Helen FieldsScience Writer

Goodbye, best year ever! Best year ever? Oh yes. And I’ve had a lot of good years, so that’s saying something. I mean, come on. I went to the Bering Sea and got paid to do this:

And then I went to Germany and finally started to develop a taste for beer, which seems like an important step on the road to adulthood:

And I did lots of other cool stuff, too, like knitting and going to U2 concerts and discovering an obsession with dictionaries.

So, what excitement will 2010 bring? I know I plan to write more stories about science, spend a lot of time near home, sing a bunch, knit a sweater for my mom, and generally enjoy myself. I also reserve the right to add adventures as the opportunities present themselves. Read along with me, ok?

Photos: top, Chris Linder; bottom, me.

My car had its biennial emissions test today:

Right after I took this picture, I found out why the inspection guys were crawling all over my car – they couldn’t figure out how to open the gas tank cover. It’s a complicated maneuver. I stick my left arm in the trunk to pull on a plastic lever and use my right hand to push on the little door on the outside of the car. “You gotta do that every time you get gas?” one of the guys asked. I told him it’s one of the special features of my car. I think he was impressed. Or perhaps that look was pity. Anyway, my car passed.

Important tip: Go to the D.C. Vehicle Inspection Station the day after Christmas. I had a big pile of knitting to entertain me for an all-day wait in line, and I practically had the place to myself. I saw three other cars the whole time I was there.

To the driver I met while waiting for the inspection to finish: Hello! Great to meet you! This is the work I did in the Bering Sea.

I like how the tortoise (in Boston’s Copley Square last weekend) is dressed up for the holidays. Do you think the decoration would help him win the race? Or create drag and slow him down? Or motivate the bunny to kick some turtle butt for once in his lazy life?

Merry Christmas!

It’s funny to wish someone a “merry” day. Who ever describes anything as “merry” anymore? I wonder if that’s a Victorian holdover.

I don’t know how you have fun at your house, but I celebrated Christmas Eve with a story about tooth decay for ScienceNOW. (Ok, I wrote it on the 23rd; it just went through final editing on the 24th.)

The thinking on tooth decay has changed a lot in the last few decades. The people who study oral health used to focus on one organism, Streptococcus mutans, as the culprit in cavities, churning out the acid that destroys enamel.

But now they realize that tons of microbes, from hundreds of species, live in your mouth. Your mouth is like a tropical rainforest, but with Streptococcus and Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus instead of fig trees and monkeys and toucans. People who study dental disease – and intestinal disease, too – have realized they need to think about the mouth and gut like an ecological system.

The advances in molecular biology in the last couple decades have totally revolutionized the study of microorganisms. In the old days, if you wanted to know what was growing in someone’s mouth, you had to take a sample of goo, then grow it up in the lab to see what you had. The problem is, a lot of bacteria are hard to culture. They’re finicky eaters. Some won’t grow in the presence of oxygen. But now, scientists can take that goo, extract DNA, and census the bugs without having to culture them.

That means scientists are getting more of a handle on all the different jungles in your body. You are so majorly outnumbered by bacteria. There’s one of you and a bazillion of them. They live in your intestines, in your nose, in your mouth, on your skin. You’re even outnumbered at the cell level. There are more bacterial cells in and on your body than human cells. Don’t worry, you’re still mostly human if you measure by volume; bacterial cells are much, much smaller than mammal cells.

Photo: Bifidobacterium dentium, courtesy of the Ventura Lab

The Dictionary of the Week is a new acquisition. Yesterday I was killing time (and seeking heat) in Harvard Square, so I ducked into a used bookstore. Then I realized that they specialize in scholarly used books, so I was ready to duck right back out into the 20-degree-F outdoors when I stumbled across the dictionary section. Of course I couldn’t resist The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary for $7.95.

It’s not for translating between Australian and English; it’s a dictionary of English, as it is used in Australia. You know, like a Webster’s dictionary of American English, but with more marsupials.

First: pronunciation. The pronunciation guide in the front defines the sound “ah” thus: “as in calm, path, arm.” Er…those are three totally different sounds. In college, I studied abroad in Australia and New Zealand with a friend named Becca who has been known as “Beaker” (to a lucky few) ever since – because that’s just how everyone pronounced her name.

