Thanks to the very kind folks at the New Jersey Agricultural Experimental Station at Rutgers, I was able to visit their fistulated cow, Lily.  I met up with Clint Burgher, the Director of the farm, and he introduced me to professors Carol Bagnell and Barry Jesse, and Preshita, a student who studies the microbial populations of the rumen. The fistula allows them to witness a wildly complicated ecosystem – it’s basically a tangle of alliances and hostilities between bacteria, viruses, fungi, and bacteriophages.

Barry showing how it’s done.

I would’ve guessed that for a cow, having a rubber tunnel implanted in your side would be like drawing the short straw in life…but Clint said it’s the exact opposite. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for cows that no longer produce milk, and they’re usually shipped off to the slaughter. By winning the fistula lottery, Lily has effectively lucked into that rare thing, the bovine golden years. She is now in her eighth year of retirement. But does she know that? Is she happy to have a fistula? Hard to say. I have no idea if the word “happy” applies to a cow, but through the whole visit she seemed totally placid and content, even when I was rummaging around in her lunch.

One thing that doesn’t really carry over the radio waves is the smell of a cow’s rumen. Every few seconds the rumen contracts on your arm, a strong but kind squeeze, and gas from deep inside shoots past your arm and into your face. It’s a noxious, poisonous smell (“primarily butyrate, and the C5 and C6 gasses are pungent as well,” explained Barry), but since your arm is being held hostage by a cow’s stomach, you just have to take it. The look of horror in these photos is me realizing why Mary Roach told me to bring nose clips.

As luck would have it, a Future Farmers of America class from Woodbridge High School in Bridgeville, Delaware, was taking a tour of the farm the day I visited. A few of them were brave enough to take a tour of the fistula.

Closing the cow.

Many thanks to the folks at Rutgers, and to Lily.

I'd never seen this before, because I thought it was just a figure of speech referring to kings and noblemen. But in real life, there are creatures that have blue blood — literally blue — like this:

This is horseshoe crab blood. Yes, those armored, tank-looking animals that crawl up onto beaches. You can see them, especially this time of year, up and down the Atlantic coast, where they gather late at night in enormous numbers to mate. You know these guys.

Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post

How do horseshoe crabs come to have blue blood? The phrase traditionally means blood which flows in the veins of old and aristocratic families, and horseshoe crabs are certainly old (they lived with dinosaurs), and, in their way, aristocrats. But they don't have veins. Their blood kind of sloshes around in their bodies carrying oxygen to various organs, as our blood does.

Our blood is red because we use hemoglobin to move oxygen around. Hemoglobin has iron in it, which gives off a reddish hue. (Think of rust.) Horseshoe crabs use a copper-based molecule called hemocyanin to distribute oxygen. In nature, copper turns things blue or blue-green. So that's why their blood is blue; it's copper-based.

But their blood does things our blood can't. Amazing things. "They are tough, jack-of-all-trades kind of creatures, built to last," says paleontologist Richard Fortey in a new book. "They remind me in a way of a Volkswagen Beetle that I once owned."

Fortey tells of sitting in the dark on a Delaware beach, watching tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs clumping and clonking about, trying to mate, when he noticed that like his old car, a lot of them were in pretty bad shape:

I saw a damaged horseshoe crab still trundling gamely onwards, even with a great hole punched right though its head. Looking over the beach more carefully, I noticed a lot of these war veterans; lumps out of the thorax, broken tail spikes — clearly, it must take a lot to finish these creatures off.

Indeed. It turns out a when a horseshoe crab gets gashed and its insides are exposed to germs (particularly ocean-going bacteria), its blood leaps into action. As soon as it senses any "negative bacteria" moving in, a particular blood cell explodes, releasing a mass of blood-clotting granules that instantly clot to seal out the bad guys, preventing further infection. It's like having an instant Great Wall of China, springing up to keep out the Barbarians.

In 1968, scientist Fred Bang was able to extract cells from the horseshoe crab and use the active ingredient to test drugs, products and devices that come into contact with blood, including human blood. If the cells clot, that means those products have been contaminated by "negative" bacteria, a very useful alarm system. All of a sudden, horseshoe crab blood became valuable.

Atlantic coast fishermen would catch crabs, remove blood, sell the serum to pharmaceutical companies (one quart is worth more than $10,000) and then return the animals to the bay. This has become a successful business, as you can see here, with bottles and bottles of blue blood harvested from crabs hooked up to blood sucking machines. (Look if you like, but this video isn't for everybody.)

I can't imagine what it's like for a critter designed 450 million years ago to find itself in a chrome room, hosed up, getting dizzy, then being trucked back to the water. Nothing in their genome could prepare them for this.

And for some, it's overwhelming. 3 to 15 percent of these crabs die after being bled. Carl Shuster, a local biologist, author of The American Horseshoe Crab, worried that the bay population was beginning to suffer and convinced the fishermen and the federal government to create a horseshoe crab preserve in the Delaware Bay.

That preserve appears, so far, to be working. These "trundling, heaving, inelegant" animals are recovering their numbers, which is as it should be.

"Now we know why dented and holed crabs can totter on regardless," Fortey writes. "They have had hundreds of millions of years to come up with an effective response to some of their most dangerous and invisible [bacterial] enemies." We've borrowed their secret, so it would be very bad manners not to say thank you.

This time, we seem to be behaving properly. So far, anyway.

Richard Fortey's new book, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms visits with animals that have survived, unchanged, over vast stretches of time. Horseshoe crabs (they're not really crabs, they're more closely related to insects like millipedes and spiders) and especially horseshoe crab eggs, were discussed in a previous blog post about a migratory bird called the red knot.

In this episode, strange stories of brains that lead their owners astray, knock them off balance, and, sometimes, propel them to do amazing things.

We hear from a kid whose voice was disguised from himself, relive a surreal day in the life of a young researcher hijacked by her own brain, and try to keep up with an ultra-athlete who, after suffering terrible seizures, gained extraordinary abilities by removing a chunk of her brain.

The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain, deep inside your skull, that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command.

Enter Liza Shoenfeld. After graduating from college in 2009,  Liza got a job as a research associate in a lab at the University of California, San Francisco. She was just starting her career in neuroscience, and though she was kind of at the bottom of the totem pole, she got to be a part of some really cutting-edge research. Her lab was zeroing in on how the basal ganglia worked by experimenting on mice, and had figured out a way to essentially switch different parts of the basal ganglia on and off, by shining a special laser into their little mouse brains.

So, armed with her lab skills and an interest in the basal ganglia, Liza started applying to grad schools where she could turn her experience with the mice into research questions of her own. And that's when things got really, really weird...and Liza got much closer to her subject then she'd ever intended.

You can watch a video of the mice here (it was posted to Nature, along with a paper on basal ganglia pathways).

Then: Meet Rosemary Morton. She had a little, um, trouble with gravity. Actress Hope Davis helps us relive this mysterious case of the topsy turvies--a true story that was excerpted from an essay by Berton Roueché, and which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called "The Medical Detectives."

In our Lost & Found episode, producer Tim Howard told the story of a pigeon named G. I. Joe, an avian war hero whose astonishing navigational skills saved over 1000 lives in an Italian town after its liberation from the Nazis.

Released in wholly unfamiliar terrain, G. I. Joe soared over mountains, lakes and forests back to his home base, delivering his message just in time to thwart an aerial bombardment. 20 miles in 20 minutes. But how exactly did he do it?

During the show, crackerjack pigeon pundit Charles Walcott was our go-to bird orienteering expert, and he explained that despite decades of experimenting, no one really knows exactly how pigeons do what they do. Do the birds use smelly landmarks? Or barely audible infra-sounds? What role does their super-sensitive vision play? 

Walcott's hunch is that pigeons keep from getting lost (at least partly) by using magnetism. He told us that they have magnetic iron particles in their beaks, which function like a combination compass and on-board GPS. 

This magnet hypothesis sounds sensible enough, but it remains contentious among pigeon experts.

