I got a nice little birthday surprise from my old Seattle station today. They purchased my fish story (previously aired on Word of Mouth) from PRX and played it this afternoon on KUOW Presents. I really miss that city, so it’s nice knowing I’ve been back on the Seattle airwaves if not there in person!
Let’s Get Scent-ual
I’ve spent much of this week learning how plants and animals communicate using chemicals, for another prospective story. I realized there was a common purpose for most of this chemical communication: reproduction. I like calling these chemicals the sexy scents. Many plants and animals use them to advertise their virility. Pheremones croon “Mate with me!” and floral aromas call out “Pollinate me!”.
But why scents? If you smelled the waxy goo coming out of a monkey’s chest gland I’m pretty sure copulation would be the last thing on your mind. And are we really supposed to believe that tiny pollinating insects fancy themselves perfume connoisseurs?
Scientists are finding that a plant or animal’s scent can carry a Sunday’s paper worth of advertising material for prospective mates or pollinators (“I know where the good food is baby, hmm, hmm” or “My pollen is the very sweetest!”). Also, communicating through chemicals can save energy and lead to more successful reproduction. Indulge me here as I cue Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On”.
To research this story I talked with Robert Raguso of Cornell University. He studies chemical communication between flowering plants and their pollinators. Raguso tells me of how cleverly plants use scent to lure and even trick pollinators. Communicating with chemicals allows plants to send pollinators complex messages. The scents they emit are ofter composed of hundreds of different chemical compounds. Scents can also attract pollinators with poor eyesight or those that fly at night. Some species of tropical orchids use scent to trick males bees into thinking the flowers are female bees. The mistaken males rub up against the flower in vain, but they do succeed in pollinating the plant. Raguso says plants that advertise visually have to constantly spend energy sustaining their impressive blooms, while plants that advertise with smell can limit scent production to times when pollinators are near.
I also talked with Anthony Di Fiore of New York University. He studies primate mating behavior. He explains how some monkeys emit scent chemicals from glands on their chest or ano-genital region. These scents can boast on topics ranging from their arousal level, to their physical strength, to their access to resources. Most interestingly, Di Fiore’s found that monkeys who use chemical communication are much less aggressive towards each other than other monkeys. They don’t have to waste energy fighting for mates because their scent automatically displays their dominance.
This could be a fun piece if I could get some human actors to verbalize what these plants and animals are “saying” with chemicals. I like the idea of having little snippets of a radio drama within a more science-y story.
Old Skulls
Monday night Rutgers professor Ann Fabian spoke at Observatory about the research behind her new book, The Skull Collectors. It tells the story of one of America’s most infamous collections of skulls, that of Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton in the early 1800’s.
People have called Morton “the father of scientific racism”. He published measurements from his skull collection arguing that the skulls of white people had larger brain capacities than other skulls. Fabian takes a pretty controversial stance in defending Morton against that reputation. Really, she insists, he was a good guy. His cranial capacity measurements were just ignorantly going along with the popular medical research practices of the time.
I enjoyed how she discussed the implications of owning parts of someone’s body after they died. Apparently having your brain preserved for science has long been considered an honor, while the preservation of your skull was a debasing insult. The idea of voluntarily donating your body to science is a fairly recent one. The medical profession has a long and ugly history of getting their bodies from less than legitimate sources like robbed graves and prisons (if you haven’t already check out Stiff by Mary Roach). In fact, Fabian calls the Civil War a godsend for doctors because it solved “the problem of collecting white skulls.” For me, the human remains at the Bodies exhibit immediately raised an ethical flag. But I hadn’t thought before about the moral implications of seeing skeletons and skulls on exhibit. Where do you draw the line between using someone’s body for “the good of science” and dishonoring the person once within that body?
My recording of Ann Fabian’s talk should be up on the Observatory website soon.
Movement by the numbers
I like how my recent interviews have had a common theme- using art to portray movement. In my last post I talked about the work of Nell Breyer, the neuroscientist/choreographer. When I asked her if she saw a mathematical basis to movement, her answer was a pretty definitive “no”. Here we have the opposite perspective. Eitan Grinspun also represents movement for artistic purposes. But for him, it’s all about numbers and formulas.
Grinspun might be the only man in show business who sees audience inattention as a sign of success. This a Columbia University computer scientist has become animation studios’ go-to guy for animating film details like hair and clothing. Diverging from the usual computer geek stereotype, Grinspun’s more a fan of dramas than action films. He wants movies to fully engage audiences in the
characters’ emotions. For that reason he focuses on making sure movie-goers don’t get distracted by fake looking visual details. He succeeds by letting numbers do the work of animators for studios like PIXAR and Disney.
