Helen FieldsScience Writer

The Economist had a story last month about which languages are the most difficult. It’s kind of a silly quest. For one thing, it depends what language you’re starting in. If you’re a native speaker of Korean, Japanese is probably going to be easier for you than Spanish. But, for English speakers, the Economist settles on Tuyuca, a language of the eastern Amazon. Japanese was hard enough for me – I have no plans to start on the Amazonian languages. Although I suppose if someone wanted to pay me to go there, I would give the language a try.

One of the interesting things the writer points out is that English isn’t as hard as people like to say it is. The spelling makes absolutely no sense, but other than that, we don’t conjugate verbs much, our nouns don’t have gender, and making plurals is pretty easy for most words. This makes me feel a little less guilty about being a native speaker of the language everyone else in the world has to learn.

The Science Channel has posted three more of my quizzes! Woohoo! Tell all your friends!

You may do better on the Science of Alcohol quiz if you know your Elizabethan poets.

I got certified for Scuba in 1995. I haven’t been on a dive since 1996. It was on the Great Barrier Reef. It may have spoiled me.

If you went scuba diving, you might see Coral, which, ohmygosh, is the subject of the last quiz.

To see all my quizzes, click here.

This weekend I was in Lawrence, Kansas, where my dad grew up, and stopped by the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. It’s in a great old building atop a hill on the KU campus.

In olden times (the Cretaceous, if you want to get technical – late in the dinosaur times), Kansas was underwater. The west coast and the eastern U.S. were separated by the Western Interior Sea. I love that it has a name, even if it isn’t a very poetic name – like it’s got a name waiting for it, in case the Rockies decide to go back down.

All that water means Kansas is rich in fossils of wacky sea creatures like this guy:

He’s a Xiphactinus molossus, a kind of bony fish. Doesn’t he look mean?

Also awesome: crinoids.

Crinoids are echinoderms, relatives of starfish and sea urchins that leave behind a lot of hard bits. They make beautiful fossils (a couple of these have been colored to show you what you’re looking at.) There are actually still crinoids, but they’re not nearly as diverse as they used to be.

One of the prized possessions of the museum is Comanche the horse. Dead horse! In a glass case!

Comanche survived the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, with several arrow and bullet wounds. After he recovered, he became a mascot for the Seventh Cavalry. He did parades and wandered around Fort Riley, about 100 miles west of Lawrence. When he died in 1891, he was sent off to the University of Kansas to be preserved. In 1893 he – or his skin, anyway – helped represent Kansas at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Here’s a great slide show on his restoration a few years ago. They had to build a full-size model to make sure he’d make the corners on the way to his new exhibit space. I love the pictures of him wrapped in plastic for the move. His head’s sticking out, which is reassuring – you wouldn’t want the dead horse to suffocate.

My dad remembered going to the museum on Cub Scout outings to see the snakes. I checked and, yep, they’ve still got snakes. (Probably not the same snakes as in 1950. No word if Cub Scouts still come look at them, but I can’t imagine they’d miss the chance.) They have fifteen species that are found in Kansas, each in its own cheerfully painted case.

I feel like the common garter snake, at right, got the nicest room. All those cheerful Kansas sunflowers.

The cottonmouth seemed particularly mean.

For one thing, it’s got the triangular head that screams, “I AM VENOMOUS.” Also, there were little furry gray things floating in the water that looked a heck of a lot like bits of mouse. I thought snakes swallowed their food whole, but I don’t know, maybe that one put up a fight.

photos: me, of course

For my Dictionary of the Week entries, I always check to see if a dictionary has obscenities. It seems useful to know whether a dictionary is reflecting the full range of a language or just, you know, the nice words. I suspect a lot of foreign language dictionaries are edited with schools in mind, because many of mine don’t seem to have obscenities.

A school district in southern California has pulled all copies of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., from schools because it defines “oral sex.” (Oh god, what kind of google traffic is that going to bring to my blog?) A parent complained that their elementary-school kid had stumbled across that entry. It sounds from the newspaper story like this dictionary was only in fourth-grade classrooms and up, for the use of advanced readers.

First: “Stumbled across”? Yeah, right. Next: Let’s consult my dictionary collection. I hadn’t thought to look for this particular term in my dictionaries before, ’cause it’s not really a bad word. So I just checked the two English dictionaries on the shelf next to me, and neither includes it, but they both have synonyms.

Here’s the story from the local paper, the Press-Enterprise. In another story, a school district spokeswoman says school officials are going to be reviewing the dictionaries by looking for other objectionable terms, which is kind of a funny mental image.

A doctor in Lorton heard an explosion in his office on Monday. But it wasn’t an explosion, it was a meteorite. (Read the story in the Washington Post.)

It’s crazy, this business of living on a planet. We go around and around the sun, blundering into bits of asteroids that cross our path. We burn them with our atmosphere, melt the outsides til they’re black and shiny, and catch them with the floors of our doctors’ offices. Then they get to go around and around the sun with us, maybe even – if they’re lucky – with their own unique registration number.

Hi, rock! Welcome to Earth!

UPDATE, 1/22: An online discussion on the Post’s website about this story – hosted by two people I met on this day.

Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about tobacco plants that open their flowers at a different time of day if they’re getting eaten by caterpillars. (My story.)

It’s kind of ingenious, if these scientists are right about it. Hawkmoths are good for the tobacco plants, because they pollinate them. Plants want pollination. But female hawkmoths also lay their eggs on the tobacco leaves. Eggs hatch into caterpillars that eat everything in sight.

So if there are caterpillars around, this study shows, these plants shift their flowering from night – when moths are out – to morning, when hummingbirds are awake.

