Helen FieldsScience Writer

No, don’t. Don’t eat more salt. But do read my latest work: a quick piece for National Geographic News about a study on salt and mood.

An editor at NG News forwarded me a press release about this research a few days ago. The scientist’s name was “Kim Johnson” but I saw on his website that his actual first name is Alan, so I asked him what he prefers in print. He says everyone calls him Kim but Alan is better because he gets the wrong pronoun all the time, and he’d already seen “she” a couple of times on stories based on that press release.

This reminded me of my favorite correction ever. When I was interning at the Monterey County Herald in 2002, I interviewed a guy named Kelly Sorenson. He’s the executive director of the Ventana Wildlife Society, which works with condors in Big Sur. He was one of several people I talked to for a story and I only referred to him once, so I never used a pronoun for him. Later that night a copy editor decided something else should be attributed to Sorenson, and added a “she said.” Hooooo boy was my editor mad.

The correction: “An article on page B1 Monday about lead poisoning in condors referred incorrectly to Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the Ventana Wilderness Society. He is a man.” I heard his coworkers cut it out and taped it to his door.

I’m trying to think of a title for this blog, because “Helen Fields, Science Writer” is really not a title so much as…my name. And job description. Any ideas? I was thinking, like, “Learning Stuff is Fun!” but that’s dumb. Similarly dumb: “I Like to Knit!” “Science is Awesome!” “Take My Quizzes!” “Give me Work…Please!” “Will Write For Food!”

What say you, my five or six readers? Any ideas?

“Hey, Helen!”

“Where in the World is Helen!” (The Washington Opera’s e-mail newsletter has a feature called “Where in the World is Placido Domingo” which you can even sing to the Carmen Sandiego tune. Love that.)

“Helen Fields is the Best Person I Know!” (Actually, this should be someone else’s blog.)

Huh. Apparently my title needs an exclamation point. (!)

Astronauts and polar bears? In one place?!?!? Well, no, two places: New quizzes!

Project Gemini. Did you know what NASA project came between Mercury and Apollo? Yeah, neither did I. I wasn’t born yet, you see. But now I want to take a field trip down to the Air & Space Museum to check out the capsule they’ve got on display.

Polar Science. Ah, this one was fun. I like the poles. You will do better on this quiz if you have seen Encounters at the End of the World, the Werner Herzog documentary about Antarctica. It’s a great movie, so you should see it even if you don’t organize your life around doing better on my quizzes.

For all my Science Channel quizzes click here.

I’ve heard from a couple of scientists on this Bering Sea trip that on last year’s cruise, there was a knitting group. Knitting! I love knitting! This leads to an important decision: What projects to take with me?

I knit really fast – one scarf is not going to entertain me for six weeks. I’m kind of on a wristwarmer kick right now, but I can make a pair of wristwarmers in two days. I could go through a lot of alpaca yarn in six weeks, and that stuff is not cheap. Anyway, I don’t know that anyone besides me actually wears wristwarmers.

Maybe this is the time to learn how to make socks. But I think knitting socks is kind of impractical, because then you end up with a sock that has to be treated with tender love, and I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of hard on socks. Also, I assume once I learn how to make them, they’ll go too fast, too.

Another option is lace. Lace knitting takes a lot of counting (knit two three four yarnover knit yarnover knit two three slipslipknit knittwotogether repeat), so it’s slow, but on the other hand, it requires concentration, which isn’t the best for sitting around watching shipboard movies.

And there’s my sweater. It’s a big project. But it requires a lot of things I don’t know how to do, which means frequent references to YouTube, and the ship isn’t going to have that kind of bandwidth. With all of these, I’m kind of worried that whatever I’m working on will get wet and/or greasy, but particularly with my precious sweater.

I could also just take all the yarn from an unraveled sweater and mess around with it. Or knit, unravel, and reknit the same yarn over and over and over.

Any ideas? (It’s also possible that my work will keep me too busy for knitting. That would be tragic.)

Part of my standard description of why people should care about the Bering Sea is: It has huge fisheries. You know the show Deadliest Catch, on Discovery? That’s in the Bering Sea.

So, *do* you know the show Deadliest Catch? I have to admit I’ve never seen it. I don’t have cable, and it didn’t occur to me until right now that it might be Netflixable, and I just put my Netflix account on hold yesterday, because – perhaps I mentioned – I’m going out of town for six weeks.

Deadliest Catch is a reality show about crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Fishing has one of the highest fatality rates of any occupation – lots of shoving stuff over the side of the boat, using winches and heavy nets, and working in horrible weather, plus you aren’t usually particularly close to medical facilities.

