Helen FieldsScience Writer

So, I’m sitting here at my desk at Die Welt a few minutes ago and my neighbor’s phone rings. This happens often. But then I notice that she’s leaning over, looking at my phone, and reading off my phone number. She hung up and told me it was a secretary, and shrugged – she didn’t know what it was about.

The secretary calls and says, “Frau Fields? Do you speak German?” And I said, “More or less.” She said, “I have a reader on the line, I’ll transfer you.” And I was like, uhh, uhh, and there he was. Yesterday the 19-year-old intern and I co-wrote a story about chronic kidney disease and kidney failure. (Really, it was mostly her – she’s young, but she’s good. Also, she speaks German and can interview people.)

The nice man told me he’d read my article in today’s paper about kidney disease, and I’d mentioned a test to detect protein in the urine. Well, yesterday his wife had a blood test at the hospital, and he had the test results, and could I tell him what the line about protein meant?

Uhhhhh….no. No, I could not tell him that. We chatted a bit about tests for kidney function, agreed that it was best to talk to the doctor (he relayed this to his wife) and he thanked me for such an informative article and told me to keep up the good work.

I pretty much feel like now I am a German superstar, although I didn’t understand everything he said, I stumbled a bit while talking, and, yeah, I totally couldn’t answer his question. Man, I haven’t gotten a call from a reader in forever. It’s the last day of my fellowship – not a bad way to end.

Back in the fall, when the media world started feeling the drop in advertising and laying off lots of people, the blog hosting people at Typepad came up with a nice little program: Typepad for Journalists. They’d give you a free pro account, tech support, maybe help you put ads on your site. All about helping newly-unemployed journalists by giving them a home in the digital world.

When I got laid off in November, I knew one of the first things I wanted to do was set up a website and a blog. I figured the two best choices were Typepad and Wordpress, so I sent off an application to the Typepad for Journalists program to get that ball rolling in case it ended up seeming like the better deal. But I decided Wordpress would work better for me, and I kind of forgot about the Typepad thing.

So here’s a little timeline. Dec. 17, 2008: I send a message to Typepad telling them I want a blog. Jan. 16, 2009: They tell me I’m accepted to their program. (Everyone was – I’m not that special.) Sept. 25, 2009: They send me my discount code so I can register and start blogging.

Uh, yeah. Waiting nine months to start a blog – that’s definitely the way to show you’re on top of the news.

You know the rules in elevators. You get in, you push the button, you turn and face the front, you watch the numbers. There is no eye contact. There is no chit-chat.

In Germany, they have DIFFERENT RULES. You say hello to the strangers – STRANGERS! – when you get on the elevator. You say goodbye when you get off. Sometimes you even face the middle of the elevator instead of the door.

The elevator at work is pretty much the most confusing social encounter of my day. Do I really have to say “bye” when I get off at the 12th floor? Please, let the people on this elevator all work on lower floors so they leave before me and I don’t have to initiate any greetings.

And it’s not just because we all work at the same company – I stayed in a hotel for three days in August and other guests said hello when they got on the elevator down to breakfast.

Is this true in other parts of the world? I don’t remember people being chatty in elevators in Japan. The main thing I remember about elevators in Japan was that in the elevator in the building where my dad worked, the door took forever to close if you didn’t push the close door button, so elevator etiquette was to push the button as you left the elevator. The area around that one button was totally worn from all the fingers.

Fascinating German fact of the day: the word for “birth control pill” is apparently Antibabypille. Well, it’s descriptive, isn’t it? I’m reading an article in Die Welt about a woman who was taking birth control pills and died of a pulmonary embolism – which is the much more straightforward Lungenembolie. (It’s an embolism…in your lungs!)

One of my funnier recent efforts, if I do say so myself: The Nose Quiz.

All about Cloning.

Neptune is now the farthest planet from the sun.

The Yeti quiz includes a reference to an article by a friend of mine. Here’s her story, about hunting for Bigfoot in the mountains of Oregon.

Black holes are really dense. Perhaps you knew.

For all my Science Channel quizzes click here.

UPDATE, late at night: Now that I’ve retaken these quizzes, I can report that, really, most of them are pretty funny. You should take them all. And tell your friends.

This weekend the Burns Fellows had our official almost-end-of-fellowship meeting in Munich (or, if you prefer, München). There’s this little festival you may have heard of in Munich. Happens once a year? Lots of beer and lederhosen? Yeah, Oktoberfest, that’s right. It started on Saturday. Many of my smart friends have pointed out that it’s actually September, so here you go, fact of the day: Oktoberfest always runs for 16 days and ends on the first Sunday in October, so the latest it’s ever going to go is October 7, and it can start as early as mid-September.