Back in graduate school Grinspun became fascinated with the idea that all movement can be described by mathematical formulas. He’d throw a cowboy hat in the air over and over again to watch it fall. Then he’d figure out the formula to describe how it hit the ground. These days Grinspun’s algorithms for movement save animators from having to draw every strand of Rapunzel’s hair as she spins in a circle. Instead, they can enter the length and texture of the hair and the direction of its movement into one of Grinspun’s computer algorithms. The program then automatically generates the image of what twirling long thick wavy hair should look like. Talking about his career, Grinspun’s eyes widen with disbelief. He says he can’t believe how lucky he is to get to use the laws of physics to create beautiful films.
I interviewed Grinspun in early January. Just how nice of a guy was he? After an hour of interviewing him, I pressed the wrong button on my recorder and erased the entire interview. Not only did he spend almost an hour trying to help me recover the file, when that didn’t work he insisted on letting me interview him all over again. “I just see it as media training,” he assured me. “Apparently I need a little more media training myself!” was all I could say.
Nell Breyer at Observatory
Choreographer and neuroscience researcher Nell Breyer spoke at Observatory last night. A recording of her lecture should be up on the Observatory site later this month. She also let me interview her earlier in the day, which made this dance and neuroscience lover pretty excited.
Nell’s interested in how we perceive motion, both from a scientific and artistic perspective. She creates installations, often in public spaces, to encourage others to notice their own movement. One of her favorite techniques is to use a computer program that captures only movement on video. Static objects remain invisible, but the negative space where motion occurred lingers on the screen. She’ll project these ghosts of movement on a wall in real time. As people walk by they can watch the outlines of their walking on the wall. This seems to compel people to move in ways they might not ordinarily move, to watch what happens to their image on the wall. “You’re a choreographer of the masses!” I told Nell.
Her most recent installation was my favorite. The inspiration came from research on a group of children in India. Born blind, they had recently gained sight through a simple operation. Researchers found that the children didn’t see overlapping objects as distinct. For example a red triangle under a yellow circle just looked like a single blob. However, when the shapes moved the children began to perceive them as separate. Nell used Sol Lewitt’s “Bars of Color Within Squares (MIT)” (above left) as a backdrop to illustrate this idea of movement revealing form. It’s a little complicated to explain, so bear with me. Lewitt’s tiled piece is 2D. Nell had dancers move against it as if they were inhabiting a 3D space. While lying on the floor they’d appear to be sitting in a crevice or hanging from an overhang. As the viewer watching from above, you’d be drawn into suddenly seeing a third dimension to what you know was a flat floor. I was amazed by how the dancers’ movement could create such a contrast between what you perceive and what you know is real.
Nell proposes that science is a model for art while art acts as a precursor to science. Art impacts us because of the way it manipulates scientific principles. Art can be seen as our initial attempt at trying to make sense of the world. These ideas are really haunting me. I keep restating her proposal in my mind, thinking what it means to me personally. I want to remember to capture more of the “art” in the science I report on in my future stories.
And now a brief farewell. I’m heading out on vacation tomorrow, so this blog will be on a week long hiatus.
Gross, but gorgeous, Greenpoint
I’ve started research on a project proposal for an environmental journalism fellowship. I’d like to make a radio documentary about the struggles of the Brooklyn neighborhood I live in, Greenpoint. I spent part of this week at the Greenpoint Library (working alongside a dude chugging Mountain Dew from a 2 liter) gathering background information. Here’s a rough summary of what the doc would be all about.
Greenpoint’s 40,000 residents live atop the largest oil spill in U.S. history. If that wasn’t bad enough, the neighborhood’s bordered on three sides by Newton Creek. It’s a four mile stagnant canal holding about 30 million gallons of spilled oil and raw sewage, covered in a fifteen foot layer of sludge. Gross, but what makes things interesting is that Greenpoint has a way of growing on you. It’s mainly Polish-speaking population enjoys high ranking schools, low crime rates, and a vibrant business district; Nate Silver even named it the 5th most livable neighborhood in NYC. Better yet, this fall the EPA gave Newton Creek superfund status and the state reached a $25 million settlement with Exxon Mobil to fund Greenpoint cleanup efforts.
My documentary would cover the history of the neighborhood, the legal and environmental battles residents have fought over pollution here, the current sentiments of Greenpoint residents, and the cleanup efforts. I think the story is extra relevant right now given the recentness of the superfund designation and Exxon settlement, and the possible comparisons to last year’s BP spill. I’ll submit my proposal in mid March, so will fill you in along the way.
