Helen FieldsScience Writer

The internet has a lot of cats. But Maru, a Japanese cat who loves boxes, is really the best one. Just watch this one video – I think you’ll agree.

Many more Maru videos here. And thanks to CuteOverload (who else?) for introducing me to Maru.

I have an embarrassing admission to make: I love fish, I love aquariums, I grew up in the Washington area, and I had never been to the National Aquarium in D.C. Until today. In my defense, the National Aquarium is basically one big room in the basement of the Commerce department, it doesn’t have a very good reputation, and it is dwarfed by the ginormous, beautiful National Aquarium in Baltimore. But I happened to have a pass for free admission that expired tomorrow, so this afternoon I finally stopped in.

First, let’s dispense with the basement issue. What are you going to do with natural light in an aquarium, anyway? (Ok, the Baltimore aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium do lovely things, I know, I know. But this aquarium gets by without it. So there.) It’s the nation’s oldest aquarium – established in 1873 in Woods Hole, it bounced around a bit over the years, then settled down in the 1930s, after the Commerce building was built. It got a much-needed renovation in the last few years.

Ok, there are no adorable marine mammals. But a lot of people would argue that you shouldn’t have them in captivity anyway. Instead, this aquarium has baby alligators on loan from an alligator farm; when they get too big for the space, they’re shipped back to Florida and end up in the wild, as part of the conservation efforts for the American alligator. Here’s their spiffy Everglades-style habitat:

And let me introduce my new alligator friend:

I like his goofy grin.

Most of the exhibits were about U.S. waters, with a particular focus on the National Marine Sanctuaries – that’s the connection to the building, you know, NOAA and everything is under the Department of Commerce. But they also had a corner about the Amazon, with this awesome snake.

I’ve been told you should never go walking in the rainforest with a herpetologist, because they will point out things like this all the time, when you might have been happier if you’d stayed ignorant. The emerald tree boa mostly eats birds. It gets its teeth into a bird, squeezes it to death, then pokes around until it finds the head (the proper end to start swallowing from).

This tank represents life in Brazil’s Rio Negro. It is appearing in this blog post because it is gratuitously pretty. Also, those are real water plants, not plastic. So that’s nice.

There, wasn’t that pretty?

This gray tree frog lives in North American bogs. Well, not *this* one. This one lives in a tank.

It’s a nice little aquarium. It’s not super flashy and it sticks to the smaller animals, but they’re well presented, and I thought the emphasis on U.S. protected waters was a clever way to focus a small collection. (And then there’s the random Amazon section, but hey, everybody loves the Amazon.)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I’ve written two pieces about household pets in the last week – one about how personality and longevity relate in dogs, and the other about how your pets are trying to kill you.

Yes, your pets are trying to kill you. Ok, not kill you, and they mostly don’t do it on purpose, but they really are dangerous. Researchers at the CDC analyzed emergency room data and came up with estimates for how many injuries caused by falls are related to pets. A lot, it turns out. This weekend I met someone who’d gotten pretty banged up by falling over cats on the stairs. Yikes. Here’s the story.

The other story is about dogs, but it’s also about a theory in evolutionary biology. The question is how personalities evolved – all kinds of animals have them, and some biologists think they may have come about along with a few different life plans. One is sort of the “live fast, die young” plan, where you live like a pop star, reproduce early, take risks, and die young. This is thought to be associated with bolder personalities. The other is a more cautious, longer life. The guy in my story thought he’d look at dogs to see if these relationships are true across breeds with different personalities.

photo: by me

Or an Honorable-Mention-er, anyway. I entered a story in the D.C. Science Writers’ Association’s first annual Science Newsbrief Award and, hey, they liked it! I write a lot of short pieces. They’re pretty tough. Explaining science is hard enough without being limited to a couple hundred words. It’s nice to have an award that focuses on short writing.

Here’s the press release about the awards. UPDATE: Science re-posted the story, so you can read it here.

For Immediate Release
April 17, 2010

D.C. Science Writers Association Announces Inaugural Science Newsbrief Award Winners

Washington, D.C.—The D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA) is pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Science Newsbrief Award.

Most science writing awards go to complex, multipart stories, but those awards often fail to recognize one of the most challenging — and most common — tasks of the science writer: writing short. Done well, short, accessible, accurate pieces make an enormous contribution to the public understanding of science.

DCSWA founded the Newsbrief Award in 2009 to reward journalists who excel at short science writing. All DCSWA members were eligible to submit written entries of 500 words or less.

The winner of the inaugural award is ScienceNOW’s Sam Kean, for his piece “Mother’s Cancer Can Infect Her Fetus.” Judges said Kean used clear and straightforward reporting on a little-known topic with broad implications. One judge said the story was very readable and written in a tight, concise manner. Another said it “used compelling storytelling to convey an interesting medical story.”

Sam works as a correspondent for Science and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New Scientist, and Mental Floss, among other outlets. He was the 2009 national runner-up for the NASW’s Evert Clark/Seth Payne award.

