilot and member of the Piccard dynasty of Swiss balloonists. He writes about this time in 1947 when he flew a Japanese balloon across a bit of Minnesota.  It was made from mulberry bark paper and had carried a bomb across the Pacific during the war. The Japanese sent 9,000 balloon bombs off in this direction, but they didn’t quite work out as planned.

In the summer of 1998, I spent a few weeks traveling around Turkey with my mom. It’s really easy traveling in Turkey – the intercity bus system is very reliable. Western Turkey is full of ancient Greek ruins, and my mom had planned our route to hit the maximum number. We went to Pergamon and Ephesus and even Troy – it’s not known as the most exciting ruin to visit, but we had to take this picture. (Caption: Helen in Troy. Get it? Get it?)

So it was pretty cool to learn more about the region from Deborah Carlson, a National Geographic grantee who does underwater archaeology. There were two things her parents made her do as a kid: take Latin and learn to scuba dive. And now she’s studying a huge ancient marble column in 150 feet of water, in a shipwreck off the west coast of Turkey.

The story is pretty darn interesting, if I do say so myself. Read it here. Check out that beautiful picture – archaeologists have to move big things underwater very, very gently. How do they do it? They inflate a balloon with air. So clever!

photo credit: my mom, 1998

On Friday I finally made it down to the National Gallery to see the Pompeii exhibit. I visited Pompeii in the summer of 1998, and it was really cool – lots of halfway-standing houses to run around in – but hardly any of the artifacts are at the site. So I was excited to actually see the stuff, and it’s lovely. Lots of marble portraits, some frescoes, a funny set of frolicking bronze animals.

It turns out the Romans were really into their fish. The exhibit had a little corner on seafood – a couple of frescoes and a reproduction of a mosaic with fish, octopus, and so on. But that stuff wasn’t just for eating. From the text on the wall:

Many proprietors of villas owned fishponds that provided a ready supply of oysters and other delicacies. Private fishponds were a status symbol that was pursued to absurd lengths. Cicero complained of senators who lavished more attention on their mullets than on affairs of state. Anecdotes tell of villa owners treating their fish as pets, adorning their favorites with jewels and gold rings and weeping over their deaths.

You have to love the Romans. They didn’t mess around. They were just straight up decadent. The exhibit closes March 22nd and will be at the L.A. County Museum of Art from May to October.

Photo credit: me, 1998.

Hey, another story! This one’s about a National Geographic grantee who’s studying a bunch of mongooses in a national park in Botswana who get the human version of tuberculosis. Which, it turns out, is really bad for mongooses.

When she found TB in mongooses a few years ago, it was the first time anyone had confirmed a human disease in free-ranging wildlife. This is one of those “firsts” where you have to pay attention to the adjectives. Domesticated animals and zoo animals are already known to get human diseases. (It’s still a big deal, though – made quite a splash in the epidemiology world a few years back.)

This story made me wonder about the plural of mongoose. My Webster’s New World Dictionary only gives one plural: mongooses. My Webster’s New Collegiate lists mongooses first, but also mongeese. And when the vet who actually did the research talks about them, she uses mongoose as the singular and plural. I settled on mongooses and the copy editors at National Geographic News seem to agree with me.

Hey, lookit – I wrote this. Things I know now that I did not know 38 hours ago:

1. Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. They were reptiles like dinosaurs, and they lived with the dinosaurs and went extinct with the dinosaurs, but they weren’t dinosaurs – they were pterosaurs.

2. I knew about birds having hollow bones, but it turns out they also have sacs filled with air that hang around outside the bones. Weird! Birds have a really nifty respiratory system, which, when I looked it up in my freshman biology textbook, did seem vaguely familiar – those air sacs help move a ton of air through the lungs so they can keep pumping enough oxygen to keep the muscles going during flight. Flight takes a LOT of muscle action. You try flapping your arms for an hour and see how you feel.

3. How to spell Rhamphorhynchus (a genus of pterosaur). Actually, apparently I did know this, because the guy said it, and I typed what it sounded like, and I’d guessed correctly. What can I say? I’m a born speller.

art credit: Mark Witton, 2009

On March 31st, I’m leaving for the adventure of a lifetime.