Actually, I think the first time I heard about the show was when my friend Kate wrote about the show in 2006 for The Daily Astorian – one of the ships’ captains lives near Astoria, Oregon, so she went to watch it at his house.

I hear it’s exciting. I should really watch it sometime. Here’s the show blog.

Hey! The pop culture blog at USA Today linked to my pi quiz! Woo!! Pi day is Saturday. Don’t forget to eat pie! And tell all your friends to take the quiz, of course. You haven’t lived until I’ve told you that you don’t know the formula for the volume of a sphere. (I had to look it up, personally. And my guess was way off.)

Here’s something a lot of people ask when they hear I’m going to the Bering Sea: “Do you get seasick?” My answer: “I’m going to find out.” Most of my boat experience is from studying abroad in Australia and New Zealand 13 years ago, but I’m not sure three nights on a scuba boat on the Great Barrier Reef is quite the same as six weeks in an icebreaker on the famously nasty waters of the Bering Sea.

I’ve been asking scientists when I talk to them, and most say they get seasick, but not on the Healy. It’s really big, which I gather can help. Also, most of the time we should be in the ice. Ice is a solid, so waves don’t travel through it. I got a prescription for the motion sickness patches, and a friend who studies humpbacks gave me advice that involved Bonine, which is apparently kind of like Dramamine. So I have options. I hear pretty much everyone acclimates after a few days anyway.

You’d think being immune to seasickness would be some kind of prerequisite for scientists who go on research ships all the time, but apparently it’s more important to be a Very Tough Person who will keep working even when you’re throwing up all the time.

I am not a Very Tough Person.

These first two quizzes for the Science Channel aren’t new, but they came out before I started blogging.

Giant Squid – This quiz will tell you how to say “giant squid” in Spanish. Yes, that *is* totally awesome.  Tell all your friends.

Botany – Everything about botany in eight kinda difficult (oops) questions. But they’re funny!

But wait!! There’s a NEW quiz!

Test your knowledge about pi. You know, the number. Ok, eventually I ran out of questions about pi and asked about pie instead. You know why? Because I love pie, and it’s my quiz. This is part of a mini-site on the Science Channel website in honor of Pi Day, which is this Friday – 3/14. Eat more pie! Be sure to vote in the poll – which do you like better, pi or pie?

To find others in this very amusing series (if I do say so myself), click on “quizzes” in the tag cloud.

More Bering Sea material is up on the website! You can find out what a Van Veen grab is at my brilliant section on the various sampling tools that scientists will be using on the ship. The text borrows heavily from some material WHOI already had on their website, but I also called a few of the scientists who will be on the ship to ask more about these tools. They were very patient with me and explained how the tools work and what they do with the samples. It was really useful background information for when I’m on the trip, and I was happy to find out how friendly they are, too.

I’ve been asking everyone I talk to for advice on the icebreaker. What’s the one thing everyone tells me? Not what brand of mittens to buy or how to avoid getting knocked off the side of the ship. No, the one thing everyone agrees on is that I should bring sheets. The ship provides sheets, but apparently they’re really strict about having your sheets clean when you get off the ship, which means everyone is all stressed out about doing laundry just as the ship is coming into port. I’m borrowing a set of ancient sheets from my mom so the Coast Guard’s sheets can stay nice and clean for the whole trip.

There are plenty of other things people have told me to bring, too – a towel, steel-toed boots, a face mask – but there’s clear unanimity on the sheets.

I also learned from these interviews that last year on this cruise (with many of the same people) there was a…drum roll please…knitting group! Woo!!

The website also now has a list of people in the science party. That includes me – check out my self-portrait, from a trip to visit friend and fellow science writer Kate in Oregon in the fall. (Incidentally, also the trip where I learned how to knit.) I sent photographer-colleague Chris a picture of me on the street in D.C., which is really my natural habitat, but I guess he thought this one made me look more rugged.

This would never have occurred to me, but now at least three people have asked it, with varying degrees of seriousness. Are icebreakers bad for the ice?

It’s not a completely nutty question. Icebreakers do, yknow, break the ice. And they leave water behind them. Open water is darker than ice, and while ice reflects heat, water absorbs it. That’s part of why it’s bad that sea ice is disappearing from the Arctic, particularly in summer – the ice helps keep the region cool, by reflecting the sun’s energy away from the Earth. (I say “particularly in summer” because that’s when the Arctic gets sun.)

Anyway, the answer is pretty much what you’d think – compared to the vast expanse of sea ice in the Arctic or Bering Sea, the tracks broken by an icebreaker are tiny. Not big enough to be interesting. So, don’t worry, I’m not ruining the planet by breaking the ice.