Yes, there are more and more people on the planet, and yes, there are fewer and fewer fish in the sea, but do we really notice? After all, fish live in water and we live on land; so we don't mingle that much. If fish were sparrows, we might see a dramatic decline, but who misses what they don't see in the first place?

Resetting What's "Normal"

Second, and this is the more subtle point, if animals are disappearing slowly, we are wired not to see the extent of the decline. People think "normal" or "natural" is what they saw when they were kids. If there were lots of bees in your neighborhood when you were 8 years old, that's the number of bees you expect to see when you're 68. If your grandma saw double that number 60 years earlier, her baseline is erased when she dies. Your experience becomes the new normal. When you die, "normal" resets and becomes whatever your daughter saw when she was 8.

Meantime, almost without realizing it, the "normal" number of bees keeps getting lower and lower.

That's why this graph of fish in the sea is so revealing. Based on a study by Dr. Villy Christensen and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, it shows population (biomass) changes of various fish in the Atlantic over several human generations — from 1900 to 2000.

Continue Reading

I don't know what kind of nerve, ferocity and stubbornness got 86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw to buy an island in the Indian Ocean, replant it with 16,000 trees, grasses and then lure a bunch of giant tortoises — big galumphing ones and itty-bitty ones — to live with him (one gets born in his bedroom). But he did it, and when he takes reporter Simon Reeve on a tour, he seems so shy and gentle. But I bet he's not. My guess is Brendon is next to impossible to live with, unless you're too big, too slow and too reptilian to care. Take a look.

Simon Reeve, the reporter, has spent the past few years wandering the world for the BBC. A decade ago, he was an investigative reporter covering arms dealing and nuclear smuggling. His book about how al-Qaida was planning attacks on the West, The New Jackals; Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism, became a New York Times best-seller. But these days, he practices the more delicate art of wandering the world in search of situations he describes as "frightening, uplifting, exhausting, upsetting, challenging and surprising."

I can think of puns. Or I can show you puns. Let me show you Gemma's.

Most punsters play with the sound of words, but Gemma Correll does it with pen on paper.

She's an illustrator, or as she puts it, "a comic-making person," and she has this habit of thinking about things a beat too long, which gets her in happy trouble.

Continue Reading

A hundred years ago — and that's when this picture was taken, in 1912 — men didn't leave home without a hat. Boys wore caps. This is a socialist political rally in Union Square in Manhattan. There may be a bare head or two in this crowd, but I think those heads are women's.

Here's another rally, Union Square again. This time it's an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. A hundred years have passed. Same place. Same kind of crowd. But this time: hardly a hat.

Flip back one more time. We're back, I think, in Union Square, with Emma Goldman arriving by car. She's another socialist (this isn't an essay about lefties, it's about hats) and there she is, the only woman in a sea of men wearing a sea of hats.

So what happened? Why did guys stop wearing headgear in midcentury America?

Continue Reading

There you are, inside the placenta, all cozy and wrapped; mommy all around you — this is nice.

Except for the occasional leak.

Six years ago I reported on Morning Edition that whenever a woman gets pregnant, some of the baby's cells slip through the placental wall into the mother's blood and settle down for a while — outside the placenta.

Then, when the baby is born (or fails to be born), most of those cells disappear. After all, the baby's DNA is different; it's a combination of mom and dad. So in the genetic sense it's a foreigner and doesn't belong in mom any more. "One would expect [fetal cells] to be attacked fairly rapidly," said Dr. Kirby Johnson of Tufts University.

But here's the surprise: some of those fetal cells stay.

And stay.

And stay.

Dr. Johnson says cells from fetal boys and girls have been found in mothers "four to five decades following the last pregnancy." That fetus may have grown into a middle aged pharmacist, and still his cells are inside his mother. Cells wouldn't persist in foreign body for NO reason. They must be doing something, but what?

Continue Reading

You wouldn't know it, not right away, but there is something strange about this picture. It's a sunset, yes, but notice the blush of color right above the sun. It's blue. And as you look up, the blue fades into a faint rose or pink.

Now think about the sunsets you've seen, how often the sky can turn golden, or orange, sometimes pink, red, but when you look up, away from the setting sun, those colors fade back to a pale, twilight blue? It's rare to see a sunset dipped in blue.

So this photo is a puzzle: it's blue where the red should be and red where the blue should be. Why?

Because we're not on Earth. This is a Martian sunset. On May 19, 2005, the camera on NASA's little robot, the rover named Spirit, took this picture while sitting in the Gusev crater on Mars. NASA snapped the photo, says the press release, "around 6:07 in the evening of the Rover's 489^th Martian day."

Apparently, Mars has blue sunsets all the time. Earth doesn't.

NASA admits that there's a color filter on Spirit's camera that exaggerates the colors slightly, but they say the blues you see here "are similar to what a human would see" on Mars. Not so much the pinks. Pinks are slightly more pronounced in these photos, but the blues are true colors.

So here's our question: Why are Martian sunsets blue?

The Air On Mars Is Different From The Air On Earth

On Earth, the air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen. We've also got moisture, dust particles, smoke, aerosols, pollen, salt from the ocean. The atmosphere on Earth is denser — meaning there are more molecules per cubic inch in our air.

Martian air, by contrast, is much, much thinner, about 1percent the density of air on Earth, plus the gasses are different: they've got CO₂, nitrogen and argon, but most important, says Mark Lemmon, associate professor of planetary sciences at Texas A&M University, air on Mars is rich with teeny, teeny particles of dust. Their dust is smaller than our dust, and they've got more of it in the Martian sky. Dust is the key to why the two sunsets look different, so we'll be keeping our eye on Martian dust.

