Helen FieldsScience Writer

I just came across something I totally forgot I’d written: why bats don’t like to fly in the rain. (It takes more energy to fly when their fur is wet.)

My first ever story in New Scientist is out – it’s about a new exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum here in Washington. So it’s like my Museum Tourist posts right here on this blog, except (a) I got paid for it and (b) more than five people will read it. Many of those people will be in the UK, because that’s where New Scientist is based. Everything about this strikes me as kind of cool.

The exhibit is called “NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration” and it’s mostly art commissioned by NASA. That’s right – NASA has an artists’ program, where they give artists access to their people and a bit of money, and the artists make art. It’s not very much money. The artist I talked to said she probably lost money on it. It’s more for the awesomeness of doing art for NASA. The first couple of decades of art live at the Air & Space Museum and the rest are held by NASA, and they got together to pick some works for this traveling exhibit.

The story was only about 550 words, so it’s impossible to point out everything I liked about the exhibit. One of my favorite pieces was the one pictured above – it’s by artist Chakaia Booker, who does a lot of work with tires; for this sculpture, NASA gave her some old shuttle tire. It commemorates the Columbia disaster, and I thought it was quite effective in person.

You have to pay to read my story (sigh) but at least this link will get you the first two paragraphs. If you want to pick up a paper copy, it’s the June 11 issue.

Update, 9/14/11: New Scientist posted the text for free!

Credit: Courtesy NASA Art Program

In the April 1 issue of Science, I had a tiny item about a neat experiment. Two organizations along the Welsh-English border recruited volunteers to test whether the people who lived at 10 Iron Age hillforts in the area would have been able to see each other’s settlements. On a clear night in March, after the sun went down, they followed a schedule: every few minutes, the group at one of the hilltops would set off a flare so everyone else knew where to look, then wave their flashlights around. Groups saw each other from as much as 40 km away. Here’s a video from one of the participants.

Nobody knows if the people who lived there in the Iron Age would have communicated with bonfires or anything, or even if these places were occupied at the same time, but this suggests they at least could have been aware of each other, able to see cooking fires at night.

You have to be a subscriber to read the story, which is the last item here.

Of course, because I know the Lord of the Rings movies way too well, this made me think of the bit in the third movie when Pippin lights the signal fire at Minas Tirith and the word is passed from one hilltop to the next as the beacons are lit atop the magestic peaks of New Zealand, all the way to Edoras. (Anybody with me? Anybody?) I was sure that the woman who organized the experiment would be with me on this, but she didn’t remember this scene. I told her she should go watch it.

This week for ScienceNOW I wrote a story about a sex difference in how dogs think about physical objects. One of the sources I talked to called the results “odd” and I think you’ll agree. Nobody really has any idea why this difference exists. I recommend watching the video with the story, if only for what appears to be total confusion on the part of the dog. Here’s the story.

To accompany this story, I submit a completely unrelated, yet charming, photograph of a dog. Her name, for your information, is Hamburglar.

photo: me

The excellent David Grimm at ScienceNOW wins again…by assigning me yet another cool story. This time, it’s about a little kerfuffle in the journal Naturwissenschaften about the body size of the dodo. The dodo, you may recall, was a flightless bird – a relative of the pigeon, I learned last week – that lived on the uninhabited island of Mauritius. One assumes the dodos lived a fulfilling, pigeon-oriented, flightless life on Mauritius for many centuries, until the Dutch came along, discovered their Indian Ocean home, and messed it up. By the end of the 17th century, dodos were gone. I think it was the first time humans were like, “hey, wait, we just made something go extinct.”

I’d always heard that dodos went extinct because they were tasty and were a nice change from Dutch ship food; in other words, that sailors ate them all. Actually, one of my sources told me, it was probably the introduced mammals that did them in. They would’ve competed with pigs for food, and both rats and pigs probably ate their eggs.

Anyway, read the story. I discovered in the course of doing it that someone had already worked out almost two decades ago that the fat pictures of dodos were probably wrong, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with that guy about his study and the new work. Next time I’m in Edinburgh, his museum is definitely on the list.

art: Dutch School, 17th century

For Friday’s (March 25) issue of Science magazine, I wrote a story about some space scientists in Britain who are developing a detector for counterfeit whisky. Here’s the link – you have to be a subscriber for it to work. (The item is called “Proof Positive.”)

The principle is, as tricky as a counterfeit may be, it’s impossible for it to be exactly the same color as the real thing. So they’re shining light through bottles of whisky and seeing what wavelengths of light emerge from the other side. They can also detect watered-down whisky.