For scientists like Walcott, who want to prove the magnetism theory, there are three main puzzle pieces to lock down: 

1. the receptor, aka how can a pigeon actually detect a magnetic field?
2. the processor, aka how does a pigeon's brain register the magnetic info picked up by its receptors?
3. the map, aka how does a pigeon store "knowledge" about where it wants to go and how to get there?

Last year, the scientific consensus was that puzzle piece (1) was more or less in the bag. Based on all kinds of evidence--electron microscopy, imaging technology like MRIs, experiments on pigeons with lesions or under local anesthesia--bird physiologists had three solid leads about where to find magnetic receptors in pigeons: the retina, the inner ear, and the upper beak. And of these three spots, the beak--which is full of iron-rich cells--was a leading contender. One clutch piece of evidence was the way beak skin (sliced off with ceramic blades to avoid iron contamination) reacted to two different chemical stains (Prussian Blue and Turnbull's Blue) designed to detect two types of iron ions.

But now, one year after we first went pigeon-crazy, it turns out that bird physiologists don't necessarily know what they thought they did. There's been a full-on shake-up in the world of pigeon science.

UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging created ‘three-dimensional blueprints’ of the pigeon beak. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed the external soft tissues (purple) and micro-computed tomography (CT) exposed dense bony structures (yellow). (M. Lythgoe, J. Riegler www.ucl.ac.uk/cabi/). Photo and captions via UCL News/flickrCC-BY-2.0

In April 2012, a flock of European and Australian researchers published an article in Nature debunking the theory that magnet-sensing receptors could be found in the upper beak.

The researchers argued that the beak cells in question weren't sensory receptors at all, but instead a kind of white blood cell called a macrophage. (The reason they were thrown? One of the macrophage's functions is to recycle iron from red blood cells.)

Mapping the location of iron-rich cells indicated that macrophages were filled with tiny balls of iron. (M. Lythgoe, J. Riegler www.ucl.ac.uk/cabi/). Photo and captions via UCL News/flickrCC-BY-2.0

Findings revealed that the iron balls cannot produce electrical signals which could be registered by the brain, and the detailed MRI maps of the pigeon beak did not show magnetic nerves. (M. Lythgoe, J. Riegler www.ucl.ac.uk/cabi/). Photo and captions via UCL News/flickrCC-BY-2.0

The mix-up dashed the hopes of many in the magnetism camp, including the authors of the study: "our goal really was just to replicate those studies that had previously been published," the lead author David Keays said, "but unfortunately, we weren't able to do so."

Then, just a few weeks after the Nature article, things shook up yet again. This time, the new finding related to puzzle piece (2), and it was good news for the magnet school: Science reported that a team from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas discovered 53 cells in the pigeon brainstem that were indeed magnetically active. Each cell had an optimum angle that it was sensitive to, allowing it to distinguish not only the intensity of the magnetic field, but also its direction. By using that information, the authors believed pigeon brains could process magnetic signals into a "directional heading" aka a compass bearing, and a "geosurface location," aka a GPS reading.

All is not lost! Metalheads take heart!

And that brings us to (3), which seems to us to be the most difficult piece of the whole magnet puzzle: the map. Birds' brains, it turns out, are nearly as inscrutable as our own, especially outside of a laboratory. Be that as it may, many experiments and newly-devised tools seem to point to one place in particular. "There is one brain structure, namely the hippocampus," according to a 2009 review of the 'Neurobiology of the Homing Pigeon,' "that attracts attention in a peculiar way." For instance, homing pigeons have larger hippocampi than their non-homing cousins and ancestors. Or the fact that pigeons with hippocampal lesions have difficulty navigating. Or that young pigeons (squabs) allowed to fly around the loft and get experience grew bigger hippocampi (but not any other part of the brain) than their grounded counterparts. Yet there is evidence running in the opposite direction, as well; the pigeon hippocampus seems to play no role whatsoever in the geomagnetic compass, or when a pigeon is tracing a route it already seems to know by smell. The 2009 summary ends its section on the hippocampus saying that "there are still a lot of non-answered questions, unsettled details and points of discussion…" Perhaps puzzle (3) could use a little shake-up.

We wanted to know what Charles Walcott's take on all of this was, so we called him up, and as ever, he had a bird's eye view of the research. On puzzle (1), he told us how researchers' gazes have shifted from the upper beak to the inner ear. Will someone find a magnetoreceptor there? "It's a very interesting hypothesis," he said, "but until I see the neurophysiology, I'm not willing to bet the farm on it." Next, Walcott acknowledged the evidence for puzzle (2) to be "a major, major advance," a step in the right direction. As he has been since his pioneering 1979 Science article "Pigeons Have Magnets," Charles Walcott is guardedly optimistic. "We've got another piece of the puzzle," he said, "but there's lots more to go."

More on Shake-Up #1:

• Pigeons’ homing skill not down to iron-rich beak cells, University College London News
  
• Compass Confusion - The Pigeon's Magnetic Myth, The Naked Scientists

More on Shake-Up #2:

• Neurons in a pigeon’s brain respond to magnetic fields, Not Exactly Rocket Science

A video series hosted by Charles Walcott, about his other major research interest, yodelling loons:

• Understanding Loons

This week: a singing planet, scientific proof that lots of things really do taste like chicken, a love letter to a map, and lots more...

Soren Wheeler

Soren confesses his love for data viz:

"I’m a freak for maps ... Especially maps that are full of information that changes when you play with them (and have colors) ...

There’s a guy who teaches at Yale, named Edward Tufte. He’s got some amazing books about data visualization and design. Pictured is a graphic he often talks about. It’s a representation of Napoleon’s march on Moscow from way back in the day. The brown line is Napoleon’s advance on Moscow, the black line is his retreat. The thickness of the line is the number of soldiers. Along the way, he charts the temperatures during the course of the retreat. You can notice that he lost almost no men in the Moscow, and you can also see little moments in the retreat, crossing a river, where lots and lots of men died. I find it a totally mesmerizing graphic (I even have a copy on my wall).

Click here to zoom.

Anyway, John Keefe (brother of our very own technical director Dylan Keefe) is the head of data news here at WNYC. And he has been doing some pretty amazing stuff with data and maps lately. You can see a lot of his work on the WNYC website, but John also keeps a little blog of his own about different projects, which is well worth checking out."

Ellen Horne

Ellen's eye -- or ear -- was caught by NASA recordings of the earth "singing":

Lynn Levy

Lynn caught a movie about radio:

"Just saw this documentary called Radio Unnameable. It's about a late-night radio DJ named Bob Fass, who's been doing a show on WBAI Radio (NYC) for something like 50 years. He was at the screening I went to, and let me tell you: this is one of the most honest, insightful, balls-to-the-wall, badass dudes I've ever seen. The doc is really well-made, too; they have a ton of amazing archival footage of NYC in the 60's and 70's that you've probably never seen before (I hadn't, anyway). There are a bunch of screenings coming up."

Brenna Farrell

Brenna discovered some very short stories about humiliation and heroes, in video form:

“I ran across this video series that completely charmed me with its combo of lo-fi charisma plus a really likable concept: comedians reliving their often embarrassing, sometimes kind-of-mundane, encounters with celebrities. It’s a collaboration between New York Mag's Vulture team and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, called Pop Culture Memory Lane. The videos are quick hits, just a few minutes each, and I find them totally disarming. There’s something really unvarnished about them -- the straight-on tells from the comedians paired up with unpretentious animations and...in some cases...cardboard puppets. Here's one of my favorites:

Malissa O'Donnell

On the tour bus between stops for our In the Dark live show in the Midwest last weekend, Malissa, Jad, and Ellen got talking about the lymphatic system (apparently somebody forgot the bourbon and deck of cards...oh, traveling nerd circus.) In any case, Malissa was into it: "The way your lymphatic system interacts with your blood is complex, but so fascinating." Rock and roll:

Chris Berube

Chris is really interested in the origins of language (did you know the saying “pork barrel politics” is actually deeply racist?), so he was a little startled to find out that the phrase “it tastes like chicken” has some real science behind it. “I assumed that people said the chicken bit to trick friends into eating unpalatable things,” said Chris. But as he learned from a new Slate article, many things, particularly fish, actually do taste like chicken -- because they evolved from a similar gene pool. The first recorded instance of someone making the comparison happened after a mouthful of iguana. Delicious.