One Wednesday night in November, I got an e-mail about a freelance gig – someone was looking for a science writer to go along on a six-week research cruise aboard an icebreaker in the Bering Sea. Awww, shoot, I thought to myself. Why do I have to have a job so I can’t drop everything and go to the frozen North for six weeks? Twelve hours later, I found out I was getting laid off. I applied, photographer/scientist Chris Linder picked me, and on April 3rd, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy is pulling out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, with us on board.

The organizations involved are – well, there are a bunch. The Coast Guard operates the Healy. Chris has a grant from the NSF to document a series of expeditions like this one. He works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, so I’m going through WHOI (“WHO-ee”), too. There will be 41 scientists on the ship from 14 research institutions working on a dozen or so projects, plus 70 or 80 Coast Guard folks.

The overall question for the scientists on this cruise is how climate change is affecting the Bering Sea ecosystem. The Bering Sea is crazy productive – that’s where Deadliest Catch is, the Discovery Channel show about catching crab in bad weather. U.S. and Russian fishing vessels pull bazillions of tons of fish and crab out of this sea every year. But all that productivity depends on the ice and the currents behaving in a particular way at a particular time. If the climate changes, crabs and fish could move or disappear.

I’ll be spending the cruise poking around, watching people work, asking them what they’re doing, and sometimes helping out. Chris will be doing the same, but with a camera in his hands. Every night after dinner, we’ll sit down and pick eight pictures to go on the Polar Discovery site the next day, then I’ll write about them.

So, basically, I can’t wait. If getting laid off means I get to do stuff like this, well, I’m all in favor of getting laid off.

It’s always so satisfying to ask smart people stupid questions. I wrote a story recently about some archaeology along the west coast of Turkey, and the editor asked me some stuff I didn’t know. So tonight I called the researcher to ask some really basic, dumb questions. The kind of thing I felt kind of sheepish about not knowing.

Like: Who lived in western Turkey in the first century B.C.? I thought she’d say, “Greeks” (or whatever) and we’d move on. No, instead she gave this whole explanation of how Alexander the Great conquered the region, but then he died, so his generals carved up his empire into little kingdoms, so they were Greeks, but the people they’d conquered were Persians, but then the Romans started moving into the area, but people resented them, so then there was a big thing where a local king, who may or may not have identified as Persian, orchestrated the massacre of tens of thousands of Italians.

What I loved was that she kept saying she was totally shaky on the details – a seriously competent specialist who does cool work in this area and just doesn’t happen to have to explain the politics of first-century-B.C. Asia Minor in her daily life. One of those nice human scientist moments, and it made me feel less sheepish about not knowing the answer myself. She checked a book while we were on the phone and she had gotten all the major details right.

(In case you thought “Who lived in western Turkey in the first century B.C.?” was like “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” – Turkey wasn’t Turkey yet. The Turks came to Turkey from central Asia in the ninth century A.D.)

Here’s a follow-up to my Munch post:

I visited the Munch Museum on my February 2007 trip to Norway, and just didn’t feel like I could pass up a piece of Scream cake. (Norwegian lesson of the day: skrik = scream; kake = cake. You’re welcome.)

I blogged again! This one is about using synchrotrons to look at ancient things. A synchrotron is a really bright x-ray machine the size of a football field. If you point it at a bug in amber or an ancient scroll, it’s like x-raying the sample, except way stronger. (I mean, you are x-raying it. Your x-rays are just super bright.)

I went to the synchrotron press conference this morning expecting it to be mildly interesting and found out that, wow, they can do crazy stuff with these really bright x-rays. One guy had all these bug models that combined *two* crazy pieces of technology: the synchrotron, which zapped amber and made 3-d images, and a 3-D printer that turned the computer version into a plastic model that you can hold and scare people with. (The real bugs are teeny; the models are the size of your hand and off-white.)

Another person talked about a new project that’s just starting, on figuring out how to read scrolls without unrolling them. Turns out the x-ray technology isn’t the problem – it’s the insane quantities of computer power you need to put the image together.

Anyway, totally cool. Read all about it! (Oh, and for more about the Archimedes Palimpsest, that project has a great website.)