Helen FieldsScience Writer

Another nice blog post by Sarah Zielinski at Smithsonian about my work – in this case, about my wacky idea that scientists are also people. I know! It’s a crazy idea, but I think it might be true!

This afternoon the phone rang and the caller ID said it was “T. Szymanski.” Well, that’s a pretty unusual last name, and I thought, that’s odd, is the T. Szymanski I know from college calling me for some kind of fundraising thing or something? I don’t think she’s ever been involved in such things before, but who knows, maybe she got inspired.

But it wasn’t her, it was the scientist who was going to call me that afternoon when he managed to get his daughter to take a nap. I asked about the name on his caller ID and – yeah, he’s married to the T. Szymanski I know.

The world is very, very small.

And just think – I would never have known this if he hadn’t called me (which is unusual) from home (I usually talk to people in their offices) and his wife hadn’t both kept her name and used it when signing up for phone service. I wonder how many other scientists I’ve talked to who are married to people I went to college with, and I’ve just never realized it?

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

Meerkats are adorable little mongooses that live in the Kalahari Desert in tight social groups. Each group is dominated by a female who does most of the reproducing. Others help raise her pups, even lactating so they can nurse them.

This sort of thing happens in many corners of the animal kingdom. Look at ants, for example. In a lot of ant species, one female, the queen, does all the reproduction while her daughters do all the child-rearing and other work.

It’s pretty clear what’s in it for the dominant female. She gets to have tons of offspring and help raising them. But the division of reproductive labor isn’t absolute; subordinates sometimes reproduce, too. This week I wrote about a study that tried to work out why that happens in meerkats.

Biologists have come up with a whole lot of well-thought-out theory on how social systems work, but to test this stuff in the real world, you have to spend a long time watching animals up close. This meerkat study has been going on since 1993, with people in the field working on it full-time. Here’s my story. Uh – there’s a lot of theory. Enjoy.

Cute meerkat detail: They’re easy to train with crumbs of hard-boiled egg, and three times a day they step on the scales to be weighed.

photo credit: Russell Venn

Over at Smithsonian magazine, blogger Sarah Zielinski has written about my Origins of Life story and the concept of primordial soup. I said in my story that it wasn’t exactly a chunky beef stew, more like a few molecules scattered here and there; Sarah came up with “Primordial Weak Tea,” which is excellent. And she continues the trend of Museum Videos You Know and Love with a video of Julia Child cooking up a primordial soup, which used to run in the Air & Space Museum. Read it here!

On Saturday I went on a geology tour of D.C. – Callan Bentley, who teaches geology at Northern Virginia Community College, took a group of science writers around the bottom of the zoo, through a bit of Rock Creek Park, over the Duke Ellington Bridge, and down to an abandoned quarry near Georgetown. It was kind of mind-blowing to add this layer of geological history on top of an area I’ve driven through hundreds, probably thousands of times. We used to be under some pretty tall mountains here, a really long time ago.

Sarah Zielinski at Smithsonian wrote on her blog about finding fossils in building stone – Bentley stopped to point out some fossil crinoids in a block of Indiana limestone on the Duke Ellington Bridge. She used my pictures in the blog post, which is exciting, but it is somewhat ego-deflating to note that the first comment is about how the picture isn’t good enough to make out the fossils. Well, ok then. (I think the actual problem is that they aren’t very exciting fossils. We’re not talking, like, T. rex ribcages here.)

Bentley also stopped at one end of the bridge to point out an interesting variation in color:

Up above, it kinda looks like standard aged building; below, it’s white. (I suspect this looks standard because Indiana limestone is used in a lot of buildings.) Here’s what’s happening. Up above, the Indiana limestone has interacted with sulfur in acid rain to make gypsum, which is calcium sulfate. Gypsum is white, but the stone is dark because the gypsum traps bits of dirt and pollution and crud. The stone below that line doesn’t look that way because it gets cleaned regularly – because that’s where graffiti-writers can reach.

Here’s Callan Bentley’s blog and a nifty-sounding new site that tells you where to find fossils in D.C. buildings.

I unfairly maligned the Hope Diamond in my last post. It really is lovely. I mean, I like sparkly rocks as much as the next girl. To make up for my slight, here are some people looking at the Hope Diamond.

This arrangement is so much better – it used to be recessed into a wall, and you had to stand in this long line of people shuffling past the gem displays forever just to see it, and then I feel it was quite normal and reasonable to be irritated with it by the end. But now it’s out in the middle of a gallery, just off the rotunda, and its base rotates every few seconds so people can look at it from all sides.

I didn’t take a picture of the diamond itself. It’s pretty well fixed in my brain – it looks like this.

Well, wait now, that’s not true. For one thing, you can see it in this next picture. And for another, it doesn’t actually look like that. At the time of this visit, the end of May, it was out of its setting; they were displaying it by itself, for a little change of pace. They may still be. I dunno. Anyway. Behold the sparkliness:

So…shiny…

pictures by me, of course

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

A friend asked if I referenced the CHON movie in my story about the origins of life. I did not. Which is tragic, really – the CHON movie is an absolute classic of science cinema, and for more than a decade now it’s been a required stop on the Helen Fields Tour of the Smithsonian. (It ranks below the Hope Diamond, which everyone wants to see despite the fact that it is just a sparkly rock, and above the artifacts from Troy, which are less exciting than you’d expect.) It plays in a little theater area off the dinosaur hall, although the last couple of times I stopped by, it was not running, which makes me nervous.

Enter…the internet. Now you, too, can watch and learn why we call it the CHON movie, even though its title is “Enter Life.” This version of the video doesn’t have the narration, but I think you’ll be able to follow it anyway. And no narration means you can pay more attention to the catchy tunes.