Molly Webster

Molly's been getting a big old kick out of "20 Spectacularly Nerdy Science Jokes," a chops-testing list on Buzzfeed this week:

"I have to thank a buddy over at SoundCloud for knowing that I'd revel in some science-related humor. All my science teachers will be proud to know I got the witticisms (I actually laughed.out.loud at the joke about precipitate), though admittedly my mind is still puzzling over that one with sodium atoms and Batman. Anyone?"

Kelly Slivka

Kelly's been looking at the world through the eyes of "The Jetsons":

"Matt Novak's blog Paleofuture, published by Smithsonian magazine, tries to reason out why people creating a cartoon in the 1960s might think the future world of "The Jetsons" (set a mere 50 years from now) would look the way they imagined. There's something circular and funhouse mirror-like about envisioning the past by looking at how the past envisioned the future. Novak's writing a post for every episode of the 1962-1963 season, full of insights galore -- not only about the 1960s, but also about why I didn't take my space car into work today."

Tim Howard

Tim's been stopping himself mid-sentence to think about words (we imagine he's analyzing this prose right now):

"Lately I've been really enjoying the book The Unfolding of Language, by linguist Guy Deutscher (you might have caught him in our Colors episode, telling us the crazy story about Homer's use of color terms). This book is about the creation, evolution, and destruction of human language, and it reads almost like a detective story. At its core is a paradox: if humans tend to be lazy speakers, and all human languages are in constant state of destruction -- elimination of cases, removing subjunctives, shortening words, allowing lazier pronunciation -- then how did we ever create such massively complex languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, or (way back) Proto-Indo-European? If we're too lazy to hang onto the word "whom," how did we ever create languages with the kind of case systems and declensions that would make any reasonable student cry?

Along the way, you also get some great side-alleys into wholesale pronunciation shifts, words reversing meaning, and metaphors dying. I wish I could make this sound more whiz-bang fascinating, because honestly, this book has made me say unprintable things many times. And since I've begun reading it, I've found myself slowing down mid-sentence ... and looking long and hard at whatever (boring) thing I was saying, realizing that it actually reveals some bizarre process of linguistic destruction and creation. If you can't get the book right away, for linguistic kicks check out this great page from the blog Kottke on pronunciation!"

This weekend, our episode Diagnosis airs on public radio stations across the country. Get fired up with our studio party experiment -- we hosted a quick Google Hangout On Air with a crew of Radiolab producers and a special guest from the episode.

Check out this map to find out where you can hear Diagnosis on air this weekend.

Oh, dear.

Courtesy of Piotr Naskrecki

First off, this lizard? It's not really a lizard. It's an almost vanished species, a reptile like no other.

Its nearest relatives are ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, animals that lived during the Mesozoic, before the great dinosaurs. They're all extinct now. This is the only one (of the order Sphenodontia) to make it through the meteorite that crashed to Earth and wiped out the big guys, through ice ages, volcanoes, changes in sea levels, through rat invasions, human invasions, pig invasions. And now, after 230 million years hunting insects in the forest, having lasted this long, this little guy is, oddly, in trouble.

New Zealand biologists worry that soon, these animals may not be able to produce females. Male babies will keep coming. But without females, they can't produce offspring. And thereby hangs a tale.

Courtesy of Piotr Naskrecki

They are called tuataras, a New Zealand-Maori word for "spiny back." In daytime, they're not the liveliest of animals. When biologist Richard Fortey spotted one, it didn't run away. "In fact," as he watched, "it did not do anything at all for a very long time." So he waited. "I am hoping it would at least lift a leg or something to indicate that it is alive. Instead it just sits there, enduring through geological time."

Courtesy of Piotr Naskrecki

They're not in a rush. Tuataras can live for a hundred years or more. It takes them 10 to 20 years to reach sexual maturity. When it's time to mate, the male darkens its skin, raises its spiny crests and does a little circle dance around the female with stiffened legs. It has no penis. It rubs where it needs to, if the female allows. A male named "Henry," now resident at the Southland Museum in Invercargill, New Zealand, fathered his first 11 babies at the age of 111. His mate, "Mildred," is in her 70s. When they age, it shows mostly in their teeth, which get dull. That's when they switch to softer foods like worms and slugs.

Cool Hunters

Tuataras quicken when the sun goes down. They are night hunters, looking for crickets, beetles and, sometimes, each other. Like most reptiles, tuataras are ectothermic. "They can hide in the shade, bask in the sunshine, but they can't generate their own heat," says Harvard entomologist Piotr Naskrecki, who's been crazy for tuataras since he was a boy in Poland. (He remembers that Poland's oldest university in Krakow got one, advertising it as "the closest thing to a living dinosaur the human race would ever have a chance to see." It had a handsome cage. "It was probably the only inhabitant of 1960s communist Poland whose quarters were air-conditioned," he says. "I envisioned a gargantuan monster, perhaps a real-life dragon." But it didn't survive.)

Courtesy of Piotr Naskrecki

Naskrecki says the special thing about tuataras is they don't need very warm weather to become active. Tuataras' "optimal body temperature is 16 to 21 degrees centigrade, the lowest of any reptile," he writes in his new book. They can stay active all the way down to 7 degrees [what we Fahrenheiters call 44 degrees, brrrrr], which is how they compete. When modern lizards go quiet at night, tuataras are still up and about. They can forage for food, but they can't fight off rats or dogs, so they no longer live on the mainland in New Zealand. They've retreated to little offshore islands, where they are protected by the government, but here's the problem.

It's getting warmer.

Tuataras are very temperature sensitive when it comes to gender. The sex of a hatchling depends on the temperature of the egg. Over 72 degrees (22 C), they are more likely to become males. Under 72, they swing female. The swings are steep, ratios of 80-20, but at the extreme, when it's 64 degrees cool, all hatchlings will be female. When it warms up enough, all hatchlings are males.

If they could spread out, climb to higher elevations, move to warmer spots, they could handle climate change, but these lizards are now locked into very small spaces — "small pimple[s] of land," says Richard Fortey — and they can't adjust. That's why biologists at Victoria University now worry out loud about their future. A climatic model for one of the northern (warmer) islands suggests that by 2085, no females will be able to develop. That's why this week, 222 tuataras were flown down to the colder parts of New Zealand in hopes that one day, they will gestate females. Left to themselves, they may begin to disappear.

"This would be more than unjust," says Richard Fortey. These animals have been around so long, survived so much, that losing them "would be an insult to the virtues of endurance."

Fortey, in a new book, imagines a future scenario, not that far off, where hiding in the thick forest are these fierce, territorial, 100-year-old males, stalking their territories, defending against the other males, waiting for a lady to happen by. They sit there, listening with their primitive ears, their spiny crests tense, waiting ... waiting ... waiting ...

For nobody.

-----

Here's a video of young tuataras being released in a highly protected "ecosanctuary" this week. They're adorable, in a lizardy sort of way. Harvard entomologist Piotr Naskrecki took all the photos for this post; they appear in his new book: "Relics: Travels in Nature's Time Machine," a ravishing collection that describes plants and animals that have hung around the planet for a long, long time, defying the odds. These are our true survivors. Tuataras are there, of course, along with beetles and ferns, cycads, horseshoe crabs, all photographed by Piotr, whose masterful eye is on regular display at his blog (one of my favorites) The Smaller Majority. The science paper about warming and tuataras can be found here. Those same horseshoe crabs (and the tuataras) appear in Richard Fortey's book "Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind." Fortey, one of our great living biologists, an expert on trilobites (may they rest in peace), is also celebrating creatures that have a knack for continuing. Both authors try to keep smiling, but it's hard.

Ooooooooh, New Normal has been on the airwaves this week. This is by far one of my favorite Radiolabs ever and I think that’s because what the episode is really about is that elusive but definite thing which pervades what can at times seem like totally flat and known universe: CHANGE.

I feel the sting of hope so many times throughout this episode (when Stu becomes mayor, when the men of Silverton don dresses), and each of those moments, it’s like some pressure point is pushed and the reaction is immediate. Boom. Ouch. Wonderful. Tears.

