April 2024 on…

Reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing , 2022 (ed. Ayaba Elizabeth Johnson) with CJS.

So far, as of May 2024, this is a very enjoyable read. I particularly appreciate the efforts of the editor to create a nice progression of topics, giving what is essentially an eclectic sampling of articles a higher level narrative.

Front Matter: Forward & Introduction

Series editor:

“The sweep of a spiral galaxy draws our eyes and attention much more than the black of space between the galaxies ever could. But there’s so much beauty to understand in the things we can’t see.”

Book editor:

Science and nature” I interpreted both more expansively and more narrowly than might be anticipated. Another bias of mine is being more enamored with ecology, evolution, and anthropology than with technology, medicine, and engineering. In short, 1 lean toward the “nature” in “science and nature.

I: Nature is Magnificent

C1: The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ…, Katherine Wu (Atlantic)

Entertaining and interesting. Some interesting bits:

• Evolutionarily, the appearance of the anus allowed organisms to move from a ‘one-meal-at-a-time’ ingest/digest/excrete sack, to a mouth-digestive track-anus that enabled (1) multiple meals to be consumed without need to excrete between them, and (2) the development of serial specialized regions for different digestion/absorption processes, with (3) a corresponding increase in both the amount of food that can be consumed, and in the efficiency in extracting nutrition from food. Overall, the appearance of the anus was associated with an increase in size and length of organisms’ bodies.
• The two hypotheses for the origin of the anus: (1) a single opening that became elongated and then split into two openings via fusion of the center portion, or (2) a single opening with the subsequent evolution of a rear opening.
• Humans are notable not for the anus, but for their buttocks, which, due to the demands of the bipedal posture/locomotion, are the largest in the animal kingdom.
• While there is subtle humor via wordplay, the author does not overdo it.

C2: What Slime Knows, Lacy M. Johnson (Orion)

Interesting!

• Slime molds are not fungi — they are protozoa.
• Slime molds, throughout their lifecycle, are single-celled: even when they fuse with one another in their aethalial form, the cells fuse into a single cell with multiple nuclei. There appear to be no bounds on their size: they have been observed to grow as large as a bath mat.
• Slime molds show the ability to learn: they can be trained to anticipate a negative stimulus (like a cold blast of air), and they can learn to solve a maze to obtain a piece of oatmeal.
• Individual slime molds that have learned things can retain the things learnt when they fuse into a single entity.
• Slime molds can go dormant.
• Recent genetic analyses suggest slime molds are 1 to 2 billion years old
• This article also included a discussion of the history of taxonomy, sparked by the difficulty of categorizing slime molds; as it recapped very briefly what we read in A Tangled Tree, some time ago, I pretermit this material.

C3: Too Big for the Universe, Arianna S. Long (Scientific American)

Interesting, but a lot I didn’t have the background to understand, and that was not explained in the article. CJS notes that it was in Scientific American, and wonders if it was part of a special issue that would have provided more context.

• Galaxies have life cycles: From an accreting cloud of gas, to a galaxy of stars that slowly shift from white and blue stars to cooler red and yellow stars, they end up, if massive enough, as a spheroidal blob that will never birth stars again– this end state is called an elliptical galaxy.
• All around us within 200-600 light years, astronomers see dead or dying elliptical galaxies gathered in ensembles known as galaxy clusters consisting of hundreds of thousands of galaxies.
• Most galaxy clusters appear to have been established with the universe was only half its present age. That means the clusters grew quickly, more quickly that we can understand [don’t understand this]. The early galaxy clusters — called protoclusters — must have been incredibly violent places, forming forming stars 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more quickly than the milky way currently does.
• Galaxies that produce 100’s to 1,000’s of suns per year are known as starburst galaxies.
• It is difficult to locate starburst galaxies because they are hotter than our current instruments have been designed to detect, they are spread out over distances 100x greater than our current instruments’ fields of view, and they are swathed in heavy metal dust (produced by the exploding stars) that make them nearly invisible to optical and UV telescopes.
• It is only in the last 15 years that we have been able to see them with infrared telescopes, and only much more recently that the Altacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), an array of the nearly 70 radio dishes that work as one telescope, came on line.
• ALMA has allowed the detection of protoclusters, including the Distant Red Core (DRC), a cluster of 10 starburst galaxies that are giving birth to 10,000x more galaxies than the milky way. These protocol clusters should burn through their available fuel in a few hundred million years.
• The galaxies in the DRC are so messily shaped that they must have recently collided with other galaxies. The DRC appears to be too large for our universe — simulations based on our current understanding of physics predicts that such galaxies should either shred themselves apart or feature explosions that would eject the gas needed for star formation.
• All galaxies are thought to be surrounded by halos of dark matter, more massive than the galaxies themselves. The DRC has such a large halo of dark matter that it is at the edge of what is possible — and, that said, it seems likely that the DRC has considerably more mass that we haven’t seen.
• One possibility is that galaxies and other structures began forming earlier in the universe that we had previously thought…

. . . reading break . . .

