Helen FieldsScience Writer

My friend and fellow science writer Sarah Zielinski has a nice blog over at the Smithsonian magazine website, Surprising Science – today’s post is about how people used to argue against extinction the way they argue against evolution today. The Earth was the way God created it 6,000 years ago, and that’s that, they said. Here’s that blog post. Check out the other recent posts, too – she’s got some nice stuff there, from whether climate change caused the downfall of Angkor to a collection of embarrassingly bad NASA posters.

Over the weekend, a friend of mine from college asked, via Facebook, how geologists know where an earthquake was. To quote:

Hey Helen, would you please write a blog explaining how geologists can tell where an earthquake’s epicenter is? Are there things stuck in the ground all over the earth? How did they get there? Are they always watching? It kinda weirds me out to think about it.

I took a stab at explaining it on Facebook, based on my foggy memories of 10th grade earth science, then asked friend and fellow science writer Naomi Lubick, who actually has a degree in geology, if she could handle this one. And she did! Here’s her blog post: How to find an earthquake.

The short version: The earthquake sends out waves in all directions, and seismometers measure the waves. If you know when the waves arrive at each place, you can calculate where they came from. But go read Naomi’s post for more about earthquakes, like pretty maps and links and stuff.

When I first started freelancing full time, a friend of mine was like, hey, I need some freelance work. You can write quizzes for me. And I was like, oh, I don’t know, quizzes? I’ve never written a quiz. And she was like, nah, it’s easy, go for it. And I was like, well, ok, if you say so. They turned out to be some of the most fun writing I’ve ever done. Here are the last three in my year-long series.

I referenced the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the intro to the Space quiz. Of course.

If you want to be a Fossil, where should you arrange to die? This is the quiz that tells you.

The art person got way sneaky on the quiz about Building Big – sometimes the picture gives you the right answer, and sometimes it gives you the wrong answer. Ooooohh!!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

A week or so ago I went to a party that was organized around singing the Pirates of Penzance in someone’s living room. It was a great party, and it reminded me of this excellent song, to the tune of the Major General’s big moment:

I grew up on Tom Lehrer records. Of course, the kids of today, or at least the ones with cool parents, are growing up on the songs of They Might Be Giants. So, here’s a new song about elements – which, I have to admit, is a lot more educational than the Tom Lehrer one.

Fun with science!

Update, 10/14/2010: A new version of the Tom Lehrer song, in Japanese pop style!

I just finished a thoroughly entertaining book about made-up languages: In the Land of Invented Languages. It’s by Arika Okrent, a linguist who’s interested in people’s attempts to create languages, mostly perfect languages that will eliminate ambiguity, be easier to learn, and/or bring about world peace. Yes, that all worked out really well.

She goes through the whole history, from Hildegard von Bingen, who wrote down about 1,000 words of a language called “Lingua Ignota,” through a 17th-century English guy who thought he could cut away the ambiguity of English by organizing everything, on to the guy who invented Esperanto in the late 19th century and the language fans today who develop their own languages and share them on the internet just for the heck of it. It’s a great read – lots of fun, with human stories and plenty of fun language facts.

Being a language nerd herself, she also decided she had to get her first-level certification in Klingon, which turns out to be a really difficult language. It’s got crazy word order and is agglutinative, which means you glom suffixes and prefixes onto roots to make big long words that can be whole phrases. (“If it’s in your way, knock it down” is two words.) Even the linguist who invented Klingon doesn’t speak it very well. When he introduces new words and phrases, he has to be careful not to make mistakes, because the real Klingon speakers will catch them. He’s gotten good at explaining them away. (Ah, well, see, when Klingons make formal toasts, they’re using an obsolete word order.)

She mentioned, without explaining, “ergativity” as something some languages have. I looked it up and found this blog post. Um…I’m still confused. I mean, Japanese was tough and all, but at least it’s not ergative.

So. Good book. And sooner or later I’ll get back to my own language nerdiness and bring the Dictionary of the Week back from hiatus.

