Helen FieldsScience Writer

This week’s Dictionary of the Week – ok, this season’s Dictionary of the Week, since the last one I did was in April – is a classic. It’s red, it’s got Webster in the title, and it sits on a shelf right next to my head, where I can grab it whenever I need a ruling on a word.

Today’s word: crenulate. I wrote a blog post about a crochet coral reef for Smithsonian magazine’s website, in which I referred to the edge of some structures on the coral reef as “crenelated.” That’s what I thought I’d heard people say. It seemed reasonable. I had a rough definition for it in my head – you know, ruffly, or something.

So this morning when I was writing about the coral reef for my own blog, and I got to that word, I thought, I should really check this. The blog post for Smithsonian was read by at least two editors, but I have no safety net on my blog. I also know that I have a problem with double consonants. It’s my spelling blind spot. I’ve looked up “accommodate” so many times, I think I’ve finally learned it, but…I usually look it up anyway just in case. As I flipped through the dictionary, I predicted that the correct spelling of crenelated would be one N, two Ls.

Boy, was I wrong. Both crenelate and crenellate are acceptable spellings. But they’re acceptable spellings of the wrong word. “Crenelate” is a verb that means “to furnish with battlements or crenels, or with squared notches.” (Crenel: “any of the indentations or loopholes in the top of a battlement or wall; embrasure.”)(Embrasure: “An opening (in a wall or parapet) with the sides slanting outward to increase the angle of fire of a gun.”) The adjective form is crenelated. Coral comes in many shapes, but it does not generally have battlements, crenels, embrasures, or squared notches.

The word I wanted was the next entry in the dictionary: crenulate. It means “having tiny notches or scallops, as some leaves or shells.” And here’s the other wacky thing: it’s an adjective. So you can just say a piece of coral or a nudibranch is crenulate. The dictionary allows “crenulated,” too, but this obviously doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying an apple is “redded.”

Crenelate and crenulate do come from the same root, as does crenate, which means the same thing as crenulate. (They come from the Vulgar Latin crena, a notch or grove.)

I guess most people use online dictionaries to check this kind of thing, but I don’t like online English dictionaries. I don’t like the way they look. I appreciate the tiny visual and tactile break that I get when I stop and take the dictionary off the shelf. And, most importantly, if I’d looked up crenellated here, I wouldn’t have seen the next entry and realized that was the word I was going for.

Dictionary Stats: Webster’s New World Dictionary: Third College Edition

date: 1991
publisher: Simon & Schuster
length: 1574 pages
guide words on p. 469: euploid adj. with the complement of chromosomes being an exact multiple of the haploid number, as diploid, triploid, etc.: see HETEROPLOID; euxenite n. a lustrous, brown-black mineral containing columbium, titanium, yttrium, erbium, cerium, and uranium
introduction: Includes an essay on language by John Algeo, who writes, “Language is not a Platonic idea abiding in a realm of archetypal truths. Rather it is a system we infer from the sounds that come out of the mouths of speakers and the marks that come from the hands of writers.” That means this is the kind of dictionary that includes “crenulated,” rather than scolding you about “redded.”
obscenities: I actually used this dictionary last night to look up quite a rude word – I wasn’t sure of the technical definition. No, I will not tell you which one.

People who like to mess with yarn fall into two camps: knitters and crocheters. In knitting, you use two sticks and it’s a disaster if you drop a stitch. In crochet, you use one hook and I don’t know if it’s even possible to drop a stitch. There’s a lot I don’t know about crochet. In fact, until the beginning of July, the only thing I knew how to do was to crochet a single chain of loops that I could use to start knitting a sock or a hat.

The first weekend of July, I was at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and saw a table for the Smithsonian Community Reef. Someone taught me how to crochet a pseudosphere – it’s like a sphere, kind of, but in hyperbolic space, which is this other kind of geometry that is not the Euclidean geometry of planes and squares and nice normal things that you learned about in ninth grade. Crocheting hyperbolic shapes turns out to be kind of hypnotic. Here’s me learning how:

The reef is being built by hook-wielding volunteers like me; the pieces all have to be turned in by sometime in September and will be on display at the Natural History Museum as part of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef starting October 16. Last week I went to a workshop at a local yarn store to learn more, and I’m now working on my third piece of coral. Here’s the collection so far:

You’ll see that it’s a great way to use up that hideous orange acrylic yarn.

I wrote a blog post about the reef for Smithsonian magazine.