Light Scatters Differently On Mars Than It Does On Earth

Let's stand facing the sun on Mars. It's early evening. The sun is setting. Light is streaming toward our eyes, moving through the dusty air. What happens?

Sunshine, as you know, contains many different wavelengths of light. If you catch a beam of light in a prism (Newton did this) it breaks into a rainbow of colors — reds, violets, blues. When the sunshine on Mars hits the clouds of fine dust floating through the air, it also breaks into different colors. Martian dust is exactly the right size to absorb the blue wavelengths of light and scatter red wavelengths all over the sky. That's why if you are standing on Mars and look away from the setting sun, most of the sky is rosy, pink, and various shades of red.

But now look straight at the setting sun. On Mars, the beams of light streaming toward you, having lost their red waves, show the wavelengths that haven't scattered off. That remaining light is predominantly blue. So when you look straight at the sun on Mars, you see a haze of blue. Look away from the sun, and the light is red.

It's exactly the opposite on Earth.

Here, when the sunshine hits our atmosphere, the waves that scatter are blue in color. That's why everywhere we look, our sky is blue — except when we look straight at the setting sun. There, the blue light is missing, so the remaining wavelengths predominate, and they are mostly the reds, the golds, the oranges.

Our atmosphere scatters blue; Mars' atmosphere scatters red.

Our sunsets feature reds. Mars' sunsets feature blue.

That's because our air is different from Martian air.

What About That Blue Halo Around The Sun?

Take a look at this short animation from NASA. Called "I'm Dreaming of A Blue Sunset," It's a reconstruction from still photographs, where you can see a bright blue halo around the sun as it sinks to the horizon. Why is that halo there?

According to Professor Lemmon, when sunshine hits Martian dust, the blue light doesn't bounce far. It sticks near the dust, pingponging around at close range. That's why if there's a dust storm on the horizon, (and that's what seems to be happening in the video), the area around the sun traps a lot of blue light, and the sun seems to glow blue.

Red light, as we've said, ricochets much farther off, so in the video, the reddish patches are some distance from the sun, the blue is tucked in close.

The point being, if you happen to be camping out on Mars and see an intense blue sunset like the one in the video, make sure the wind isn't blowing in your direction, because a few hours from now, that sandstorm might blow your tent down. (You did remember to bring a tent, no?)

I don't remember who told me this tale, but it begins with a little boy, maybe 4 or 5, who is given a book. He opens it, begins to read, curls into it, won't look up, can't stop, looks at the pictures, turns the pages, keeps turning, turning, turning, until all too quickly, he's done, finished.

That's when he does this odd thing: He lays the book down, opens it wide and stands on it; one foot planted on opposite pages and, bending at the knees, pushes his heels down.

"What are you doing?" his mother asks.

Looking up, he says, "I want to get inside. How do I get inside?"

Some books are that good.

We who love books know what it feels like to plunge all the way in. I even know what it looks like, thanks to graphic novelist (author of Stitches) David Small. It looks like this:

Which brings me to this weekend's special. It's about a young man who loves books. It lasts 15 minutes, longish for a web experience, but I promise you, the time (and lots of books) will fly by. In fact, the tale begins when our hero is, literally, swept away and carried off by a Wizard of Oz-like storm that dumps him into a wreck of a place that has, luckily, a vast, spooky, magical library.

This little video won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2011, so many of you may already know it. But for those of you who don't, who haven't seen The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, it's time to plunge in.

---

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was written by William Joyce and directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg. The drawing is Reprinted from Stitches: A Memoir by David Small, © 2009 by David Small, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Publius Paquius Proculus, they say, invented pizza almost 2,000 years ago. I don't think he did, and anyway, that's not the coolest thing about Proculus, a very successful baker and sometime politician, who was living in Pompeii the day Mt. Vesuvius erupted. He, his house and his family were buried. Then, centuries later, when archeologists unearthed his home they discovered a message, etched onto one of his household walls. It looked like this:

As you can see, it's five latin words, SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA and ROTAS, each of them five letters long, arranged in a square. You can read them left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top.

What is this? Well, obviously it's a very clever palindrome (palindromes are word sequences that say the same thing forward or backward; this one's a super-version, going up and down as well.) It translates, roughly to...

"The Farmer Arepo works with a plow."

Why put something like this on your wall? It wasn't just on the wall at Publius Paquius Proculus' place; there was another on a column near Pompeii's amphitheater. Other versions (same words) were found at Roman sites in Germany, Britain and France.

Continue Reading

She's been visiting grandma since 1697, when her story was first published in a French anthology of children's stories. Now we have a 21st century version, but before we go there, here's a little review:

Little Red Riding Hood — First Version

In the earliest version, she meets the wolf in the woods, the wolf scrambles to Grandma's house, eats grandma, gets into grandma's bed and when Little Red arrives, the wolf gobbles her too. Nobody survives — except the wolf. This is not the gentlest of bedtime stories.

Little Red — Unchewed Version

A generation later, the Grimm Brothers reworked the tale and made it, well...less grim. In their version, grandma is eaten whole (like Jonah in the bible), same for Little Red, then the wolf falls asleep and begins to snore contentedly. Those snores catch the attention of a local hunter who looks in, and seeing a wolf dressed in grandma's nightgown, decides what's called for is a quick bit of surgery. So with a hunting knife, he opens the wolf's intestine, and releases Grandma and Little Red, unchewed, back into the world. That's a lot nicer.

Continue Reading