Someone I used to work with at National Geographic just drew my attention to this totally cool music video – it tells the story of a woman’s day through infographics:

It’s by the company H5, whose video Logorama just won the Oscar for best animated short. I also love the band, Röyksopp – they’re one of my favorites to listen to when I’m writing. (Is “band” the right word when it’s two guys playing electronica? I suspect not.)

The National Museum of Natural History’s newest permanent exhibit opens tomorrow: a hall about where humans came from. It traces our evolution through the last few million years, from ape-like critters to today. I went to the press preview this morning and met my ancestors.

Lucy is the first hominid you meet. The ancestors of humans and chimps split about 6-8 million years ago. Lucy was an Australopithecus afarensis, in the human lineage, and she lived about 3.2 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. She was a big deal when she was discovered in the 1970s. I’ve always heard of Lucy, and I imagined she would be more human-like, but she was short and hairy and climbed trees. A lot more apey than I expected.

The real Lucy is on tour in the U.S. right now – quite a controversial move, because there’s only one of her and she’s so fragile. Many museums, including this one, refused to display her. But if you want to see her, she’s in Times Square at the moment.

Neanderthals and modern humans actually overlapped, but they were a different species. We’re Homo sapiens, they’re Homo neanderthalensis. About 28,000 years ago, we came into Europe and somehow drove them extinct. I feel kind of bad about this.

This is a Neanderthal. He looks a lot like us, doesn’t he? Fun fact: He’s named after Neander Tal (Tal = valley) in Germany, where some early fossils were found. Other fun fact: People in the know pronounce the “th” in Neanderthal as “t.”

The exhibit has a lot of neat displays showing how scientists learn things about fossils. This is a Neanderthal who survived a major blow to the head – if you look at the side of his head, around his left eye socket, it’s deformed.

The bones on either side of the skull are from his arms – his right arm is withered because the bash on the head messed up the part of his brain that controls the right side of his body. He lived to be 40ish, so they figure other people in his group must have helped him survive. Isn’t that sweet? See what I mean about feeling kind of guilty that these people didn’t survive?

There are tons of bones and skulls and tools and things in the exhibit. But I realized as I was going through that almost everything on display is casts and models. For the most part, real bones are way too fragile to display. I asked one of the Smithsonian people standing around if there was anything real in the exhibit. She said, other than the one special case with two French skulls and a Smithsonian Neanderthal skeleton, it was a couple of axes and some beads.

So here are the beads.

They know they’re beads, and not just random shells, because the snails came from somewhere else, they’re no good for eatin’, they have unnatural holes drilled in them, and there are microscopic marks on the edges of the holes that indicate the beads were strung. This is from our species, Homo sapiens – about 30,000 years ago in France.

They have a station where you can see what you look like as an early hominid, then get the picture e-mailed to you. This is me as a Neanderthal:

You’re welcome.

Today is a big day for other reasons – it’s the museum’s 100th birthday and also a certain holiday that inspired the cafeteria staff to this act of culinary artistry:

I was tempted, but in addition to being bright green, they were also $3.50 each. Ah, museum prices.

The website for the exhibit is full o’ hominid history.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

It’s March 14 – get it? 3.14? Happy Pi Day! In honor of this day, surely you’d like to visit the Science Channel website and take my pi quiz from last year.

I just remembered to go looking for my last batch of quizzes, and they were there! Wahoo! Here are three to entertain you for now, and I’ll post the last three later. Tell your friends.

A mosquito researcher once told me that the best way to feed mosquitoes in the lab is to stick your arm in the cage.

I learned some cool facts about electric vehicles while writing this quiz, but they’re all in the quiz, so I’m not telling you what they are.

Climate change is a very large topic to write a quiz about. Take the quiz and see how I did!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

The Washington Post ran a little blurb recommending Science’s podcasts – particularly the entertaining ones, like the superhero one. Which was by me! Woohoo! Here’s their piece.