At the crochet coral reef workshop, I hung around with the beginners – I did, technically, already know how to crochet, but I really only knew how to crochet continuously in one direction. So, if I wanted to make spirals, I was fine, but it seemed useful to learn some other skills, and also to learn what the different stitches were called. Also, the friend I brought with me (MJ) was a beginner.

So the beginners were chatting, and I said I was writing a blog post for the Smithsonian, and one of them said, oh, I work at the Smithsonian. Turns out she’s a VIARC volunteer – they’re the ones who answer questions at the information desk. And I said, oh, my mom does that at the Freer and Sackler, and she said, I think I’ve met your mom, she works with my sister-in-law, Sandy. Who I know.

Then the sign-up for the mailing list came around, and the last name on it was someone I knew a little in high school – I was good friends with her little brother. It’s a fairly unusual name. I wandered around the yarn store until I found someone who looked vaguely familiar, asked, and indeed, it was her. She didn’t remember me at all.

(I don’t really know everybody, but I like to pretend I do. Read about it.)

I do a heck of a lot of knitting, most of it not really suited for a work blog. But I feel this is legitimate science and paleontology and…oh, cmon, look how cute this little guy is:

The pattern is modified from this knitted stegosaurus.

I’ve often said that I run into people at every event I go to – except baseball games. Well, that was a lie, it turns out. Saturday night I went to see the Bethesda Big Train, a team in a summer league for college students. Revels was performing, and they’d given us a bunch of free tickets. Before the game, I was waiting with some other Revels folks to sing the national anthem when I saw Alan Mairson standing a few feet away. Alan and I both left jobs at National Geographic in November, 2008. He now writes the blog Society Matters and is the bat boy/girl coordinator for the Big Train. Ok, and he also has a day job.

Photographic proof:

(I don’t really know everybody, but I like to pretend I do. Read about it.)

A new genetic study finds that Alaskan sled dogs, the mutts that pull sleds, are actually their own breed. Despite coming in all sizes, coat lengths, and ear shapes. The people who breed Alaskan sled dogs feel free to mix in any other dogs they want. They aren’t making purebreds, like a poodle breeder would. But still, the genetic signature – the doggy essence – that all those all those dogs share is Alaskan sled dog. (Not, as the researchers expected, Siberian husky or Alaskan malamute.) Read all about it in my ScienceNOW story.

Photo: Heather Huson

Some scientists at the University of Georgia are working on what sounds like a kind of goofy project: making ornamental clovers. They swear they’re very pretty plants – lush green, with red and white markings. And they fix nitrogen, so they could help fertilize your garden, too. The Georgia team has actually bred three ornamental varieties, called Patchwork Quilt, Irish Mist, and Pistachio Ice Cream, which they’ve turned over to the university to commercialize. So keep an eye out for these to plant in your garden.

In the course of all this breeding, the team has been working on mapping genes for different traits – including the four-leaf trait. This turned out to be really tricky. So, there’s a gene for four leaves. But just because a plant has a gene doesn’t mean it’s always turned on. (You have a ton of genes for making digestive enzymes. The cells that line your small intestines turn these genes on, but you should be pretty grateful that the cells that line your eyeball don’t.) The four-leaf trait comes and goes depending on the season, for example. It’s also recessive. If you want to map it, you need a grad student who’s willing to spend a few years crawling around on her hands and knees counting leaves.

I wrote about that grad student, and the four-leaf gene, for the July 9 issue of Science magazine – but you have to have a subscription to read my story. (Or if you e-mail me and ask nicely, I’ll send it to you.)

Photo: came with the press release. I can’t find a credit for it.

In the last 24 hours, two friends have sent me a link to the same gig. And I have to say, they’re right. It’s made for me. You know how I love museums? Particularly sciencey ones? So much that I have a whole blog feature devoted to them? And I like adventures? And blogging?

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is looking for some adventuresome soul to spend a month living in the museum and blogging about it. And I mean living. One of the requirements is “sleeping in confined or ‘untraditional’ spaces,” and if you know me, you know that sleeping in any space at all has never been a problem. The person would hang out, learn about science, go to outside events, talk to visitors, all that stuff.

There are, of course, reasons why I should not apply. I have stuff to do at home. They want someone super outgoing, and I’m not sure I could be outgoing for a month straight. Also, it’s kind of weird that they frame the $10,000 payment as a prize at the end – if I’m going to live in a freaking museum for a month, I want to be pretty darn confident there’s some money coming my way. But I have to say, it sounds cool.