So first of all, I wanted to share a powerful little quote that, for me anyways, presses upon that same spot. It comes from the author Francine Prose, from the short story “Hansel and Gretel” which is a modern twist on the old fairy tale.* The narrator is a middle-aged woman reflecting back on a time when she was young, stuck in a very unhappy situation in a cabin in the woods:

I wonder how often the future waits on the other side of the wall, knocking very quietly, too politely for us to hear, and I was filled with longing to reach back into my life and inform that unhappy girl: all around her was physical evidence proving her sorrows would end. I wanted to tell her that she would be saved, but not by an act of will: clever Gretel pretending she couldn’t tell if the oven was hot and tricking the witch into showing her and shoving the witch in the oven. What would rescue her was time itself and, above all, its inexorability, the utter impossibility of anything ever staying the same.

I find myself needing to go and find this paragraph from time to time. Almost like it's a prayer. What this quote and the New Normal episode say to me is that in a world that is seemingly uncaring of you and your needs, there is in fact one promise. One quiet truth, a large and omnipotent Delta (Δ) in the sky that guarantees you're not really as stuck as you think you are. Things will change. Because change, (Δ), always awaits. And, yes, it can cut both ways. It can take away a loved one or rot your tomato plants -- but it is true! A fact of nature. (Δ). (Δ). (Δ). The best worrystone there is because its powers are guaranteed. And New Normal seems simply a celebration of this fact.

Which, errr, mute the Hallelujah, brings me to the second part of this post. The foxes segment, the last in the show, in which Dmitri Belyaev domesticates the silver foxes. I have to confess that I've never really understood what was oh so hopeful and astounding about it. So some guy domesticated some foxes. Big whoop.

I got that there was something neato about the fact that when you select for a friendly fox you also get some anatomical changes (floppy ears, dull teeth), but I didn’t find it strange or surprising. Hadn’t I been taught in high school that sometimes genetic traits were randomly linked? Like red hair and freckles.** These just often ‘went’ together, and there’s nothing so astounding about that -- they’re close together on a chromosome, so they're less likely to split up in recombination. So floppy ears and gentleness are linked, I buy it. No need to wheel out the wow-machine.

But then along came a listener so awed-out by Belyaev’s friendly foxes that he made it his mission to go to Siberia just to see them in their floppy-eared glory. His name is Tyler Cole, this listener, and when he wrote the fox farm, they did not write back. He wrote again. No response. And finally, after much email persistence, they relented. They said he could visit. He got himself to Russia. He got a train ticket to Novosibirsk. Hundreds of dollars and hours of his life, just to see these foxes. He got there. He took a video. And he sent it to us.

OK, I thought after I saw his video. Maybe I need to re-listen to this segment and see what’s so darn amazing about it. If Tyler’s gonna go all the way to Siberia, there’s gotta be something I’m missing. So I listened and I focused and I think … I got it.

This is absolutely redundant for some of you, but for my fellow folks with curious hearts and an occasional zone-out problem... take heed. What’s so cool about the foxes is this: they aren't just a fluky collection of floppy mutations, but specifically… half-grown foxes. At least that's what Tecumseh Fitch (who is not a Harper Lee character but an evolutionary biologist) thinks. They are frozen in adolescence.

T-Fitch bases his idea on the slightly magical set of cells called “neural crest cells.” OK, magical is the wrong word. Neural crest cells are as mundane as they come. Every mammal has them. They are the cells responsible for making fur thick, cartilage firm, bones strong, and adrenal glands pumped full of stress-wary hormones. But if you look at all that in another way -- if you take what they do for a creature en masse -- they are sort of magical-seeming: they're the cells that make you grow up.

What Tecumseh Fitch thinks is that when you select for a friendly fox, you are actually selecting for a fox with less potent neural crest cells. I’m imagining these cells like pixie dust, that only gets sprinkled lightly. The adrenal glands get only partially inflated with fear. Which is why the foxes are friendly to humans. And all the other changes -- floppy ears, thinner bones, duller fangs -- aren’t due to coincidences of gene location, but of pixie dust that never finished its job. 

Cue the Peter Pan music.

And that's what Tyler Cole went to see. A glimpse of Neverland.

Here's what he found. NOTE: This video might be upsetting to watch as it features stressed out animals in cages. We're presenting it for those interested in seeing the difference between the aggressive foxes and the gentle foxes, and how their physical features compare.

Tyler Cole's "The incredible fox domestication experiment in Novosibirsk, Russia" on Vimeo.

Tyler also wrote an account of his visit, and reports that while he didn’t notice the differences in bone size that we talked about in the episode (the facial features of the gentle foxes looked the same to him as the aggressive foxes), he did note a couple of other anatomical changes that we didn’t discuss in the show. First of all was the fur color. Many of the friendly foxes had patchy patterns on their fur. Kind of like a cow or calico cat. This is kind of patterning is called piebald, and a little Googling on the topic reveals that piebald patterning is often caused by a neural crest defect!  A study on piebald mice found, “The white areas of the coat are completely lacking in neural crest-derived melanocytes.” (Melanocytes are the cells which produce melanin, a dark pigment). Whoa! Ten more points for Tecumsah Fitch’s idea. And then there were the blue eyes. Many of the domesticated foxes Tyler observed had gorgeous baby-blue eyes, a sappy adjective I use intentionally because it turns out… what else are a thing made dark by neural crest cells? Eyes.*

So as Tyler squishes his hand into the fluffy white coat of the gentle calico fox, maybe there is something to the notion that what he’s actually touching is a creature on pause. A lost boy fox in a kind of canid Neverland. 

Alright, I’ll zip up the poetic musings for now. But, man! Here’s to Stu and the friendly baboons and an absurd sci-fi reverie of a whole breed of adolescents. Enjoy those remaining days of fall. Look up at the near barren trees and maybe even try to catch a falling leaf. What is it if not a dry crusty flake shed from that benevolent Delta (Δ) in the sky.

P.S. I would be remiss not to inform you that these lost-boy foxes are now for sale.

And now, to the FOOTNOTES:

* My friend Maria first shared "Hansel and Gretel" with me two years ago, and I so thank her for that gift. It's part of the collection, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. An insanely fun compilation of modern takes on fairy tales by contemporary authors.

** Regarding red hair and freckles. This is common example of genetic linkage, though it has not actually been shown that it is due to them being physically close together on the chromosome. They could appear together for other reasons. Maybe there was once some selective advantage in northern climates to have such traits, so they evolved together. Scientists don't know yet. An example where two phenotypes have been shown to be linked because the genes are close to each other is:  Myotonic muscular dystrophy (a childhood disease caused by disruption of the "dystrophin" gene, which is essential for the proper development of skeletal muscle cells) and the ABH secretor gene (a gene that is responsible for secreting a series of "blood group antigen" proteins into the bloodstream). But I thought that was a bit complicated to go into when I was trying to make the freckle point.

*** Here's an absolutely fantabulous National Geographic article that finally made me understand why domestication is actually mysterious.

Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the very foundation of our lives. To understand how big a role it plays, we look at chance and patterns in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body.

Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, meet two friends whose meeting seems to defy pure chance, and take a close look at some very noisy bacteria.

We tackle a question from a listener, this time about storytelling. To answer it, we turn to the brain of Jonathan Gottschall, a writer who has devoted much of his early career to understanding why humans relish the well-spun saga, the epic tall tale, the sob-inducing ballad, the ... well, you get it ... 

The Question:

Elizabeth from Boston asks (for full comment, see here):

"I don't know about you, but I really love to read a good novel. There is something really special to me about this ... where you're doing literally nothing but staring at a bound pile of papers for many hours and yet your mind couldn't be more active. My question is, what exactly is happening there? How is it that we can go from interpreting little symbols to acquiring an experience that we didn't even actually experience? WHAT MAKES THE PAGE DISAPPEAR?"

The Answer:

Wouldn’t it be great if the holodeck were real? In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the holodeck is a sort of walk-in closet that allows people to simulate virtually anything in absolutely authentic sensory detail. I watched Next Generation avidly as a teenager, often dreaming of the uses I could make of such a device -- from amorous exploits, to saving the world, to playing shortstop for the Mets.