Two honorable mentions were also chosen. Helen Fields was recognized for “Groovin’,” published in ScienceNOW. According to one of the judges, “I found myself smiling every time I read this.” Another called it charming and a gem of a story.

Sarah C.P. Williams got an honorable mention for “The Power of One” in the HHMI Bulletin. Judges said this original story had a nice use of metaphor, and the clear storyline meant that readers did not get lost in the science.

A panel of five judges, past presidents of DCSWA, selected the winner and honorable mentions. They are Aaron Levin of Psychiatric News, freelancer Lisa Orange, Joe Palca of National Public Radio, Gail Porter of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Mitch Waldrop of Nature.

An award ceremony will take place during DCSWA’s annual Professional Development Day on April 17 at the American Geophysical Union building in Washington, D.C.

The D.C. Science Writers Association is an organization of about 500 science reporters, editors, authors, and public information officers based in the national capital area. For more information or to join please visit www.dcswa.org. Details on how to enter the 2011 Newsbrief Award will appear on the Web site by the end of the year.

I don’t know the other winners – I look forward to meeting them Saturday.

Skip over to ScienceNOW to see an amusing piece I wrote about caterpillars talking with their butts. The species I wrote about has a modified hair-like structure, called an anal oar, that it drags across a leaf to make sounds and vibrations that warn off intruders. You can see this in the video that accompanies my story.

The idea is that caterpillars may have evolved this ritualized form of communication out of fighting. The researchers had a neat way of figuring this out – they made a family tree of a few dozen caterpillars. Then, for a few species, they looked at the anatomy of their hind ends and also watched how they defend their territory. Some, the ones that are more like the ancestors, have a leg back there and fight. The anal-scraping ones have no leg on their last segment and never fight. Fighting is dangerous for caterpillars – one bite and they’ll bleed to death. So the territorial displays may have evolved in part to avoid that deadly outcome.

Here’s the paper. It’s open access, so you don’t have to pay to read it, and it’s a pretty good read – much easier to follow than most journal articles I encounter.

Photo: Jayne Yack (video still)

I got my Verizon troubles sorted out, finally, after many angry phone calls (and if you know me, you know angry is not something I do a lot of) and multiple visits by Verizon techs to disconnect and reconnect my phone. The last guy they sent out was clearly the big guns – he’s been with Verizon forever and knew exactly what was causing the problem.

Of course, as a science writer, I was excited about this…and I spent way too long crafting my explanatory message to the building listserv. It was like writing a consumer health story! I told everyone: Here’s the situation, here’s what it means to you, here’s what you should do if you have this problem.

I thought I’d share it here, too, so it doesn’t go to waste.

A super-competent Verizon technician was just here fixing my phone line, and he explained what the heck is going on!

The basic problem is that the box that brings in the phone lines from outside is this funky kind of box that Verizon was thinking about switching over to a few years ago – presumably about the time this building was built. Verizon decided not to go that way, but we already had one. (If you ever happen to be in the Telcom room, it’s the pair of gray boxes all the way on the right, “Krone” brand.)

The box requires a special tool to punch a line in. He said what’s probably happening is, a tech comes out here and doesn’t have the correct tool, so he jams the wire in there some other way. The wire is making contact, so there’s a dial tone, but the connection is loose. Then if somebody else comes and works in the box – like happened Monday, when they connected [neighbor]’s line – and they jostle it a little, my wire will fall out again. (No worries, [neighbor], it would’ve happened sooner or later anyway.)

My connection is now so messed up from the techs forcing it, there’s no way to get the wire to stay in. He fixed my problem by hard-wiring my phone line to the outside line. Now, it’s possible that your phone went out as a result of his working in there. If that happens, I have his cell phone number.

So the immediate problem is that some techs are coming out without the correct tool. But the more basic problem is that we have a stupid Krone box. The tech is going to tell his supervisor that we should get a different box…but he says we shouldn’t hold our breaths. He was talking to [building manager] about this when I left.

Useful tip: If you’re calling the Verizon tech support line and the computer voice is insisting she can solve your problems just as well as a human can, and you do not wish to waste your time in such a manner, I think the magic word is “representative.” (But shouting and swearing works, too.)

If you’re trying to reach me on my 202 number and nobody answers, that means my epic Verizon problems are continuing. Send me an e-mail and I’ll get it eventually – I’m borrowing various other people’s wifi and can call back on my cell phone or skype.

Summary of epic Verizon problems: Every time they send a technician to my building to do anything in the telecom closet, they disconnect my phone (and, by extension, my internet). Monday morning my phone went out. Tuesday evening a technician came out and fixed my phone. Wednesday afternoon a technician came to fix some other problems. (Possibly caused by the guy who came Tuesday.) And guess what: my phone got disconnected.

Yeah, I’m pretty frustrated.

