Helen FieldsScience Writer

In 2005 my dad and I visited friends in Mali and they took us all over the country, seeing tons of amazing sites.

One of the less exciting sites was Djenné-Jéno. Now, Djenné is fantastic. It’s a city of mud brick buildings, including the world’s largest, this mosque:

But Djenné-Jéno is an archaeological site just down the road from Djenné. Several centuries ago, it was an important city. Now it looks like this:

To an archaeologist, that may be exciting, but to me, it kind of looked like a big empty space covered in broken pieces of pottery.

So I was pretty excited a few weeks ago when I was at Yale for a story, dropped in on the Yale University Art Gallery, and found this case of wonderful terracotta figures from Djenné-Jéno (or Jenné-Jeno, as they spell it).

I love the personality – they’re so different from anything I’ve seen. This male figure is from sometime between about AD 600 and 1200:

The label called this a “maternity figure,” from a bit later, somewhere in the AD 1100-1700 range:

Another label mentioned that some of the figurines show signs of disease and might have been somehow associated with healing. Look at the maternity figure’s back:

I’m not sure what disease involves polka-dotted snakes, but it can’t be a good one.

Isn’t life cool? It was so neat to wander into the art gallery and see these delightful figures from a site I’d walked on. Here’s some background information on Djenné-Jéno from the people who did a lot of the excavation there.

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pictures: first two by Jim Fields; the others by me

The last time I was in New Haven, I heard that one must see the Beinecke library on campus at Yale. I didn’t get around to it. So I rectified that situation this week.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. Well, it looks like something. It looks like a hopeless victim of the ’60s.

See? Hopeless. But the story’s different when you go inside. The entrance is on the ground level. From the outside, in the picture above, the ground level looks like a cave, but there’s actually quite a nice glass-enclosed lobby there.

From the lobby you go up a wide staircase and you’re in this:

All those white panels you saw on the outside of the building are actually 1.3-inch-thick slabs of marble. The light filters through them and gives the whole space this sort of warm, wood-panelled-library feel. On the right you can see part of the central column of stacks – six floors of rare books behind glass. It’s like a zoo for books.

I don’t think banging on the glass is a good idea – it’s also not a good idea in zoos, they say – but I did take some pictures through it. Look, old books:

The library had a temporary exhibit on the effect of psychoanalysis on American writers and thinkers. They also have a few treasures on permanent display. This is a page from John James Audubon’s Birds of America:

The book is so big it’s called the Double Elephant Folio. Something I didn’t know about Audubon: He was born in Saint Domingue – you may know it better as Haiti – and raised mostly in Nantes. He emigrated at the age of 18, hung out in Pennsylvania for a while, migrated to the frontier, and eventually set out to paint every bird in America. Read about him here.

They also have a Gutenberg bible.

Oh, you Ivy League types, you think you’re so hot, with your…Gutenberg Bibles. Ok, yeah, I can’t really dispute the coolness of owning a Gutenberg Bible.

Gratuitous arty shot of exterior:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

One of the many lovely things about living (a) in the nation’s capital and (b) near my parents is that I occasionally get taken along to evening events at Smithsonian museums for whatever kind of member my parents are. Last week it was a reception for the new Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight gallery.

First of all, in case you don’t have your Hilton genealogy straight (some other guests and I discussed this, and they weren’t sure, either), Barron Hilton is Paris Hilton’s grandfather. He’s the one who thinks Paris has disgraced the family name. Conrad Hilton was the one who started the whole Hilton hotel thing, and he was Barron Hilton’s father. Putting Barron Hilton’s name on the exhibit continues a Smithsonian tradition, which seems to have picked up in the last decade or so, of putting the name of extremely rich people on the names of exhibits. Thus the Sant Ocean Hall and the Behring Everything.

Of course, extremely rich people are used to this sort of thing; their names are everywhere. Thus, Barron Hilton appears below August Busch III on this list of “Team Members”:

That’s the capsule that Steve Fossett used to become the first person to make a round-the-world non-stop solo flight in a balloon.

You have to be careful when you see something like “round-the-world non-stop solo flight in a balloon” – it’s easy to skim past the qualifiers. Other people had flown around the world non-stop before. An Air Force plane did it in 1949, with in-flight refueling. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager did it without refueling in 1986. Another team had even managed to fly around the world non-stop in a balloon before – Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, in 1999. (Read my story about the Piccard family.) Fossett’s record was that he was the first one to do it by himself. That was in 2002.

Moral: There are a *lot* of records to be set, so listen closely to the qualifiers.

Since I mentioned the Piccard/Jones flight, the red Tylenol-like thing in the bottom of this picture is the capsule from their balloon flight:

Anyway. Back to the gallery at hand. I honestly didn’t spend that much time looking at the exhibit, because I was distracted by things like this:

Holy cow, it was good food. I’m talking about things like “Individual Truffle Macaroni and Cheese” and Kobe beef sliders. And the desserts! Wow. I must think this kind of event is a curator’s nightmare – I saw lots of beers and wine glasses and food plates on top of display cases – but on the other hand, nobody was, like, throwing their mashed vegetables onto the wing of the bright red plane once owned by Amelia Earhart. At least, not that I saw.