But I already had a holodeck and I was already wearing it out simulating these feats and more. The imagination is an awesome evolutionary adaptation that allows people to teleport mentally into alternative worlds. While the imagination doesn’t give us the perfect sensory simulation of the holodeck, it still gives an engrossing and authentic sense of what it would be like to live different scenarios (and in the case of dreams, the imagined world is as convincing to the dreamer as real life). Thanks to the imagination, people can try out the consequences of an action -- say confronting a bully or asking someone out on a date -- without the risk of trying out the action for real. The imagination gives us, in other words, the near magical ability to experience what “we didn’t even actually experience.”

In terms of evolutionary priority, the imagination comes first. But once we developed internal holodecks it probably didn’t take us long to discover that we could upload stories onto them for kicks and edification. So we can think of a story -- from a novel to a film to a non-fiction narrative -- as a simulation we run on the mental machinery of the imagination. Instead of having to construct the imaginative world on our own, however, the story can be seen as a set of instructions for building a whole world -- line by line, detail by detail -- in our heads.

And the simulation is so powerful that it really can seem like we’ve passed straight through the page and into a parallel universe. Here’s why:all of us understand that fiction is about fake people and fake events. But this doesn’t stop the unconscious centers of our brains from processing it like it's real. When the protagonist of a novel is in a bad fix we know it’s all pretend, but our hearts still race, we breathe faster, and stress hormones spike our blood. When fictional zombies attack, we feel sick with real fear; when Old Yeller dies we are floored by real grief. And when something sexy or dangerous befalls a protagonist, we feel aroused or afraid. FMRI studies show when we experience these things, our brains light up as though that thing were happening to us, not just to the characters. So novels make us feel like we’re experiencing an alternative reality because, from the brain’s perspective, we actually are.

When we are living in the imagination it often seems that the real world fades, but the thing to remember: it does not. Not really. Consider “highway hypnosis”: our brains can drive our cars even when our conscious minds are lost in intense Walter Mittyesque fantasies. The same goes for sharing in a story. The brain is still registering our surroundings, which is why we can walk to work even as an audio book takes us to the Starship Enterprise.

Once a kid is born, their genetic fate is pretty much sealed. Or is it? This hour, we put nature and nurture on a collision course and discover how outside forces can find a way inside us, shaping not just our hearts and minds, but the basic biological blueprint that we pass on to future generations.

Jad starts us off with some wishful parental thinking: that no matter how many billions of lines of genetic code, or how many millions of years of evolution came before you, your struggles, your efforts, matter -- not just in a touchy feely kind of way, but in ways that can mold your kids on the deepest level. 

This is, of course, an old idea. Back in the day, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forward a theory that animals could pick up traits during their lifetime, through effort and struggle, then pass those traits on to their kids to give them a leg up. So, for example, a blacksmith could bulk up over years of hammering iron, then sire a bunch of thick-armed kids to join the family business. It's a nice thought -- that the hard work you put in could get passed on to your children -- but ... it's wrong. Evolution doesn't work that way. Species change slowly, over long periods of time thanks to chance and fate, with no regard for how an individual improves itself through the course of its life. But is that really the whole story?

Back in the early 1900s, an Austrian biologist claimed he had real-live proof of Lamarckian inheritance in action.Science writer Carl ZimmerandSam Kean, author of the The Violinist’s Thumb, tell us about Paul Kammerer and his experiments with midwife toads. And what happened when people started to take a close look at his toads.

BUt it turns out, Kamerer might have been -- perhaps unwittingly -- onto something. Which leads us to a really basic question about parenting -- one that Michael Meaney at McGill University is trying to answer: if you're nice or mean to a kid...what does that actually do to them? Michael, along with Frances Champagne from Columbia University, figured the best way to sort this out was to studying maternal care in rats. It turns out that good rat moms lick their babies a lot. And pups that get licked a lot, go on to lick a lot. You might think they just learn to lick, but Michael and Frances explain to us how a mother's tongue can reach all the way down to their babies DNA.

Image of Paul Kammerer via loc.gov.

As a grad student who is writing my dissertation on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962, I am partial to one particular Radiolab segment … on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962.

For those of you who don't remember all the way back to season four, producer Ellen Horne traveled to Bukoba, Tanzania, to find out about a fifty-year-old outbreak of hysterical laughter that spanned about ten months; thousands came down with it, mostly young girls, each laughing and crying for hours at a time. Ellen heard of many possible causes. Stress, puberty, … even caterpillars. And not just caterpillars, but dead caterpillars. The ghosts of caterpillars.

You see, the same area that fell prey to the laughing sickness had, about a year or so before, also been the site of an infestation of caterpillars, said Gertrude Rweyemamu, herself a victim of the 1962 epidemic and a participant in our 2008 show. The members of the farming community exterminated the little pests, the hungry hungry hippos of the soil. Rweyemamu explained that an elder of her community concluded the epidemic was the dead caterpillars' revenge. But Rweyemamu wasn’t sold. She shrugged off the revenge theory, offering that if caterpillars were the culprits, perhaps they had some sort of bacterium in them that made people crazy.

To be fair, it was an offhand remark. And, as Ellen reported, blood tests at the time ruled out all possible germy explanations. But it got me thinking: could a caterpillar start an epidemic? Is that even possible? Sure, fleas gave us the bubonic plague. And ticks cause Lyme disease. But, what about nature’s fuzzy little plush toy, the caterpillar? They seem so friendly and benign. What was on their rap sheet?

Turns out, a caterpillar epidemic recently broke out in the United States. So recently, actually, I was surprised I hadn’t heard about it.

It all started in 2001, in the bluegrass pastures of central Kentucky. That year, starting a week and a half before the Kentucky Derby, local newspapers began reporting a rash of horse miscarriages. Not just one or two. Not even one or two dozen. The miscarriages numbered in the hundreds, and eventually, in the thousands.

In three short weeks (a period described, in the title of a paper written by University of Kentucky veterinary science professor Thomas Tobin, as the: “2001 Kentucky Equine Abortion Storm”), 20-30 percent of the region's mares lost their foals, either as early- or late- term fetuses, stillborns, or, in some cases, just a few days after they were born. Most accounts of what became known as “Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome” were coolly clinical, but somehow as I was reporting out the topic I couldn’t help feel how epic and tragic and extreme it all was, as if pulled from the pages of the Old Testament.   

In a state with a billion-dollar horse industry, the loss of thousands of thoroughbred foals was financially crippling; not just in the short-term to breeders, but also down the line to stable owners, to feed and hay sellers, to blacksmiths, to veterinarians, to racetracks. According to the University of Louisville's department of equine business, the costs all tallied up to $336 million (or $85,142 per thoroughbred foal lost). Add to that the incalculable emotional toll on the mares and their owners. Kentuckian Amy Graves, whom I spoke with in 2011, lost foals from two of her own mares. She summarized the loss to the horses, the owners, and the area in one word: "devastating."

As government and private veterinary scientists began to research mare reproductive loss syndrome, their gaze soon turned to a plague of caterpillars, which were at the time blanketing Kentucky’s Ohio Valley. Two inches long, fully grown. Spiky brown hair. Black, with a white racing stripe. The eastern tent caterpillar was one scary mammajamma, the Terminator of caterpillars. And they were everywhere.

"It was like a carpet,” Graves said of the caterpillars covering her hometown of Versailles, Kentucky. “I couldn't walk through the grass without crunching them." 

She remembers one spring day she went to use her barbecue and found caterpillars covering the lid.

"The grill looked like it grew hair." 

In data collected both from the field in 2001 and in a series of experiments over the next two years, researchers found that when they piped the caterpillars directly into the stomachs of six pregnant mares, all six aborted within five days; if they killed the bacteria on the caterpillars first, only three of six aborted, though it took longer, between eleven and twenty-four days.

But how exactly could a caterpillar out in nature harm a fetus wrapped in a mother's womb?