Plants have a ton of ways of dealing with predators. They can produce toxins to hurt the predators. They can stop making new leaves, send new sugars to their roots, and wait until the predators go away. My favorite: They can send out “heelllp meee” chemical signals to attract their predators’ predators, like a parasitic wasp that lays its own eggs in the caterpillar.

One of the guys I talked to for this story told me (when I interviewed him for another story) that he used to be able to tell what species of caterpillar was eating a plant in his lab by the smell of the chemicals the plant was giving off. They’re that specific.

Plants are awesome.

photo: Danny Kessler

About a month ago, I wrote about a visit to Harvard’s Museum of Natural History. Friend, fellow science writer, and Bostonian Lila Guterman asked me why I hadn’t written about the glass flowers. Because they’re so awesome they deserve their own post, that’s why.

In the late 19th century, father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were making glass models of invertebrate sea creatures. There wasn’t a good way to preserve jellyfish and such, so they made lifelike, detailed models out of glass. The head of Harvard’s Botanical Museum found out about them and hired them to make glass models of plants.

So I’m at the museum. I know the glass flowers are famous. I walk into the glass flower room. I look at the first display case:

And I’m like, well, ok, that’s a perfectly nice specimen of a grass, so where are the glass flowers?

It took me a while to catch on that, no, really, everything was glass. I expected it to look like…glass. Shiny. A little translucent. But that’s not what the Blaschkas were doing; they were making something that looked exactly like the real thing, for study purposes.

See? Just looks like a cactus. A real pretty one, with a flower. The card in front of it tells you it’s an Echinocereus engelmannii modeled on a specimen collected in Tempe, Arizona in June.

An advantage of working in glass (as opposed to working in, uh, plants) is that you can magnify the specimens. A lot of the plants were shown with blown-up sexual organs:

Other than the magnifications, they just look like plants in cases. If you don’t know they’re made of glass, it’s not a very impressive room. But if you do know? Wow!

photos: me. allllll me.

My buddy and former colleague Andrew Curry wrote a great story for the February issue of Smithsonian about whether Auschwitz should be saved. Now it’s a museum with more than a million visitors last year. Some people say we’d be better off letting it crumble. Andrew talked to three survivors for the story, one of whom said this about why she wasn’t killed on arrival: “People shipped from prisons weren’t shipped in huge trainloads of Jews…. They were shipped as individuals, which was an advantage. It’s not worth turning the gas on for one Jew, I suppose.”

photo: me, 2008

Tonight I went on a tour of the fossil labs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, organized by the DC Science Writer’s Association. I learned many exciting things and took pictures with my cell phone camera, ’cause that’s all I had. Sorry.

Sample fun fact: When they find little fossils in the field, they wrap them up in toilet paper and tape.

I like the one that says “Chunk-o-Bone.” And the other one that says “Bone?” Might be a bone. Might not. We also learned that you can sometimes tell the difference between bone and petrified plant material by licking it – bone is porous, so it wicks liquid away from your tongue and your tongue sticks to it. Petrified wood is solid and doesn’t do that. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of this demonstration.)

We learned a lot about preparing fossils. When fossils come back from the field, they’re often stuck in rock. So, you want to cut away the rock. The preparators have jackhammers as small as a dentist’s drill. Some rock is just too hard for chipping away, though. These vats are for dissolving fossils in acid:

These fossils are in limestone, which apparently is really hard. If you chipped bits of it away, it would take forever. So instead they bathe them in really weak acetic acid, over and over and over and over. After every overnight bath, someone has to coat the bones with a plastic solution so the acid won’t dissolve them, too. With weekly baths, dissolving the bones out of a rock takes…forever. Like a year. Acid won’t dissolve plant fossils, so if that’s what you’re trying to get out of the rock, you can just throw in the rocks, put mesh over the drain, add some super-strong acid, and wait.

The vertebrate paleontology folks are in the process of making custom-fit foam and plaster jackets for all their fossils. Big fossils are heavy. REALLY heavy. They’re basically rocks, and think how big a dinosaur leg bone is – that’s a big rock. Until someone dug them up, these fossils were happily ensconced in some kind of rock formation. So if you have a big old bone sitting on a shelf, and it’s just resting on three or so points, it’s really likely to break. Here’s a fossil getting its cast made:

The sand supports the weight of the fossil while it’s being worked on. My favorite fact: That sand is made of crushed garnets. It’s cleaner than regular sand, apparently. Also, red. And so pretty!

Our last stop was in a big room with big stuff. Example: That white thing in the back is a fossil branch of some kind of ancient tree fern. It’s so big, for years it leaned against the wall outside in the parking lot. They were afraid it would break the floor if they brought it inside. Note that it is inside now. They cut a lot of rock off the back before they brought it in.

At left is some dinosaur whose name I’ve forgotten. This is actually a cast; the original has been on display, but they’re trying to take their type specimens down. (I think he said there are seven in the dinosaur hall right now.) A type specimen is the specimen that defines a species, so paleontologists want to be able to study them. The museum is replacing them with casts so scientists can work with the type specimens.

The Natural History has redone two of its major halls recently – mammals and oceans – and a third is opening this spring. The dinosaur hall is next on the list. Apparently a lot of the skeletons are mounted based on antiquated ideas about how dinosaurs stood. Some date to shortly after the museum opened – which was in 1910. So if you know anyone with a few million dollars to throw around, the Smithsonian would love to hear from them.

UPDATE, 2/1/10: Here’s some more info about that giant tree fossil. It was a “scale tree” and it came from a coal mine in Iowa. The museum received it in 2005.

photos: me.

A few weeks ago a friend had to come to D.C. to take a test for a federal government fellowship. She couldn’t find good dog care at home, and my building is pet-friendly, so she brought the dog with her. Which means I got to hang out with this while my friend was off taking her test:

She kept me company while I worked. (She’s not dead, she’s waiting for you to rub her belly.)