Here’s the info. Intriguing, isn’t it? Maybe someone I know should apply and tell me all about it. Anyone?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I took the occasion of a visit to Colorado last week to drop in on the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The building opened in 1908, which is positively ancient for Colorado. And like any self-respecting natural history museum, it is chock full of dead animals. As a special bonus, though, they extend this to the human animal. Not only because one of those dead-modern-humans exhibits was on when I was there (this one – I skipped it). The museum also has a nifty little exhibit of Egyptian mummies.

First: A dead reptile of the Mesozoic Era. Or what’s left of it. I thought this Stegosaurus was particularly lovely. I don’t remember seeing those scutes below the neck before. Aren’t they pretty?

This fossil was found in 1937 near Cañon City, Colorado by a high school teacher. They redid the pose after discovering another Stegosaurus skeleton in 1992 – that showed them things like how the back plates and tail spikes were arranged.

You know how birds eat grit to help them digest their food? Dinosaurs did that, too:

They’re called gastroliths.

Check out how tough this fish is. It’s a big predator from the sea that covered Kansas late in the dinosaur era.

See how tough it is? It died with a whole fish in its belly. You can see the tail at left and the vertebrae scattered along toward the right. (The head and everything were there, too.)

On to the dead humans!

In the old days, visiting Egypt was a lot like it is today in some ways. People marveled at the pyramids and the Sphinx. It was really hot. They bought souvenirs. The souvenirs were just a little different, that’s all. Until 1946, a visitor to Egypt could pick up a mummy to show the folks back home. In 1904, a wealthy businessman from Colorado went to Egypt and came home with a couple of mummies. They were displayed in a museum in Pueblo until the last 15 years or so; they’re on long-term loan to Denver now.

In the late 90s, the scientists in Denver took the mummies to get CT scans at a university medical center. (They rode in an ambulance.) This is much less destructive than the old way of figuring out what’s inside a mummy – unwrapping it. Without messing with the linen at all, they could look inside and learn about the people inside. First, this lady:

At some point in her history, somebody thought it was a good idea to unwrap her head. She’s in a very simple sarcophagus, so they had a good bet she was poor to start with. When they did the CT scan, they learned that the mummifiers hadn’t even bothered to remove her internal organs – they just shriveled in place. Her linen covering is only a few layers thick, and there are no charms or amulets wrapped into it.

Another mummy was also in a poor person’s coffin – a poor man’s coffin, from the way it was done. But the CT scan showed that the innards were a wealthy woman.

See the two white things – I think the top one is the heart, wrapped in linen and ready to go for the afterlife. So that’s part of what shows you she’s wealthy. The other part is the thing below that – a scarab tucked into her wrappings. They don’t know how she wound up in the wrong coffin – it could’ve happened in ancient times, or it could’ve been done by the souvenir seller in 1904.

Amazing preparations, aren’t they? The Egyptians took the afterlife seriously. The museum also displayed some of the tools and ornaments people had buried with them. It seems like a waste of effort, but what do I know? I’ll sure feel dumb if I die and get to the afterlife and find out I was supposed to bring my stuff with me.

The museum also has a lovely set of dioramas. There’s a whole room showing all the environments of Colorado, from low-ish desert, through the plains, to the alpine tundra. And a whole section of Botswana – the trip I was planning last year to Namibia and Botswana fell through, so I was able to imagine just a bit of what it would be like by looking at this:

I’m inclined to be a little disdainful of dioramas, but I guess they’re good for imaginary vacations.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Today for ScienceNOW  I wrote about meerkats – you know, the adorable critters – oh, did you need a picture? Here:

It’s from a long-term study site in the Kalahari desert. Most of the research there has to do with the evolution of cooperation; meerkats are social animals who live in groups. If you’re going to follow the meerkats all day, you need to be there when they first poke their noses out of the sleeping burrow.

In summer, some groups get up as early as 5 a.m. “We have to get up at ludicrous hours of the morning to get there on time,” says behavioral ecologist Alex Thornton. But the scientists who work there also know something else: “There are certain groups, where if you are going there in the morning, you can have a bit of a lie-in” – because they consistently get up later. Thornton and some colleagues analyzed 11 years of data and found that their sense was right – some groups consistently get up early, and some consistently get up later.

The researchers concluded that this is evidence of a tradition, a controversial concept in the non-human animal world. They looked at all kinds of characteristics of the sleeping burrows, but couldn’t find any other reason that would explain some groups getting up later. This could even be true in the same burrow – “You might find that group A use a burrow and they get up late and group B use the same burrow a few days later and get up early,” Thornton says. And it’s not genetic; if a new meerkat comes in, it learns what everybody else does.

See my very short story (and one more meerkat picture) here.

Photos: Alex Thornton