Oktoberfest is the kind of thing I should hate. I don’t like beer. I really, really don’t like cigarette smoke. Loud boisterous rooms aren’t really my scene. And it was really hot in there.

But, holy cow, it was fun. Soon after we got to the Augustiner beer tent and ingratiated ourselves with a partly-full table of Swedes and Germans (you have to have a table or you can’t order beer), the band started playing, and we learned that what you actually do at Oktoberfest is dance on benches. That’s it. That’s the whole activity. Wave your one-liter mug of beer and dance on benches and sing along with the band. Note that you do not dance on tables. You’re not supposed to step on the tables. Everybody just stands on the benches. It’s easier than standing on the floor, really. (This may vary in other tents at other times. But in that tent on Saturday evening, it was all about the bench-dancing.)

I would totally go again. Heck, I have a dirndl now, I have to find another occasion to wear it.

Sorry the picture’s shaky. Blame one of my new Swedish friends.

For today’s Welt I wrote about colorblind monkeys – scientists cured them of their colorblindness with gene therapy. “Cured” is kind of a silly word in this case. The males of this species naturally don’t see red and green, so it’s not like they have something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. So, more accurately: Scientists gave monkeys a gene for a pigment they didn’t have, and now the little guys see colors like we do.

Aww, lookit the cute li’l monkey doing the test! He’s supposed to find the pink dots among the gray dots. If he gets it right he gets a drop of grape juice.

The monkeys in the study are squirrel monkeys. Isn’t that a cute name? It sounds tiny and adorable, and like it would enjoy hopping around in trees, which I think is a fairly accurate description of the species. So, guess what the German word for them is? Totenkopfaffen. Death’s-head monkey. Yipe.

Progress update: I actually wrote this story in German, rather than writing in English and translating. And it ran in TWO newspapers today. Woo. I’ve mostly written for Die Welt so far, but the science section also supplies stories for Welt am Sonntag (the Sunday edition)  and Berliner Morgenpost. 

Photo Credit: Neitz Laboratory

One of the manz interesting things about living in foreign countries is adapting to new computer kezboards. Iäm tzping on mz work computer right now. Have zou guessed which two kezs are switched on a German kezboard? Thatäs right, itäs Y and Z. Also, the ä is where the ’ should be and the ö is where the ; should be and I donät even remember what should be here: ü.

These differences make sense. German uses a lot more of the last letter of the alphabet than English does, so it makes sense to put it in a place thatäs easier to hit. (And Germans have much less reason to use the secondßtoßlast letter.) (See what happened to the hzphen?) And of course, zou want the ö, ä, and ü right where zou can find them.

Donät worrz, after a month on German kezboards, I actuallz am capable of tzping on them without making too manz mistakes. For one thing, a colleague at Bild showed me how to switch the kezboard to the American lazout. And also, if I slow down and think a bit, I can hit the z when I want the y and vice versa. I even know where to find all the punctuation marks I use in dailz life.

But this is a blog. Who slows down and thinks on a blog_ (Um, that sentence is supposed to end with a question mark, just so zou know.)

A friend of mine who prefers to remain nameless on the internet moved to China at the end of August, and she’s started a blog. So we can all follow along!

She’s a fellow science writer who is trying out teaching English for a while. This is pretty cool – she had a job with an ending date, she’d poked around for other jobs unsuccessfully, she had been taking Chinese for a while, and she decided, what the heck – I’ll move to China. And that’s what she did. (She’d also been to China for a month and liked it, so this wasn’t totally insane.) Go Anonymous Friend!

For today’s paper, I wrote about late blight – you may know it better as potato blight, the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. It’s still a huge problem for potato and tomato farmers, so a bunch of scientists sequenced its genome (their paper is in Nature today). Here’s my story.

Usually when I read about some new genome sequence, I get a big “eh” feeling. As in, “eh, big string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, who cares.” But this is a really cool disease, and super important economically, and it turns out the genome itself is interesting, too.

The organism that causes late blight has a ginormous genome, with a ton of repeating sequences of DNA. Those big repeaty areas include lots of copies of the nasty genes that help it attack plants, like genes that cause cell death and stuff. So maybe there’s some way that the bug is using those extra copies to overcome the plants’ defenses. Cool, huh?

Chad Nussbaum, the guy at the Broad Institute whose group did the sequencing, said this genome was really hard because of all the repeats – and it helped them figure out stuff they can use later. “Every genome teaches you something new,” he told me. “They’re all strange in their own little ways.”

Best thing I found while working on this story: PotatoPro, a news source for the potato processing industry with headlines like “Sultry Sally has re-launched its low fat potato chip with even less fat” and “Man dies after falling into potato harvester.”