Speaking of Amelia Earhart, I learned that in addition to writing about her adventures in books and for National Geographic, she was the aviation editor for Cosmopolitan magazine. Yow. Can you even get your head around that concept today? “77 Sex Positions in 77 Days…On a Plane!” “The Surprising Thing That Turns Men Off…On a Plane!” (I gather Cosmo was different in the 20’s.)

The new gallery also features the plane that made the first non-stop cross-country flight, a nearly 27-hour slog from Long Island to San Diego. This was in 1923. The thing that most impressed me was not the plane, which is, you know, kind of plane-like, but a newspaper clipping reproduced next to it. It was from the LA Times and quoted a telegram from Ezra Meeker of New York City, who wrote to the pilots:

Congratulations on your wonderful flight, which beats my time made seventy-one years ago by ox team at two miles an hour, five months on the way. Happy to see in my ninety-third year so great a transformation in methods of travel. Ready to go with you next time.

I find it kind of mindblowing that only 71 years before, Ezra Meeker was crossing the country by ox team. And in 1923, it took 27 hours and Air Force training to do it. And now, 88 years later, I can just buy a ticket and go to San Diego whenever I want. Crazy.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

As we look forward to a possible real live snowfall this afternoon in D.C., I think it’s a fine time to look at some pictures I took a few months back. It was a lovely warm day in September; my cousin and his wife had just renewed their vows in a church in Lanham, Md., and we wandered outside to get in the cars and drive to the reception site. Standing around chatting with relatives was fun, but I was distracted by the plants next to the church door: pink, cheerful, and so full of bugs!

Fun fact: “dumbledore” is a dialect word for bumblebee. I learned this in the footnotes of the 1872 Thomas Hardy novel Under the Greenwood Tree. At the time of the story, organs were just starting to be introduced to churches, replacing the church bands that had provided music for generations. A member of the church band refers to organs as “miserable dumbledores.” (Thus the footnote.) Just think, that fun word might have been lost to history if it hadn’t been for J.K. Rowling.

That looks like a honey bee to me. Like I can tell a honey bee from any other kind of bee. Honestly, I don’t even know how to tell a bee from a wasp – you probably think a bee is fuzzy and a wasp is black and shiny (and scary), but in fact there are metallic green bees and fuzzy brown wasps and lots of other combinations, too.

As categories, bees and wasps are a little like butterflies and moths – I wrote before that a butterfly is a particular kind of Lepidopteran, but moth is kind of a catchall term. Bees are a particular kind of Hymenopteran (my favorite order of insects) but wasps are just most of the other stuff in the Hymenoptera that isn’t an ant or bee. The “wasp” category includes a lot of really cool animals, like the parasitic wasps that lay their eggs on other insects and the fig wasps that pollinate figs. And also yellowjackets and hornets and such.

North America doesn’t have any native honey bees – the ones we have were imported by settlers. So none of the New World plants we know and love evolved to require pollination by honeybees. Potatoes use other insects; cacao trees use flies.

Speaking of the Lepidopterans…

…and another picture, which could be the same butterfly or could be a different one. (I’m going with “butterfly” here because it’s active in the day, but again…what do I know?)

Loyal readers may recall my shipboard foray into oreo science two years ago, in which I learned that the ship’s mini-pack oreos were way smaller than the regular oreos I’d bought on shore. A follow-up experiment with Ritz crackers showed that the ship’s crackers were bigger – but, like the ship’s oreos, tasted worse – than the ones I’d brought with me.

My mom contributed to the spread of snack food science by bringing back a packet of oreos from Spain this fall. In the interests of science, I had to buy oreos at CVS – and then not eat them all before I got around to making a comparison. (Curse those tasty cookies.)

On the left, the American oreo; on the right, the Spanish one.

It’s easier to tell in person, but the American one is definitely bigger, although it’s not as big a size difference as ship vs shore oreos. The American one is also a slightly lighter shade of brown. The Spanish ones are a bit more squished, but that could be because the packet sunbathed in my kitchen for a couple of months before I got around to opening it for this experiment. And the American ones taste better. That’s probably thanks to some ingredient that the EU doesn’t allow.

Here’s a side view where you can see the difference in height:

And there you go. Oreo science.

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.

I’d been to the Cal Academy in San Francisco once or twice before, but it was about a decade ago, and I didn’t remember much other than a bunch of fish. So I went into this expecting your basic natural history museum experience, which after a year of examining natural history museums I can boil down to two elements: stuffed animals and rocks.

I got half of that. They do have a hall of dead stuffed mammals – with, bonus, live penguins. But rocks were sorely lacking. There was a dinosaur in the entrance hall and an exhibit on climate change, but basically, this is a museum about biology. Which is fine. I like biology. In fact, it’s my favorite. But I was disappointed they didn’t have a broader reach.