Of course, they get samples given to them by the companies. You might think, “haha, those clever scientists, getting free booze at work” but the point of the research is to do it without opening the bottles. And the guy in charge doesn’t like whisky, anyway.

I wrote this story two months ago and keep forgetting to post it. It’s about some social amoebas, formerly known as slime molds, that farm. They pick up the bacteria they’ve been eating and take the crop along when they disperse. Nuts, eh?

Everything about these social amoebas is a little nutty. Amoebas, as you may know, are single-celled organisms. But these amoebas, when they get low on food, can come together and grow a little fruiting body on a stalk that disperses spores. So they’re single cells, but they’re single cells that can come together and divvy up tasks to build a whole, you know, thing, with a base and a stalk and spores. That’s just cool.

Be sure to watch the video. Here’s the link to the story again.

Also, in case you’re wondering, amoebas and amoebae are both acceptable plurals of amoeba, according to this dictionary. (I just looked it up.)

This weekend the AAAS meeting is in town. Hordes of scientists and science writers have descended on D.C. for a weekend of general science. It’s good times – lots of interesting ideas flying around and tons of colleagues to hang out with.

Friday I wrote about bilingual babies. The idea of someone being bilingual at eight months may seem a bit nutty, but apparently it’s true – babies are born with a basic sense of the language or languages they heard in utero, and they keep developing their knowledge from there. I wrote before about a study that found that babies cry differently depending on the language they’re growing up with – read about that here.

Send these Neanderthals to the dentist! For a study published last month in PNAS, an anthropology grad student used dental tools to scrape hardened plaque off the teeth of Neanderthals. She wasn’t trying to help them avoid tooth decay. They’d been dead for tens of thousands of years. She was looking inside the deposits for starch grains and other bits of trapped plant matter. This is helping to settle a debate about what Neanderthals ate, which could help explain why they went extinct.

You may remember – Neanderthals are another species of human. They’re in the genus Homo, just like us. We even overlapped a bit, in Europe. Our genomes tell us there was some interbreeding. But modern humans took over and the Neanderthals went extinct. Nobody knows why, and one hypothesis is that it was because they only ate meat, and they just couldn’t get enough calories to compete with modern humans.

The new study shows: Nope, they were definitely eating plants. The researchers were even able to figure out that a lot of what they saw in the plaque came from grasses, relatives of the oats and barley and whatnot that humans got into later. There were even grains of starch that had been cooked. So the all-meat hypothesis is wrong, and also: they were cooking! Whoa!

I wrote about this for Science; you can read it here if you’re a subscriber.

photo: Amanda Henry

New story! On meteorites! Read all about it!

When I was working on my story about the origins of life, I kept coming across meteorites. Scientists study them to understand the early chemistry of the solar system, including the chemistry that led to the basic building blocks of life.

I’m fascinated by these little emissaries from space. Other than moon rocks collected on Apollo and a few unmanned missions to comets and such, the only stuff we have from outside Earth is what’s fallen in the form of meteorites. They’re kind of tricky  - we don’t know much about their history or where they came from – but they’re just about all we’ve got.

The meteorites didn’t make it into that story, but my wonderful editor, Laura Helmuth, found a way for me to write about them anyway: an article in a Smithsonian Collector’s Edition. This special edition of the magazine is called Mysteries of the Universe and yes, the only way to read my article is to buy the special issue for $8.99 plus $1 shipping and handling. (Some of the articles are online, but mine isn’t one of them.) I know, that’s $9.99 you could otherwise spend on yarn or a movie, but it’s a really good article! Surely that’s worth 10 bucks. There are nice stories on lots of other topics, too, from Galileo to black holes to the search for Earth-like planets around other stars.

Scientists use meteorites to learn lots of things about space. My article includes this behind-the-scenes visit to the meteorite collection at the National Museum of Natural History. I also visited some astrobiologists at NASA who crush bits of meteorites and had a very funny phone conversation with the guy who runs ANSMET, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites project.

The ANSMET FAQ includes these instructions on how to apply: “Here’s the first step- think about it for a minute. Do you really want to freeze your rear end off, living in a tent for 45 days, with no contact to the outside world, no warm bathrooms, no showers, no web surfing, no cable? If you fail that intelligence test, then the next step is simply a letter (on paper, please) stating your interest in the program.”

I don’t plan to apply. But anyway. Buy the special issue.