Helen FieldsScience Writer

Fascinating German fact of the day: the word for “birth control pill” is apparently Antibabypille. Well, it’s descriptive, isn’t it? I’m reading an article in Die Welt about a woman who was taking birth control pills and died of a pulmonary embolism – which is the much more straightforward Lungenembolie. (It’s an embolism…in your lungs!)

This weekend the Burns Fellows had our official almost-end-of-fellowship meeting in Munich (or, if you prefer, München). There’s this little festival you may have heard of in Munich. Happens once a year? Lots of beer and lederhosen? Yeah, Oktoberfest, that’s right. It started on Saturday. Many of my smart friends have pointed out that it’s actually September, so here you go, fact of the day: Oktoberfest always runs for 16 days and ends on the first Sunday in October, so the latest it’s ever going to go is October 7, and it can start as early as mid-September.

Oktoberfest is the kind of thing I should hate. I don’t like beer. I really, really don’t like cigarette smoke. Loud boisterous rooms aren’t really my scene. And it was really hot in there.

But, holy cow, it was fun. Soon after we got to the Augustiner beer tent and ingratiated ourselves with a partly-full table of Swedes and Germans (you have to have a table or you can’t order beer), the band started playing, and we learned that what you actually do at Oktoberfest is dance on benches. That’s it. That’s the whole activity. Wave your one-liter mug of beer and dance on benches and sing along with the band. Note that you do not dance on tables. You’re not supposed to step on the tables. Everybody just stands on the benches. It’s easier than standing on the floor, really. (This may vary in other tents at other times. But in that tent on Saturday evening, it was all about the bench-dancing.)

I would totally go again. Heck, I have a dirndl now, I have to find another occasion to wear it.

Sorry the picture’s shaky. Blame one of my new Swedish friends.

For today’s Welt I wrote about colorblind monkeys – scientists cured them of their colorblindness with gene therapy. “Cured” is kind of a silly word in this case. The males of this species naturally don’t see red and green, so it’s not like they have something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. So, more accurately: Scientists gave monkeys a gene for a pigment they didn’t have, and now the little guys see colors like we do.

Aww, lookit the cute li’l monkey doing the test! He’s supposed to find the pink dots among the gray dots. If he gets it right he gets a drop of grape juice.

The monkeys in the study are squirrel monkeys. Isn’t that a cute name? It sounds tiny and adorable, and like it would enjoy hopping around in trees, which I think is a fairly accurate description of the species. So, guess what the German word for them is? Totenkopfaffen. Death’s-head monkey. Yipe.

Progress update: I actually wrote this story in German, rather than writing in English and translating. And it ran in TWO newspapers today. Woo. I’ve mostly written for Die Welt so far, but the science section also supplies stories for Welt am Sonntag (the Sunday edition)  and Berliner Morgenpost. 

Photo Credit: Neitz Laboratory

One of the manz interesting things about living in foreign countries is adapting to new computer kezboards. Iäm tzping on mz work computer right now. Have zou guessed which two kezs are switched on a German kezboard? Thatäs right, itäs Y and Z. Also, the ä is where the ’ should be and the ö is where the ; should be and I donät even remember what should be here: ü.

These differences make sense. German uses a lot more of the last letter of the alphabet than English does, so it makes sense to put it in a place thatäs easier to hit. (And Germans have much less reason to use the secondßtoßlast letter.) (See what happened to the hzphen?) And of course, zou want the ö, ä, and ü right where zou can find them.

Donät worrz, after a month on German kezboards, I actuallz am capable of tzping on them without making too manz mistakes. For one thing, a colleague at Bild showed me how to switch the kezboard to the American lazout. And also, if I slow down and think a bit, I can hit the z when I want the y and vice versa. I even know where to find all the punctuation marks I use in dailz life.

But this is a blog. Who slows down and thinks on a blog_ (Um, that sentence is supposed to end with a question mark, just so zou know.)

For today’s paper, I wrote about late blight – you may know it better as potato blight, the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. It’s still a huge problem for potato and tomato farmers, so a bunch of scientists sequenced its genome (their paper is in Nature today). Here’s my story.

Usually when I read about some new genome sequence, I get a big “eh” feeling. As in, “eh, big string of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, who cares.” But this is a really cool disease, and super important economically, and it turns out the genome itself is interesting, too.

The organism that causes late blight has a ginormous genome, with a ton of repeating sequences of DNA. Those big repeaty areas include lots of copies of the nasty genes that help it attack plants, like genes that cause cell death and stuff. So maybe there’s some way that the bug is using those extra copies to overcome the plants’ defenses. Cool, huh?

Chad Nussbaum, the guy at the Broad Institute whose group did the sequencing, said this genome was really hard because of all the repeats – and it helped them figure out stuff they can use later. “Every genome teaches you something new,” he told me. “They’re all strange in their own little ways.”