Well, the caterpillars were all over the pastures, and they even got into the feed, where the mares unknowingly gulped them down. After that, the caterpillars' body, covered in tiny, barbed hair (or “setae”), made it into the equine gastrointestinal tract. There, these tiny hairs, even just fragments of them, pierced through the intestines, carving microscopic holes; in some cases, the hairs then slipped through, entering into the bloodstream, where they would ride around the body and "randomly lodge in distant tissues," wrote Tobin.

Along for the ride on these tiny hairs were, to quote one journal article, “bacterial ‘hitchhikers,’” any of a number of species of Streptococcus or Actinobacillus. All of the mare’s most robust organs fought off these intruders -- all, that is, but the most immunologically vulnerable: the placenta. The barbs spiked their way into this critical organ -- the connection between mother and baby – and researchers conclude that the combination of the breached placenta and the influx of bacteria triggered the miscarriage. The penetrating setae hypothesis, like mare reproductive loss syndrome itself, is, “biologically unique and without precedent in the biological and medical literature,” according to Tobin’s article. 

More than a decade after the fact, every time Graves thinks about the eastern tent caterpillar, she gets tingles down her spine. And to this day, she squishes any and every tent caterpillar she sees, lest it make its way down the gullet of a pregnant mare.

***

Thanks to scientist Thomas Tobin for his heebie-jeebie inducing photo of eastern tent caterpillars swarming a bucket in Kentucky, during the 2001 outbreak. Kentucky horse owner Graves confessed she didn't have any photos of her own yard or pastures because it was "too gross to even want to document."

Holy heck, I just learned something crazy.

So you know about vestigial traits? Organs or attributes that no longer serve their original purpose, but still haven't completely vanished. Like your appendix.

I was recently looking into the topic and I came across a list of "10 Vestigial Traits You Didn't Know You Had."

And there, alongside our tonsils and tailbones, and those tiny little triangles of skin in the corners of our eyes that used to be full-on, horizontally opening-and-closing translucent third eyelids (yeah, uh huh! like lizards have)...it sat:

Goose bumps.

Now, I never thought of goose bumps as a vestigial trait. I thought of goose bumps as cool-looking, sure. Neato. But kind of pointless. It turns out, however, these little flashing studs of flesh used to do something very specific (and useful!) for us.

Think about when goose bumps occur: when you’re cold or really freaked out (Was that a ghost!? Ah. Goose bumps). Turns out those tiny domes are just evidence of the Arrector Pili muscles flexing. The Arrector Pili muscles are the tiny muscles in your dermis which connect to your hair follicles. Now, long ago, when you were covered with a nice thick coat of fur, the effect of such a contraction would be a magical POOF! Tada, you are now a giant fur-ball. Like a cat with its hair standing on end, but human-sized. Now it turns out there are two reasons hair standing on end is useful to a creature:

1. It traps heat! The warm air your body heats up gets trapped more effectively when all those hairs are erect, so you've got yourself a nice warm layer of air to prevent against the advancing cold. Mmmm. Cozy town.
2. It makes you look bigger to predators. Poof. I'm giant. I swear.Rowr.

It’s this second effect that made me smile. Because then I thought about the third thing which gives us goose bumps -- feeling so moved by something...something so sweet or sad or hopeful...that a wave of ripples appears on our skin. I never knew why that happened, though I’ve always loved it when it did. Proof, in cutaneous puckering, of just how much a story affected me. Now I see there might be a far more specific reason for this reaction. Perhaps when a story has a turn that’s so overwhelmingly powerful, it makes us feel humbled, literally: we feel small in the face of it. That little pulse of skin is an attempt to flex that long-lost coat of fur, an attempt to protect us. But not from some creature of massive strength -- not a sharp-taloned, razor-fanged predator -- but from Hope itself. Right? When I think about what brings on these "emotional" goose bumps -- what precisely is it that triggers them? -- I think it's moments of blindsiding hope. A jack-in-the-box surprise amount of human goodness. Lovers waiting for each other against all odds. That sort of thing.

Is it the same for you? Next time you get goose bumps because of someone’s story, or music, or art, whatever it is, try to note SPECIFICALLY what it was that did it. We’d love it if you’d share.

Either way, enjoy watching that ancient mechanism trying to do its thing, flashing its shield, in an attempt to make you look bigger than you are.

When talking to researchers for the genetics portion of our Inheritance show, one thing that consistently came up is that it's difficult for science to study the effects maternal lineage has on offspring.

Some listeners noticed this too, notedly in our segment "You are what your grandpa eats," in which we explored a Swedish study that looked at the effects of food availability on boys between the ages of about 9 and 12 years old, and how those effects showed up in the future sons and grandsons of those boys. Quick recap: for those boys that experienced famine in their tweens, when they grew up to be fathers, they actually passed a health benefit onto their offspring; their kids, and grandkids, were less at risk for heart disease, and diabetes. For those who had lives of plenty, it turns out their kiddos (and grandkiddos) would have a higher frequency of heart attacks and diabetes.

A pretty provocative study. But what about the effect grandmothers, or mothers, have on the offspring? Lars Olov Bygren, the lead researcher on the Swedish study, said that his group did study both the male and female lines but, and it's a big but -- "the maternal influence of this special kind, from availability of food during childhood, is difficult to discern -- probably because there are so many signals between mother and the fetus or child, and this might hide a similar influence as in the male line."

What does Bygren mean by "so many signals"? Well, pregnancy is a very intimate, boundary-smudging process, in which mother and baby share not only genes, but hormones, blood, cells, chemicals, bacteria, and more. If you're trying to isolate the effect that genes -- and only genes -- have on the baby, and isolate that effect over multiple generations... it's a tall order. Like trying to hear a whisper in a room full of crying babies. But if you look for the effect in the paternal line, there's one thing and one thing only to study: sperm. It's more of a clear cut process (as "clear cut" as genetics can be, that is).

That's not to say science isn't extremely interested in what mothers are contributing -- on the contrary, they're doing their best to understand it. In fact, Bygren says that his group sees some kind of "involvement" between a maternal grandmother, her son, and the son's daughter, but they aren't sure exactly what that involvement is. And as for a connection between grandfathers and granddaughters, his team didn't see an influence on cardiovascular or all-cause mortality like they did with grandfathers and grandsons. So the big research results, like the kind of data-driven paternal studies Bygren talked about in our Inheritance show, are still in the making. Hopefully those findings are on their way with future studies -- with larger sample sizes and new techniques, scientists should be better able isolate the whisper in all the noise.

In the meantime, we'll keep our ears perked for any upcoming maternal studies -- and you should too, we'd love to know if you see anything.

A giant trampoline, a burger refill denied, and buffaloing English grammar...

Pat Walters

Pat is not pulling our legs, the world now contains a 170-foot long trampoline, in the Kaluga region of western Russia:

Lynn Levy

Lynn's fallen for a strange new short film by Philip Bacon:

I won’t try to explain what happens in this little movie. I’m not sure I quite understand, myself. But I’m in love with the world Bacon created in his 8-and-a-half minutes, a world of jelly beans and bunny costumes and thermoses and death; a world with very different rules from ours, but with all the same pesky emotions.

If you want more short strange stuff like this, poke around on Short of the Week, a beautifully designed & lovingly curated site that almost always has something interesting on offer.

Molly Webster

Molly recommends taking a really close look at the human body:

What I love about science, particularly biology, is that it dives into the things we see all around us, and it illuminates what’s going on down there, in there, beneath there, up there... in all those places and spaces where daily life continues onward -- and through Lennart Nilsson’s lens, we are able to take this journey at such an intimate level. The world might remember Nilsson as the first person to snap a photo of a human embryo (and then the first to capture both the HIV and SARS viruses); I recently discovered him and I can’t stop geeking out over his photographs: a cell sentinel engulfs an invading bacteria; a marauding virus floats away from a host, having stripped it of its protective coating; sperm swim, land, and tip, push, slide into an egg; a fetus adjusts her (or his) hand. Though we can’t always see it, Nilsson reminds us -- me -- that at its base, life is a micro-series of interactions that are real; that can be intercepted, changed, and observed. And also, wondered at.

