Helen FieldsScience Writer

Plants are amazing. I said this to a friend yesterday and he corrected me: “Everything is amazing.” Which is true. Kidneys? Amazing. Meteorites? Amazing. DNA? Amazing.

But, for now, let’s talk about plants. They’re amazing. They can communicate by releasing chemicals. Messages like, “Come eat the tasty caterpillars!”

For ScienceNOW last week, I wrote about a study on tobacco plants that, when they’re being chomped by caterpillars, send out a chemical message that calls the caterpillars’ predators. Amazing, huh? Read about it here.

photo: Matthey Film

A new study finds that bird lice have evolved cryptic coloration. (What you or I might call camouflage.) Read my tiny story about it here.

Sulfur-crested cockatoos are awesome. This is my favorite fact about a trip I took to Australia in 1996: instead of pigeons, the parks have flocks of sulfur-crested cockatoos. At least, the parks I remember. Ok, I actually have a lot of favorite facts about Australia, like the fact that the kangaroos in Carnarvon National Park were total pests and kept trying to steal food from the picnic tables. Also, we were on Heron Island during the time when the female sea turtles were coming on shore to lay their eggs and the babies from earlier nests were hatching out and swimming out to sea (where probably most of them became shark snacks).

Man. Australia was cool.

Last week I reported on some strange rocks from South Australia that may preserve the oldest animal fossils. Or may not. Ok, nobody knows. But they look kind of like animals. Read about it here.

I like that the function of the journal article was basically to throw the idea out there, see if any other geologists come across anything interesting. There’s plenty of rock of the right age exposed on the planet; you just have to tell geologists to look for it, and other samples of these animals (or whatever they are) could turn up.

In the I know everybody category, the lead author’s name sounded vaguely familiar. Before I called him I looked at his website, and indeed – he went to Carleton College at roughly the same time as me. We have four friends in common on Facebook. Fifteen years ago, I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup. Today, his name just sounded vaguely familiar.

Back in April, I went on my first work travel in ages. A magazine sent me on a big, exotic trip to…West Virginia. Ok, it doesn’t sound so exotic, and it’s certainly not very far. But it was fascinating. I was in McDowell County, the southernmost part of the state. It’s a coal mining region – and there are a lot fewer jobs in coal mining than there used to be. In the 1950 census, the county had 98,000 people; in this census, they say they’ll be lucky to break 25,000. Two high schools were closing at the end of this spring to reopen in a new, consolidated school. (Read my story here.)

I had a wonderful couple of days in the town of Welch. People were very friendly. I realized after I came back that I’d managed to meet everyone who was running to represent the area in the state legislature. The Democratic primaries were coming up and there were yard signs all over town. One was the incumbent, so we stopped in to say hi at his office across from the beautiful old court house.

I met another of them when I had dinner with the Kiwanis Club. (I was like a visiting dignitary. I was hardly allowed to pay for any meals.) We ate at a drive-in, which also had indoor seating – not to worry.

I met the third candidate when I visited the high school, where he’s a teacher. The stop at Mount View High School was the reason I went to West Virginia. I was there to report on an after-school and summer program that’s designed to get high schoolers excited about careers in science and health. The program is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, whose magazine I was writing for.

Here’s the only motel in Welch, West Virginia.

That’s me with Cathy Morton-McSwain, my gracious host and chauffeur. She works for HSTA and drives all over the state visiting schools.

McDowell County really is beautiful. Spring was just arriving, the hillsides were green and lush, and everyone was so nice. I’d love to go back sometime. Here’s my story – enjoy!

Robert Krulwich is one of my media heroes. He’s been working in radio forever, telling entertaining stories about topics that are difficult to explain. These days, he reports for the science desk at NPR and cohosts Radiolab, which is produced at WNYC in New York.

Two summers ago he gave a commencement address at Caltech about  how important it is for scientists to tell stories about their work. As an example of how to do it right, he used a story from Smithsonian. And it’s by me! He doesn’t name me, but he quotes extensively. (Yes, I do pick funny quotes, thank you for noticing.) You can listen to the whole speech here – he starts talking about my story at 19:45.

This was possibly even cooler than being anthologized.

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.

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.

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

A lot of endurance athletes have some kind of training regimen that includes being at high altitudes. When you’re at high altitudes, there’s not very much oxygen. That stimulates your body to make extra red blood cells and otherwise adapt to hypoxia. It’s the same kind of benefit cyclists get from blood doping (only it’s not against the rules). Blood doping, in case you need a review – I did – is when you get yourself extra blood, either by taking someone else’s, banking your own and injecting it before a competition, or taking erythropoeitin (EPO) to stimulate red blood cell production.

This week for ScienceNOW, I wrote about a study on people who have a particular genetic mutation that means their bodies always act like they’re low on oxygen. It might help suggest an upper limit to how much benefit athletes can get out of staying at high altitude.

A number of national teams spent time at high elevations before the World Cup – but that may have had more to do with acclimitization, because four of the nine stadiums are over 4,000 feet. If you’re going to run for an hour and a half plus possible extra time at 5,500 feet, you don’t want it be your first day after coming up from sea level.