Best thing I found while working on this story: PotatoPro, a news source for the potato processing industry with headlines like “Sultry Sally has re-launched its low fat potato chip with even less fat” and “Man dies after falling into potato harvester.”

This weekend I discovered my perfect German audience: three-year-old girls. I was reading a book to the daughter of a friend of a friend about some animals putting on a show. I didn’t quite get the pronunciation of the word for “stage” right, and she corrected me. With my deft foreign-language punning skills, I launched into a discussion of whether we were having stages or beans (they kind of sound alike) for dinner. It was clearly the funniest thing she had heard all day. Possibly in her whole life.

I also had a nice long chat about dinosaurs with a five-year-old boy. I didn’t catch all of it, but I did learn that they were bigger than a car. Best thing about talking to kids: they don’t get embarrassed when you mangle a sentence so badly that it’s unintelligible. They say “What?” so you know to try again.

So, as long as I don’t have to talk to or write for anyone over the age of six, I think I’m ok.

Here’s the story I was talking about yesterday. Yeah, it’s in German. Google Translator actually does a pretty good job with it – select German to English, paste the URL in the box, and it’ll show you the page in English.

Extra fun – you can scroll down and read the comments. Ah, newspaper comment sections. They’re juvenile and abusive everywhere in the world. Actually, most of these are kinda funny, and only one person swore he’s deleting the link from his computer and never reading Die Welt again. He was apparently upset that this “revolution and milestone in the research” did not get the appreciation it deserves.

Yeah…I’m not sure “revolution” and “milestone” are the right words for this study. I’d classify it as “pretty neat.” The whole idea of building telescopes in Antarctica is totally awesome, but it’s not new. This is just one more suggestion about a good place to put them.

Today I wrote my first story in German! Ok, actually my second story in German. I wrote a little tiny story last week at Bild, but something went tragically wrong and it didn’t get published. But today’s story went into a layout and went to the presses and will be in newspapers tomorrow! Real live newspapers! Which, apparently, people in Germany still read.

The edit went a lot better than you’d think, considering German is not my best language. It’s not even in my top three. In the first go-round, the editor corrected my grammar (which wasn’t *too* bad, but I’d guessed some genders wrong and messed up some cases) and fixed the two or three expressions that made no sense. I made the corrections, and then he went through and did an edit that was a bit more rewritey while I watched over his shoulder and suggested alternate phrasings and the intern at the next desk looked up words on Leo. In the final version, I still know what all the words mean, and it still ends with something funny I thought up. (My other funny was cut for space. Sigh.)

The editor and I bonded over our mutual love of the letter ß. It was taken out of a lot of German words in the spelling reform of 1996, presumably because it’s weird and people who don’t speak German don’t know what to do when it shows up in a text. It’s called the “eszett” and it makes an “s” sound. I’d used it to write the word “daß,” because cmon, there’s a ß key right on my keyboard, and that’s how I learned to spell “daß” in 1990, and besides, I love that letter. But the spellcheck on his computer caught it and he replaced it with “ss,” and we had a little grumble about it.

The people at Die Welt still seem to think I speak German. I suspect that I actually speak a unique hybrid of German, Norwegian, and German-accented English. But they keep speaking German to me, so I keep speaking my mishmash, and everyone seems happy.

Today was my first day at the new workplace, Die Welt. (“The World.”) It’s got the same publisher as Bild but is somewhat higher-brow. For example, there are no naked ladies on the cover and very few exclamation points in the stories.

I wasn’t optimistic about my first day – I’d never managed to reach my official contact before starting, and when I reached a secretary on Friday, she appeared to be mad at me – but it went really well. I already have an assignment for tomorrow. And it’s for a story I proposed myself. At a meeting. IN GERMAN.

I showed up in the morning and spoke German and somehow they took this to mean that I actually speak German, rather than just being able to fake it in brief, uncomplicated encounters, and they keep speaking it to me. (And repeating themselves more slowly and with simpler vocabulary when I’m confused, bless their hearts.)

I’m afraid the editor thinks I am also writing my story in German. My written German is like that of a five-year-old who has only learned one or two sentence structures and has a severely limited vocabulary and was probably also raised by wolves (see example of corrections here). Of course, everyone here reads English perfectly well and I’m sure I’ll be able to get translation help if I need it. But it’s for Wednesday’s paper. So they’d better help fast.

Wish me luck.

My mother forwarded me a link today to a New York Times story about Tatort, a German police drama that’s been running since 1970. 1970! Almost 40 years! My parents watch the Cologne version at home, with subtitles, but I now know – thank you, NYT – that they produce versions of it all over the country, it’s on every Sunday evening, and by not watching it, I am clearly missing out on something BIG. Don’t worry; it’s on my calendar for the rest of the time I’m here.

UPDATE (8/28): My mom points out that the link originally came from her friend Judy.