Brenna Farrell

Brenna takes heart from two ludicrous questions -- one involving a burger, and the other a batch of donuts:

If you haven't seen these videos yet, they're pretty great. A little backstory before you hit play -- Jia's plan is to toughen himself up by making insane requests to strangers, so he's comfortable hearing people tell him "No" a lot as an entrepreneur. For example:

Burger refill denied, he geared up for a bigger "No"... and then he met Jackie, who threw his plans for a donut-shaped, viral-video-making loop:

Chris Berube

Chris shuffles off to Buffalo...grammar-wise:

I've been thinking about complicated grammar. When writing, you ideally like to avoid repeating words in a sentence - for example, sometimes there's a temptation to write "It's its" -- that is to say "The dog is having a party next week -- it's its first birthday." A more common one is "had had" as in, "He had had an awful time on vacation." While it's common to do this in speech, in my experience, newspaper editors hate it.

In the early 80s, students at the University of Buffalo created the ultimate sentence to drive editors nuts -- a grammatical phrase that is entirely made up of the same word. They came up with a few examples, like, "Dog dogs dog dogs dog." But the most annoying, and most notable, that they put together has got to be, "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo."

As professor William Rapaport points out, you can make a grammatical, though hardly euphonic, sentence out of a single word pretty easily. Here's how this one works: Buffalo is a place and a noun, but also a verb, meaning "to bully." So this sentence means "Some buffalo from Buffalo are currently buffaloing (in a distinctly Buffalo way - in this case, a Buffalo buffalo is like a 'French kiss') some other buffalo who are also residents of Buffalo." Make sense?

I first saw this while clicking through links on Wikipedia, but have since found out that Steven Pinker has a section on the buffaloes in his great book The Language Instinct.

Tim Howard

Tim recommends a storytelling podcast in Spanish:

For those of you who speak Spanish and enjoy narrative radio, there’s a great new podcast called Radio Ambulante. Along the lines of This American Life and Radiolab, they do stories big and small (and mostly non-fiction) that cluster around a different theme each episode. The most recent hour is “Milagros” (Miracles):

Malissa O'Donnell

A twist on a classic game has Malissa's fingers tickling -- Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock:

For those of you out there who are fans of TVs The Big Bang Theory, you already know about this expanded version of the classic rock paper scissors.

The inventors of the variation, Sam Kass and Karen Bryla, were aiming to cut down on the occurrence of ties in the original when played by people who know each other fairly well. So they came up with this alternative:

• Scissors cuts Paper,
• Paper covers Rock,
• Rock crushes Lizard,
• Lizard poisons Spock,
• Spock smashes Scissors,
• Scissors decapitates Lizard,
• Lizard eats Paper,
• Paper disproves Spock,
• Spock vaporizes Rock,
• Rock crushes Scissors!

Kelly Slivka

Kelly's been looking for help in all the wrong places:

If you live in New York City, you might have noticed that there's an emergency intercom system on the wall of each subway car. Maybe you've even had to use it to help an ailing co-passenger. On Tuesday morning of last week, I found myself standing on the subway during rush hour, packed shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back with strangers like a Terra Cotta Soldier, overheating in my winter jacket, almost half an hour late to work due to a breakdown on the track, and about to scream. As I stared at the subway car's wall, bumping knees with the person sitting on the bench facing me, and trying to inure myself to the desperation of the morning commute, I noticed this intercom system -- really noticed it -- for the first time.

"EMERGENCY INTERCOM," its steel-plated face reads. "To talk, press, release and wait for steady light." It seemed like the kind of thing Banksy would graffiti on the side of a brick post office in a rough neighborhood. But the humor of it...of my needing help and right there help was being offered but not in a way I could possibly use...helped me survive the commute. I suppose now those intercoms will always make me smile.

I was recently introduced to a friend’s five-year-old daughter, and I’m already living in her shadow. She is being raised with not one, not two, but three languages. I began calculating how soon this child would know more total vocabulary than I do, and realized it’s probably already happened.

Nothing makes you feel intellectually insecure like finding out that a child might be smarter than you. But I found some small relief in talking with psychologist and noted researcher Ellen Bialystock, who studies the effects of language on the brain.

“Look, I will never say that bilingual kids are smarter,” says Bialystock, from York University in Toronto, Canada, after I repeatedly peppered her with the question. “That’s something you can never say.”

Phew!

My relief, however, was cut short as Bialystock continued:

“What we can say is that some of the cognitive processes that are part of intelligence are more developed in bilinguals.”

So what, exactly, does that mean?

Brain Changer

A common view before the 1960s was that teaching a kid more than one language at a young age was confusing. Behavioral studies at the time posited that young minds weren’t developed enough to handle so much information, and that bilingualism was disorienting for children. Since then, countless studies have shown that young brains are a lot more adaptable than old school social scientists gave them credit for being. Learning multiple languages won’t confuse a child, or an adult learner: bilingualism actually reshapes the brain.

(A quick note here: when I refer to “bilingualism,” I’m not talking about taking a couple of Spanish classes so you can order a torta with confidence; most of the cognitive benefits I’m about to point out only happen for people who are certifiably bilingual -- people who pass fluency tests, things like that.)

In one study carried out by Cathy Price, a neuroimaging researcher at University College London, it was discovered that bilinguals had more gray matter in their posterior supramarginal gyrus, a long name for the ridged part of the brain that researchers have associated with vocabulary acquisition.

“When you learn more language, your posterior supramarginal gyrus will get a workout, and be stimulated to grow,” says Price. “When you look at the images, there is more gray matter density with more than one language spoken.” The image below is just one of the brain scans Price's team took of a bilingual brain; it shows the same brain, from three different angles, with the yellow spot identifying the area of the brain where they've seen thickening:

Since gray matter makes up a good portion of the nerve cells within the brain, the more gray matter in that particular gyrus, the faster and more accurately your brain will perform certain tasks. For example, there is evidence that bilingual brains are better at doing tasks where conflicting information has to be processed. In one study, Ellen Bialystok subjected a group of 5 year olds -- some bilingual, some monolingual -- to something called "Simon Tests," which are used to determine how quickly people can respond to confusing stimulus. For example, you might be asked to push a button with your right hand that triggers a light on the left side of your field of view - things like that which feel unnatural. The bilinguals, on the whole, were much better at the tests, which suggests they are much better at sorting out conflicting information.

Since the bilingual brain is adept at suppressing the language that isn’t being used in a given moment, it has experience inhibiting unhelpful information and promoting important stuff. There are lots of benefits to this -- one study found that bilinguals were more able to filter out ambient noise. Speaking two languages means you feel less overwhelmed when trying to order in a busy restaurant, and makes you more capable of talking to someone on a crowded subway.

Price is quick to point out that, at best, any benefits are minimal. Bilinguals are only a few milliseconds faster at sorting information, but, hey, that adds up!

“Bilingualism is an experience,” says Bialystock, and just like any other exercise (e.g., dancing, knitting, using sign language) it re-wires the brain, forming new neurons and new connections.

Preventative medicine

While many contemporary studies have linked bilingualism with a better-performing brain, more recently, a few researchers have begun exploring the question of whether language proficiency affects disease outcomes -- does bilingualism, in other words, help stave off certain illnesses? Bialystok has studied people suffering from dementia and she believes that the healthier bilingual brain actually weathers the ravages of aging better than a monolingual one.

In one experiment published in 2012, Bialystock examined the brain scans of 40 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s disease. “For our test subjects, we had people with the same level of disease, at exactly the same age,” says Bialystok. They all showed approximately the same symptoms. Their brains, therefore, should look pretty much the same. But what Bialystok found was surprising.

Traditionally, the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s atrophies as neurons die: the brain’s outer layer begins to shrink, and the hippocampus withers. When Bialystok compared the brains of 40 patients, she found that the brains of the bilinguals in the study showed twice as much atrophy as the monolinguals. But despite having far more diseased brains, they had performed as well on cognitive tests as the monolinguals with less diseased brains.

What? With more atrophy, you’d expect the disease to be further along -- you'd expect those patients to have moreproblems functioning day-to-day. But for the bilinguals, it wasn’t, and they didn’t. Bialystok has undertaken a couple of similar studies in the last few years, and every time, she’s found the same result: language multiplicity appears to hold off the effects of dementia. In one examination of 211 probable Alzheimer’s patients, the effect was so great, she found that the bilingual patients had reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later than the monolingual ones.