A story I worked on for nearly a year is finally out in Smithsonian. It’s about the origins of life. We’re talking way, way, way back, billions of years, to the time when Earth was rock and water and a very different atmosphere, because plants didn’t exist and therefore hadn’t started spitting out oxygen yet. It’s about how the very first building blocks of life, in this case amino acids, were formed and found each other on an unfriendly planet.

Read the story.

The story ended up being a profile of Bob Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science here in Washington who also collects trilobites and Hudson River School paintings, writes a lot of books and articles, and plays professional trumpet.

I’ve blogged about this story a number of times, which I can now point out – this visit to the lab became the section in the story where I watched Kateryna Klochko do her work. This and this were for a section of the story that got cut. This…was never in the story. I just thought it was funny. This is a question that came up in my reporting.

And I started going to these concerts because Hazen was playing in one, and I haven’t missed one since. Free Bach at lunchtime – you can’t beat it.

A month ago, Dave Grimm, my editor at ScienceNOW, e-mailed me about quotes:

“as you know, i hate to flatter you.  but you do tend to get awesome quotes for your stories.  also as you know, i’m teaching a science writing class at hopkins in the fall, and i’ve got a section on how to get good quotes.  but i’d like some advice from the master.  any tips i could pass along to the students?”

So I wrote back a whole essay about how I get quotes. I spoke to his class about quotes yesterday, and here’s a modified version of the original message.

A lot of it is ear, I think – I just listen for funny/colorful/illuminating things the person says, and make sure to write those down. Often they’re kind of throwaway comments; I don’t stop typing just because the source is done with their major exposition. If I’m at their lab and recording, I leave the recorder running until I’m in my car.

Once when I was an intern at the Monterey County Herald I interviewed a marine biologist about how marine protected areas can’t be everything to everyone, and he said, “They might generate ecosystems that have low numbers of particularly luscious and juicy species that you’d like to eat yourself.” I can’t remember the context – I think he might have gotten irritated and busted out the sarcasm.

I ran into him a while later at a talk and he was like, augh, as soon as I said that, I knew that was the quote you were going to use. Heh. I told him, of course, what a wonderful and evocative quote it was, and how it would drive home the point to readers better than anything else I wrote.

It’s important to set the tone – in part so that the scientist doesn’t talk over your head and use jargon, and also so that you’ll get them to talk naturally. The good quotes are ones that sound like natural speech; you need the interviewee to relax and say, “The poo just sort of stands out at you.” (That story here.) I often try to change the tone and loosen interviewees up by laughing at something that’s only marginally amusing. I make vaguely funny comments and observations myself and hope they’ll run with it.

That sounds like some creepy manipulation, but it’s not. That’s just my personality – I laugh at things that are only marginally amusing and make vaguely funny observations all the time. It’s how I talk to strangers at parties, too, which is not that different from a phone interview.

A few weeks ago I was interviewing a paleoanthropologist about how he studies the habitats of early hominins, our ancestors, and he was talking about how you need this whole multidisciplinary team. He said, so, I’ve learned how to identify diatoms to species. And I said, sarcastically, “which is why you went into anthropology” and he laughed and gave me this absolutely beautiful quote about how fun it is to be a paleoanthropologist, which I think I ended the story with: ”That’s one of the beauties of paleoanthropology, for me, is it allows you to be kind of like one of those old-fashioned natural history types. Naturalists, they used to be called. It allows you to study like crazy to learn a heck of a lot about a lot of different things.” (This guy.)

Another science writer I know asks people questions he know will piss them off if they’re being boring. I imagine the key to making this work is finding something that is natural for you and makes other people want to say interesting things, whether it’s because they’re amused or annoyed. I really just want people to relax and talk naturally. (Although I bet my amused-at-everything personality annoys some people, too.)

Digressions are helpful. I’ll often take the interviewee away from the main topic, like asking them what else they’re working on, or about something else they mentioned, or whatever. I do this because it’s interesting, and it’s fun to have smart people on the phone. This person has agreed to be on the phone with me – they’ll answer questions about anything. But it has the side benefit that when they get back to the main topic, they often have something newly interesting to say.

Sometimes you get lucky. Whitey Hagadorn from this story – he’s just a great talker. He’s clear, non-jargony, insightful. And I talked to a totally hilarious scientist about working in Antarctica a few weeks ago.

I do think a lot of it is ear. I think people say pithy, illuminating things all the time, and you just have to recognize them, and realize which ones fit into your story.

One of my favorite quotes ever is from a Random Sample about four-leaf clover genetics. The grad student said: “Three years of looking for a four-leaf clover on 200, 400 plants each time, you get pretty good at spotting them.” This wasn’t actually the first quote I chose for her, but I was going back through my notes and realized how much it accomplishes at once. It tells you the length of the study and how many plants were involved, it tells you it’s possible to learn how to spot four-leaf clovers, and it’s funny. Perfect for a 220-word story.

It also probably doesn’t hurt that I type really, really fast.

Earlier this week I needed to keep a sandwich cool for a few hours, so I took an insulated lunch bag down from the top of the fridge. Since I work at home, I don’t have a lot of use for insulated lunch bags these days. I opened it and realized I must not have used this one since I left my last job in the fall of 2008:

That, my friends, is what a two-and-a-half-year-old apple core looks like. It’s mostly replaced by fungus. I like thinking about how this whole ecosystem of decomposition was sitting quietly on top of my fridge, taking apart this apple core, which really had a lot of nutrition left in it – flesh, seeds, skin, stem – while I was off gallivanting around the Bering Sea, working in Berlin, singing in various concerts, and spending a lot of time sitting at my desk and working.

Now it’s off to the landfill.