Australian English also has lots of words I don’t use in my daily life. Take the phrase “mad as a gum tree full of galahs.” A galah (guh-lah) is a kind of Australian cockatoo – the word comes, says the dictionary, from the word “gilaa” in the Yuwaalaraay language. Australian English has no shortage of words for different cockatoos and wallabies and shrubs, but the differences go beyond that: the preposition “longa,” in Aboriginal English, means “belonging to; near; about; with.” And a “furphy” is a “false report or rumour,” which comes from a kind of cart that was a center of gossip during the second world war.

I love the diversity of English. Down there on the other side of the world, people are going about their lives speaking something that doesn’t just have a different accent from what I speak; it’s got a vocabulary all its own. And over there in England, “pants” has a different meaning. And yet we’re all speaking something descended from the language of this guy.

This dictionary does, however, lead me to wonder if “pocket” means something different in other English dialects. The book is the weight of one of the larger Harry Potters, and while it does fit in one of the bigger pockets on my raincoat, it pulls that whole side down, and I think I would prefer to wing it, dictionary-free, on the mean streets of Melbourne. In the same used bookstore I saw a Kodansha “pocket” Japanese dictionary – also published by Oxford – that was almost as big as a toaster.

Dictionary Stats: The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 5th ed.

date: 2002
publisher: Oxford University Press
editor: Bruce Moore
length: 1298 pages (I said it was big)
guide words on p. 1010: shake-a-leg n. Aust. style of traditional Aboriginal dancing; shamefaced adj. 1. showing shame. 2. bashful, shy.
useful extras: A map on the back endpaper shows where more than 90 Australian Aboriginal languages are spoken, from Adnyamathanha (central South Australia) to Yuwaaliyaay (northern New South Wales).
obscenities: Nope. Hm. That seems a little unrealistic. This is Australia we’re talking about. Also, “tranny” is defined as “transistor radio.”

This kind of image is on a very large percentage of the headstones in Boston’s historic burial yards:

Seventeenth-century Puritans were opposed to using religious imagery (like crosses) on gravestones, so they went for reminders of the limits of mortal life, instead. Yipe. Note the grinning teeth, partly hidden by the leaves.

So, just a friendly reminder: You are going to die. You might want to bookmark this for later.

Here’s an introduction to gravestone iconography, courtesy of the City of Boston.

Handy website: a list of public radio stations across the country that stream live, including (where available) what’s on right now. So if, say, you’re in a hotel in Boston where the clock radio is broken but the wifi works, and you happen to be with your dad who loves A Prairie Home Companion, well, the internet is here to help.

There is nothing I love like a good old-school museum. And Harvard’s Museum of Natural History? It is OLD school. Ok, it has many excellent modern displays teaching scientific concepts. And it also has:

Boxes of rocks!

(Excuse me: cabinets of minerals. I learned today that a mineral is not a rock; rocks are made up of minerals. I’m still working out this whole geology thing, and I thank the museum people of the world for helping to teach me.)

Also: Cases of birds!

(SO MANY cases of birds. I love birds. Although, I must say, you don’t learn a lot when you just look at a couple hundred birds in a case. Pretty, but…not that informative.)

And also:

South American vertebrates! Thank goodness it’s only selected representatives. There are a lot of vertebrates in South America. (Not to worry – the museum has vertebrates from everywhere else, too.) (There is one black rhinoceros that is crying out for a wealthy alum to fund its retaxidermying, if that is a word, and it should be.)

But by far my favorite room is this one:

Several whale skeletons, a taxidermied giraffe, SO MANY BIRDS, deer, apes – this gallery has a little of everything. It was built in 1872 and restored to its early-20th-century glory a few years ago. It’s not really how people do museums today, but wow, is it beautiful.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me

I’m posting with the free WiFi at BWI:

Thanks, Google! Ok, I only logged on to do this post, so really I’m not using it. But if I were here for a long time (rather than rushing to finish before they call my row for boarding), I’m sure I’d appreciate it.

UPDATE, 5 minutes later: Heyyy, it reaches out to the airplane! Ok, ok, I’m turning it off now. Sheesh.

Today I spent two hours watching a scientist do incredibly tedious work. The time actually went really fast – she does this incredibly tedious work all the time, but to me it was all new and I had a lot to figure out:

What are you pipetting?

(Sodium hydroxide solution.)

What’s that machine called?

(A rotator.)

What are those pretty liquids?

(Buffers.)

What’s in those tanks?

(Argon.)

Actually, she thought the time went fast, too. So not only did I pick up a scene for a story I’m writing, I served a purpose: entertaining the postdoc.