Bialystock is the first to say that, while her studies are promising, they aren’t definitive. “There are lots of questions here,” Bialystock says. “Like, why would bilingualism fight Alzheimer’s anyway?” But she believes it has something to do with how language re-wires us.

Who's smarter?

That's all good news for that five year old, though I still wanted to know if she was smarter than me.

The closest I could come to an objective measurement was IQ scores...and well, I won't get into the caveats and thorniness of using IQ to measure anything, let alone how smart you are. Quite a few studies explicitly draw a parallel between bilingualism and a high IQ score, but researchers are quick to point out that such a relationship is not perfect.

“One of the IQ tests is a vocabulary test, and in general, we might expect bilinguals to do slightly worse on a [vocabulary] test in one language than if it was their only language,” says Price. 

The reason for this vocab disparity is that bilinguals learn and use each language “for different purposes, in different domains of life,” according to a book by french linguist Francois Grosjean. A kid might learn and use different languages for home and school, which means that, because of context, they won’t get the full vocabulary of either place. Kind of a, “Jack of all trades, a master of none” scenario.

“Bilinguals have a larger vocabulary, since they speak two languages,” says Price, “but they might know fewer words within a language.” 

It seems nit-picky to me to say that a bilingual individual might be at a disadvantage because they don’t speak as many words in each of their languages, and I think it’s fair to say that the cognitive benefits of bilingualism probably outweigh the slight disadvantage they face on a test that is often discredited. Which again is good news for the multilinguals, but not for me and my monolingual ego. And it’s going to be hard to make up for lost time: researchers show that it’s tougher to fluently learn a second or third or fourth language as you age, meaning that adult learners might have a hard time getting the sweet, sweet cognitive advantages that bilingual children enjoy. Even if I start now, I may never catch that kid. Or this one:

A special thanks to Vladimir Sanchez from San Francisco, for sending us Labbers the question about bilingualism that got us thinking in the first place; and to Judy Willis, a neuroscientist/teacher/advocate for bilingual education, for pointing me in the right direction as I set out to report this piece. She blogs about bilingualism for Psychology Today.

In a moment, there's going to be singing. It will be a love song, sung by Nathaniel, a sad-eyed, blue-gloved scientist who gave his heart to an organism, but then did her wrong. (Or maybe she did him wrong. These things get complicated.)

YouTube

Like every lost love, this one has a back story. I don't know Berkeley biologist Nathaniel Krefman, but I can guess what happened. It happens all the time.

Imagining The Young Nathaniel ...

You fall in love with science, there's a professor who takes you on, leads you to a good graduate program, you study hard, spend your 20s earning embarrassingly little money working crazy hours, not minding that much, you get your Ph.D., you're trained, you're primed and suddenly you're in a job market where there's one academic opening for every five new Ph.D.s — and you're scared, your colleagues start to bail, slip off to med school, business school, and that dream you had — being a post-doc in a good lab, with a bench, and a little freedom? That's next to impossible — but, but, but, you hang on, and hooray! You get a starter job, get an idea, write it down, send it off to some National Institute in Washington, or to a Foundation, and double-hooray! They fund you, and now, finally, you've got a little money, a little time ... and then this happens ...

Your experiment fails.

Bad, Bad Yeast

The thing you thought would happen doesn't. Maybe it's something stupid, like your yeast won't grow, and you need them to run your trials. You want to try again, with a different critter, but that means another National Institutes of Health grant and Washington says, ... well ... if you were working on cancer, or STDs, or flu, a disease everybody's heard of, then maybe we'd give you more money ... but you're not.

You're just chasing a cool, fascinating idea. And it seems you chose the wrong yeast to do it with. That's when you walk into your lab, pack up your test tubes, your flasks, your dishes, your notes, and you sing this sad, sad song ...

Thanks to Nathaniel Krefman, Lydia The, Haomiao Huang at Berkeley for the video. This is our second homage to musicians Gotye and Kimbra; a few months ago we blogged about the cool camouflage designs they included in their video. And thanks to physics grad student and blogger Aatish Bhatia at Rutgers who notices first what I then notice later.

One question that listeners keep shooting our way is why do humans cry? Be it something stuck in our eye, a surge of love, a great joke, a death, or just a crappy Tuesday -- we cry a lot (and when we don’t, the lack of tears is very noticed).

“Tears are really the only bodily fluid that doesn’t offend others,” says Michael Trimble, who we rang up to get the dirty deets on our tear ducts. Trimble is Emeritus Professor in behavioral neurology at the Institute of Neurology, London. He recently wrote a book called Why Humans Like to Cry. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation with Trimble.

RL: What is happening physically when I cry?

MT: If you ask people what’s the opposite of crying they’ll say laughing. The emotion [that comes] with both laughing and crying leads to it being hard to speak -- you get choked. But they are different. Crying begins in the guts; it’s a gut feeling that rises upwards. It starts with heavy breathing, your throat becomes dry, and the muscles around the eye contract. This then triggers a reflex from the central nervous system back to the lachrymal glands with an increased output of tears. You often can’t prevent it. Laughing on the other hand is quite evanescent. And there doesn’t have to be a joke to laugh. For example, “Fred, how are you? Haha,” is used often as a greeting. But crying is usually not a greeting communication. 

That would be a pretty weird way to say hello… in your book, you talk about how humans are the only animals that cry, at pretty much everything. Why do we do it?

Tears have a biological function to make the eye moist. Tears contain proteins and antibiotics to keep the eyes from getting infected. Conjunctivitis, when the eye becomes infected and red, will lead to tears because of the irritation of the eye. If you throw grit into the eye of any animal that has an eye it needs to be kept moist, it will cause tears. But I want to emphasize this: only human beings cry emotionally (but I am not saying that animals don’t have emotions or do not mourn).

Wow, that’s crazy – why are humans the only animals that emotionally cry?

We have no idea precisely. But my [idea] is that when small social communities began to develop language, this allowed for the development of self-consciousness. To be self-conscious, you need the “I,” and to have “I” you need to realize it is “here and now.” With this development, people began to understand that others in their small community died and disappeared. [They began to try to connect to those who were gone, and] this is when early religious ceremonies developed which involved singing and dancing. I believe that this is when crying developed as an emotional signal. Group crying may have been an important aspect of these ceremonies and is still an important feature of religious services today. Over a long period of time my speculation is that the early development of emotional tears happened with bereavement.

Another explanation -- again we can’t prove this -- is that in these early ceremonies, cremation occurred. People were gathered around the fire and that provoked tears through irritation. And then being sad became linked with tears.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t we cry only at funerals? But we’ll cry at pretty much any emotion…

Well, it’s linked to loss and detachment. The most important things to mammals are mothers. If the mammal infant does not cry out, it will die. The separation call is the first thing that happens; it’s the beginning of bonding a baby to a mother. In my opinion, this is why we generally feel better after crying -- because it’s an emotional response learned early on. And this developed between one million and 200,000 years ago, [though] we can’t be very exact.

So you’re saying that crying makes us feel better because it reminds us of being comforted by our mothers, but then I saw some studies arguing just the opposite. Is crying really good for us? Most people generally say it makes them feel better.

The majority of studies indicate that people feel better after crying. It’s situation specific -- obviously if you have a domestic argument and it continues, you won’t feel any better. But with music, poetry, bereavement… you feel better. In fact, crying is [often socially] expected. Shakespeare had a great quote about this:

And if the boy have not a woman’s gift  

To rain a shower of commanded tears,

An onion will do well for such a shift.

Are you saying that Shakespeare was all about shoving an onion up our sleeves to make us cry when necessary?

What it comes back to is catharsis, an Aristotelian idea, which goes back to the theater of tragedy. Tragedy, particularly if combined with music (for example opera or the movies) leads to an emotional response which is positive, interlinked with this is very often crying. [Under the right circumstances,] the sensation of feeling better is prolonged with crying. When you laugh, the feelings are very often over as soon as the laughing bout ceases. If you go to an opera and cry at the death of Mimi [in La Boheme], your calmness lasts much longer.