C4: Heads Up: The Cardiovascular Secrets of Giraffes, Bob Holmes (Knowable Magazine)

• Giraffes need a blood pressure of about 220/180 to have a normal-for-large-mammals blood pressure at the brain. This level of pressure would could a host of problems for humans.
• The left ventricle’s in Giraffe hearts are thickened, so they can pump more strongly, but they have mutations that decrease the stiffening that would accompany such thickening in human hearts. Also, the ventricle-filling phase in the giraffe’s heartbeat is extended, allowing the heart to pump more blood with each stroke.
• Giraffe legs have a tight wrapping of connective tissue — think built-in support stockings — to prevent swelling. They also have thick-walled arteries near their knees which may serve as a flow restrictor to reduce pressure.
• The giraffe also has mechanisms that appear to regulate pressure when it lowers its head to drink (blood pools in the neck veins), and then raises it when it raises its head.

C5: How Far does Wildlife Roam: Ask the Internet of Animals, Sonia Shaw (The New York Times Magazine)

• ICARUS — International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. A worldwide collaborative project to tag and track animals, beaming their data to a receiver on the international space station. The tags are powered by solar energy, weight less than 5 grams, and will track position, physiology and microclimate for each organism.
• A description of trapping and tagging a cuckoo.
  • Q: I wonder where the tag was attached, and how it would provide information on the physiology of the cuckoo.
    • A: According to chatGPT there are different methods depending on the organism and tag type. Collars and harnesses can be used; in some cases, tags can be implanted under the skin. They use ECG, thermistors and accelerometers to collect physiological data.
  • Q: I’m also unsure of what happens when the International Space Station is not in line-of-sight of various tags — is there some sort of network of receivers involved?
    • A: According to ChatGPT, the tags have on-board memory and store the data if the ISS is not in line-of-sight. They can also transmit to one of several ground stations around the world, if they are in range.
• Traditionally, the article argues, it has been assumed that animals were relatively fixed in place, inhabiting a niche in a stable ecosystem.

“But over the last few decades, evidence has emerged that animals move farther, more readily, and in more complex ways than previously imagined. And those movements, ecologists suspect, could be crucial to unraveling a wide range of ecological processes, including the spread of disease and species’ adaptations to habitat loss. “

– ibid., p 32

• The planet may well be criss-crossed with “environmental highways” that provide paths along which various species can travel. This could be an explanation for why many bird migrations are not straight-line, but follow looping paths.
• Describes genesis of ICARUS — Wikelski and Kay were talking with George Swenson, a retired radio engineer, who told them they were stupid and should think bigger — think about tracking all creatures on the planet, everywhere, simultaneously. Wikelski became obsessed with the idea and spend a decade or so recruiting allies and grant money to make it happen.
• Migrating thrushes spend twice as much energy on stop-overs than while flying.

The revolution in wildlife tracking offered a glimpse into the world that ICARUS seeks to reveal. It’s one in which geographic borders are porous and migrants make their way across the globe almost effortlessly, like hang gliders on a front. It’s one in which movements once deemed episodic are continuous, in which those regarded as rare are common, in which others dismissed as ineffectual are ecologically fundamental. It’s a vision of a planet that vibrates with motion.

ibid. p 41

II: Nature is Roiled

C6: Our Summer from Hell, Jeff Godell (Rolling Stone)

A downbeat article suggesting, on the one hand, that the summer of 2021(?) was a preview of what climate change that ‘woke up’ a lot of people, but that, on the other hand, if this is what it means to wake up “we are well and truly fucked.”

I didn’t particularly care for this article.

. . . reading break . . .

Next Update: 6/3/2024

6/3/2024 => C7: How Rising Groundwater Caused by Climate Change Could Devastate Costal Communities (MIT Technology Review)

• An unexpected effect of rising sea level is that the groundwater also rises: in coastal areas, the fresh groundwater floats on deeper, denser salt water. Rising ground water has the potential to effect at least twice the area that rising sea level will.
• Rising groundwater can
  • corrode metal pipes
  • infiltrate sewage and storm sewers, and cesspools and septic tanks, decreasing or eliminating their ability to function
  • introduce water vapor into natural gas lines, causing gas appliances to corrode
  • release buried pollutants from military and industrial sites (e.g., benzene), including those that have been remediated
  • create surface wetlands where we do not want them
  • cause roads and foundations to buckle
  • (not mentioned, but obvious) inundate fresh water wells with salt water
• Approaches to addressing sea level rise, such as building sea walls, may
  • (1) fail because a seawall that keeps all seawater out will keep fresh ground water in
  • (2) may keep surface seawater out, but if the bedrock is porous, the subsurface seawater level will rise, pushing up the freshwater layer.

6/3/2024 => C8: How we Drained California Dry (MIT Technology Review)

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6/3/2024 => C9: The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 into the Atmosphere (Ars Publica / MIT Technology Review)

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. . . reading break . . .

III: Humans are Part of Nature

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