When I lived in Japan, in the late 90’s, the internet was still a relatively new thing. I actually had a kind of proto-blog, on Geocities, and I did something Skype-like to call home for free…but my dictionaries were on paper. These days, though, the unpoetically named Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC is rocking my world. And that’s why it’s the Dictionary of the Week.

Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC has got everything. You can look up characters by counting the number of strokes in them. You can type out a Japanese word phonetically, with roman letters, or in Japanese, if you happen to know how to make your computer write in Japanese. You can look words up in the general Japanese-English dictionary, or one of many other dictionaries – including automotive, Japanese-Slovenian, and river & water systems.

I use this dictionary for reading e-mails from my Japanese choir. I’ve been singing for a few months with the Japanese Choral Society of Washington (oh hey, I’m in the picture that’s on the homepage right now). During rehearsal, I’m ok – I can mostly follow what’s being said. It helps that I do a lot of choral singing and have a good idea of the kinds of things that conductors say. But a lot of important information gets transmitted by e-mail. It is so handy to be able to just cut and paste the words I don’t know into the dictionary.

I got a whole string of e-mails today from the group. One, about a potluck after rehearsal next week,contained the lovely word 帰国. The first character means “return” and the second means “country,” so together it means “go back to your country” – part of the occasion for the potluck is that a choir member is going back to Japan. It’s pronounced “kikoku.”

If you cut and paste that into the dictionary, you get a whole list of definitions. The first one is the word you looked up. Then there’s also compound words it appears in, like 帰国セール, kikokuseiru (sale), to sell your belongings before returning to your country, or 帰国子女枠, kikokushijowaku, special consideration for students who have lived abroad. Each entry has the word, the pronunciation, definition, a recording of someone saying it, and a string of links. Here are the ones for 帰国:

[V][Ex][G][GI][S][A][W] [JW]

Each of those looks up 帰国 in a different database – V takes you to all the ways you can conjugate 帰国 as a verb (I didn’t know I knew the hortative, but apparently I do), Ex is a list of sentences using 帰国, G is google, GI is google images, S is an online Japanese-Japanese dictionary, A is a Japanese-English online dictionary (for Japanese people), W is Japanese Wikipedia, and JW is some kind of Japanese word database.

The WWWJDIC doesn’t have the most beautiful interface, but it sure does a lot of stuff. I’m pretty sure I’ve only discovered a tiny corner of it, but I am very grateful to it for helping me read my e-mails.

Oh wow, yeah, I just came across this, for example: an interface that lets you handwrite a kanji with the mouse while the computer guesses what you’re going for.

Dictionary Stats: Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC

date: predates the world wide web; constantly updating
publisher: Jim Breen seems to be the guy; Monash University in Australia hosts the dictionary (he’s retired from the Electronic Dictionary Research Group)
other languages: Japanese – German, French, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian
amusing entry from FAQ: “[Q] I can’t read the kana readings. Will you add romaji display as an option.
[A] No. Better to learn kana. It will only take a week or two.”
insight from FAQ: “Remember that it is really a Japanese-English dictionary, and you have to take your chances with English-Japanese.”
obscenities: Yup. I can only remember one rude word in Japanese (糞), but it’s in there.

P.S. I know, I know, the Dictionary of the Week is now more like the Dictionary of the Quarter. It took a little hiatus. I don’t know if it’s back for good now or just dropping in.

You’d think rainforest birds would be ok with rain – and you’d be right, to a point. But when the rain really comes down hard, the birds stop flying around. Today I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about a study that shows birds get stressed out in the rain, at least this one super cute bird called the white-ruffed manakin – in heavy rain, levels of a stress hormone go up, and they seem to maybe not be able to get as much food as they need.

Here’s how this works. Every week I get a bunch of press releases from science journals, like Nature and Biology Letters. My editor at ScienceNOW gets them, too, and so do tons of other science writers. This is how we know what’s coming out in the journals the next week; there’s a list of articles, with a summary and contact information for each one. When my editor assigns me a story, the first thing I do is e-mail one of the authors. I do that before I read the article or anything. I know I’m going to have to talk to them, I have limited time, and I want to get moving on scheduling that interview.

So last week he assigned me this story and I e-mailed one of the authors, who had a charming British last name and works in Wales, asking him if he could talk to me about his tropical bird research, blah blah blah. Half an hour later I was looking at the article, and looking through the references, and thought, wait, who wrote this article? These people are Canadian. And none of them has a charming last name…uh-oh.

Yeah, I’d grabbed the wrong contact information off the press release and sent a message about tropical birds to a computer scientist. The best part is, he studies errors. If I ever write a story about errors, I’ve already got a personal anecdote and a source ready to go. (Fortunately, he was amused.)

photo: Alice Boyle

Washington’s famous cherry trees peaked this week. I woke up early Thursday to beautiful sun, and happened to be at a point where I needed to think about something other than the book chapter I’m writing, so I went down to see the trees for the first time in years. A tip if you ever think about visiting the cherry trees: go on a weekday, first thing in the morning.

Here’s my favorite shot:

I like the stumpy tree, valiantly blooming.