Helen FieldsScience Writer

Having blogged before on songs about the elements, and being a Japanese speaker, I believe I am in a position of unique authority to say: Yes, of course Tom Lehrer’s song about the elements needed to be translated into Japanese. Watch it here:

I learned about it from a blog post by Bethany Halford over at Chemical & Engineering News – she also explains how this version happened to come about and to be sung by these 13-year-old Japanese-American twins.

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 week or so ago I went to a party that was organized around singing the Pirates of Penzance in someone’s living room. It was a great party, and it reminded me of this excellent song, to the tune of the Major General’s big moment:

I grew up on Tom Lehrer records. Of course, the kids of today, or at least the ones with cool parents, are growing up on the songs of They Might Be Giants. So, here’s a new song about elements – which, I have to admit, is a lot more educational than the Tom Lehrer one.

Fun with science!

Update, 10/14/2010: A new version of the Tom Lehrer song, in Japanese pop style!

Today I spent two hours watching a scientist do incredibly tedious work. The time actually went really fast – she does this incredibly tedious work all the time, but to me it was all new and I had a lot to figure out:

What are you pipetting?

(Sodium hydroxide solution.)

What’s that machine called?

(A rotator.)

What are those pretty liquids?

(Buffers.)

What’s in those tanks?

(Argon.)

Actually, she thought the time went fast, too. So not only did I pick up a scene for a story I’m writing, I served a purpose: entertaining the postdoc.