Oh, and there’s a planetarium, but since you have to pick up special passes that run out if you want to see a planetarium show, I don’t think it really counts. And actually I didn’t even know I was entitled to one of those tickets until just now, when I read it on the website – I assumed they cost extra. Nice job with the communications, Cal Academy.

This looks how I always imagined the moon would look if it weren’t lame and dusty and gray:

But it’s not some kind of futuristic outer space pod station thing, it’s the roof of the museum. The Cal Academy has gotten a lot of attention for their “living roof” with native plants – unlike the imported European grasses that cover California’s hillsides, these don’t turn brown in summer. The domes cover the planetarium and the rainforest exhibit, and the hatches can be raised for ventilation. Read about some of the building’s green features in this cool graphic from Wired. The roof was my favorite part of the museum – I made a second stop up there before we left.

So here’s what it looks like underneath one of those domes:

That’s a rainforest in a globe. You have to go through multiple doors, like an airlock, to make darn sure you’re not releasing any of the rainforest denizens into the California environment. Inside are trees, vines, lots of cute chirpy birds, a macaw, butterflies, bromeliads, and fish. When you’re done winding your way up through the ramps in the rainforest, you take an elevator down below the floor, to the basement aquarium – including the fish you were looking down on moments before:

Several of the aquaria are open at the top, so from the ground level, you can also look down on a coral reef and an aquarium that represents the California coast.

In honor of the holiday (this was December 20th) there were several special displays – a little portable planetarium with a show about the northern lights, some stuffed polar animals, and these two bored-looking reindeer:

You’ll be glad to know the reindeer poop was being used to fertilize the plants in nearby Rhododendron Dell. The museum sits in the middle of Golden Gate Park.

So, I enjoyed it. Particularly the roof. But I was shocked by the $30 ticket price,  the highest I’ve paid in my museum tourist expeditions. Of course, I’m spoiled by the Smithsonian, where admission is free. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you can pay $32 for admission and all the extras – special exhibits, like the butterflies, IMAX movies, and so on. But you also had the option of paying $16 (or less – it’s a suggested donation) to see the permanent exhibitions, which includes tons of rocks, dinosaurs, and other amazing stuff.

And in any case, I do wish they’d mentioned that my ticket covered a planetarium show. Apparently I’m still irritated about that.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by the National Gallery of Art, to show off the cool East Building to a friend who’d never been there. We ran into Greg Luce, a former colleague of mine at National Geographic, who was headed toward an exhibit about Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a fabulous 16th-century painter I’d somehow never heard of.

Arcimboldo painted portraits of people composed of fruits, vegetables, fish, books – everything but flesh. They’re delightful, and seem like a very early precursor of Surrealism. He was court painter to Maximilian II, the Holy Roman Emperor, and was celebrated in his time because some of the portraits are darn funny. (Nice to see someone getting credit for humor.)

Photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibit, but you can see some of the paintings and read a bit about the show here.

All of Arcimboldo’s plants and animals are scientifically accurate – botany and zoology were new sciences at the time. The exhibit included old books with lovely botanical illustrations and some other things that would have inspired Arcimboldo, like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of ugly faces.

Out in the gallery’s mezzanine was this sculpture, finished this year and inspired by Arcimboldo’s Winter:

Compare it to the painting.

Greg was there because of a blog post by our mutual friend Wray Herbert about psychological research on how we perceive faces. Wray has a new book out about the shortcuts we use to make decisions. It’s beautifully written, and I’m not just saying that because one of my many freelance jobs is writing press releases for Wray. And while I’m mentioning books, I should also note that Greg’s first poetry book is now available for pre-order. (Go to this page and scroll down to Drinking Weather.)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Well, actually, this is nature immediately outside my kitchen. It’s finally raining around here these days, and I saw this through my kitchen window the other day:

Hey – I assumed this was a moth, because I think of them as being brown, but I just went and looked up the difference, and learned that it’s a butterfly. You can tell because its antennae are club-shaped, while most moth antennae aren’t. (The picture is a little confusing – of the two long things that appear to be sticking out from its head, only the one on the left is an antenna. The one on the right is a leg. The second antenna is out of focus in the background.)

Also, it’s out during the day and it’s holding its wings together, which aren’t definite indicators, but they usually mean butterfly.

Actually, the whole butterfly-moth thing isn’t very precise, scientifically. Butterflies and moths are all members of the order Lepidoptera. Butterflies are one group of Lepidopterans; skippers are another that are usually lumped as “butterflies” by people like you and me who don’t know any better; the other 20-odd groups of Lepidopterans are what we call “moths.”

So, while saying something is a “butterfly” is reasonably specific, saying something is a “moth” is just lumping together a whole bunch of not-very-closely-related bugs. This helpful FAQ from The Lepidopterists’ Society says “Butterflies can be thought of as being basically a group of moths specialized to fly during the day.” (But some moths are active during the day, too.)

Update, 10/4: Commenter “Ranger Steve” dropped by to tell us that this is a Common Buckeye. Cool! Learn more about the species here.

photo: me

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.