A Collaboration!
Observatory is a Brooklyn arts and events space that’s interested in the intersections of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature. Pretty much the best intersections. It’s run by a collective of seven artists and art curators who want to create a home for “kindred geeks”, inspired by the 18th-century idea of rational amusement. This last week I started work with them on a podcast!
Last Friday I recorded Mitch Horowitz‘s talk on The Secret History of the Ouija Board. He told a really interesting history of mysticism in the United States. I learned that the movement was largely interconnected with the women’s suffrage movement in the early 20th century. Apparently, the heightened role of women in mysticism (women, not men, were usually the mediums) attracted a number of the historical figures we now credit for helping women get the vote. The full lecture should be up on the Observatory website soon.
This Friday I’ll be covering the lecture Perceptions of Motion by MIT researcher and choreographer Nell Breyer.
The idea right now is to produce a monthly podcast highlighting Observatory’s people and events. I’m excited to see what we come up with!
Memories of the Future
In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there’s a shop where you can go and have specific memories erased. Total bogus, right? Not really, says memory researcher Dr. Todd Sacktor of SUNY Downstate. He thinks the most unlikely part of the film is that the shop’s in a run-down building.
In the last few years Dr. Sacktor’s discovered a molecule, PKMzeta, that most neuroscientists now agree is essential for memory formation and storage. (I’d first heard about PKMzeta on page 8 of this article, featuring Dr. André Fenton.) I visited Dr. Sacktor in his Brooklyn lab to find out what this new understanding of memory could mean. I figured we’d talk about brain imaging and experiments with PKMzeta using lab mice. Instead, Dr. Sacktor offered up possibilities for altering memories that veer towards, in his words, “Philip Dick dystopian type” scenarios.
Dr. Sacktor says that doctors may one day be able to enhance old memories in Alzheimer’s patients with supplements of PKMzeta. Or even more incredibly, they could get rid of disturbing memories in the minds of PTSD patients. When you recall a memory, you have chance to prevent it from going back into long term storage. Dr. Sacktor says this might have something to with PKMzeta breaking down when a memory’s recalled. If this is the case, doctors could instruct a PTSD patient recall a memory. Then they’d apply PKMzeta blockers to prevent PKMzeta from reforming to help store that memory again, pretty much erasing it from the patient’s mind. However, scientists still aren’t sure how tightly individual memories link to each other. You want to destroy the memory of getting shot on Smith St? Well that the memory of being shot at might be intertwined with all your memories of Smith St, so erasing your traumatic memory could unintentionally erase all your memories of that locale. It’s a slippery slope, says Dr. Sacktor.
I was pretty tripped out by all this, so I went to check my facts with another memory researcher, Dr. André Fenton of New York University. He says these possibilities for memory manipulation using PKMzeta are still pretty speculative. Right now he’s mostly focused on just figuring out the basics of how memory works. However, he says such prospects for manipulations aren’t too far off to worry him. In fact, Dr. Fenton says he often questions himself about the ethics of his own line of work.
A Fish Tale to air on Word of Mouth
Good news today! New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth will be airing my story about Dr. Melanie Stiassny’s dear little dying fish. Updates about the air date to come.
Sneak Preview Here Running time 5:33
And the snow keeps on coming
When I moved to Brooklyn this fall, I was a little disappointed when long-time New Yorkers told me it really doesn’t snow that much here. Come on, I wanted to experience a real East Coast Winter!
Well, I guess I got one. Jeff Masters compiled these numbers for his Weather Underground Blog (thanks Joyce). This is a list of the top ten snowfalls in Central Park since 1869. Half of them have been in the last decade, and two of them have been this winter!
1) 26.9″ Feb 11-12, 2006
2) 26.4″ Dec 26-27, 1947
3) 21.0″ Mar 12-14, 1888
4) 20.8″ Feb 25-26, 2010
5) 20.2″ Jan 7-8, 1996
6) 20.0″ Dec 26-27, 2010
7) 19.8″ Feb 16-17, 2003
8) 19.0″ Jan 26-27, 2011
9) 18.1″ Mar 7-8, 1941
10) 17.7″ Feb 5-7, 1978
How does this tie in to global warming? Apparently, snow is more likely during warmer winters. Meteorologists say that if it keeps getting warming, we can expect to see even more snow in the coming winters. But eventually we’ll reach a kind of tipping point where it gets too warm to snow. And that will be sad.