Helen FieldsScience Writer

I leave for my Bering Sea adventure in 26 days! Oh my gosh. That’s not even four weeks. Wow. I need to do my taxes.

They’re gradually putting together the part of the website that will deal with my expedition. You can head over there now to read my first piece of writing, the “About the Expedition” piece. I explain a bit about the science on the trip and the ship we’ll be on. Future installments will include my snazzy descriptions of the various sampling tools people are using on the ship (do you know what a Van Veen grab is? Neither did I!) and, eventually, the daily updates. Those won’t start until April 4.

The east coast got walloped by a big old snow storm earlier this week (yes, our “big old snow storm” is Wisconsin’s “five measly inches,” but bear with me) so I decided it was a fine opportunity to try out some of my gear for the Bering Sea.

I haven’t lived anywhere cold since Norway in 1997-1998, so I’ve been restocking on the warm stuff. I have one pair of long underwear in each of wool, silk, and some kind of synthetic. (I tested the synthetics during the inauguration and stayed toasty warm.) I’ve stocked up on SmartWool socks from REI – they’re wool, but they’re not that itchy – and cashmere sweaters from the thrift store.

Monday’s test was mainly for my new winter hiking boots. Here they are in the snow:

I walked about 40 minutes to the next town over, stepped in some of those horrible six-inch-deep slushy puddles at a curb, and had perfectly happy feet all day. I way approve of these boots. I’ll wear them for hanging around on deck on the icebreaker.

This picture looks all pristine and lovely and wintry and stuff, which is funny, because it’s on the sidewalk in front of a storage facility. About half a block later I wanted to take a picture of my feet in a slightly more realistic setting, some nice brown snow at the side of the road, when I realized I’d dropped my camera. In the snow. Brilliant, Helen. Luckily, I was the only person who’d walked that way and it was easy to retrace my steps and find it. I wanted to let it dry out before I turned it on again, though, so no more pictures from the walk.

So I don’t have a picture of the other piece of equipment I was trying out on Monday: the face mask. It’s black, neoprene, makes me look like a serial killer. I felt ridiculous putting it on, but holy cow, my nose was happy. You know what, it’s so crazy looking, I’ll just take a picture right now.

Nice, huh?

Lessons from Monday’s walk: Wear the face mask, vanity be damned; aim more carefully when inserting camera into pocket.

Yaaaarrrrnnnn!!!!

It may just look like a pile of yarn, but…it’s my first sweater! I’ve been wanting to make a sweater, just because, I don’t know, when you learn how to knit, it seems like you should make a sweater. I knew I wanted to make a cardigan, because I never wear the regular kind of sweater, and it would be stupid to make a sweater and not wear it.

So I did what I always do these days when I’m looking for a knitting pattern: poke around Ravelry, possibly the coolest website of all time. People say it’s like Facebook for knitters, but it’s so much more. You can list your projects in there – for each one you can put in the size of needles you used, and the yarn, and record how long it took you, and whether the yarn was stupid. Then when you look at a pattern, the database is all linked up. You can see all the projects that other people have done and what yarns they used and look at their pictures.

I looked at a lot of patterns on Ravelry and settled on the “Cardigan for Arwen.” It’s super pretty, it’s got cables (yay), there’s no pesky zipper, and it’s named after a character in the Lord of the Rings. The only drawback was that the pattern costs $5.95, but considering I spent 50 bucks on the yarn, it seems a bit stingy not to want to pay the person who’s going to tell me how to arrange that yarn with sticks.

And now I have the yarn! Yay!

Today I wrote an extremely teensy story for ScienceNOW. It’s at the bottom of this list. It’s about a 300-million-year-old fossil brain. That’s really old. Soft tissue doesn’t usually get preserved, but they found this one with the crazy bright x-rays of a synchrotron.

Those little teeny stories only run with one picture, so I’m really just blogging here to share this drawing of what the iniopterygian (it’s a cartilaginous fish, related to sharks and stuff) might have looked like:

Is it just me, or does this fish look…well…kind of dumb? In a wide-eyed, hopeful way. Sorry bout the extinction, little guy.

Image courtesy of PNAS