Karen Sandler

Author: Karen Sandler

  • Oh, So Cuddly

    As I write this, I’m babysitting my nearly 3-month-old granddaughter. She’s asleep at the moment, hence my ability to compose a blog post. I am not exaggerating, nor am I the least bit biased when I say that my granddaughter is the most beautiful baby ever born. It is simply a fact. 🙂

    There is something completely irresistible about babies. Their smiles are so bright, their laughter so enchanting. It’s so much fun seeing them interact with their world. Everything is new to a baby. And they’re so wonderful to hold and cuddle.

    Apparently that fascination for babies and the urge to hold them is rather universal among primates.  I read a very cool study study here about how vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys adore new babies. But those primate moms require a certain amount of quid pro quid quo before another female can sniff, touch, or hold their baby.

    The medium of exchange in baby cuddling for vervets and mangabeys is grooming of the mother. A vervet who’s just given birth to an adorable infant might require ten minutes of “hair brushing” before she’ll let another female interact with her baby. A female who’s higher status than the mom might get some cuddle time for a shorter grooming session, a lower status might have to work longer. The more babies there are in a group of vervets or mangabey’s, the less they’re “worth” in grooming time. And the older a baby gets, the less interest there is from the other females. In one mangabey group, a baby the age of my granddaughter didn’t even earn its mom four minutes of grooming.

    As far as I’m concerned, my sweet grandbaby is worth a whole spa treatment if that’s what my daughter-in-law wants. A massage, some peeled grapes and a box of chocolates, too. She is just that perfect.

  • The Second Thing to Go

    The memory, they say, is the second thing to go as you get older. And I don’t remember the first thing.

    My memory is pretty average. I’m quick to come up with the stuff I use/interact with on a regular basis. Some phone numbers. Functions in Word that would cause most people’s eyes to cross or glaze over. I have a mental block about names, but always have. Bizarrely, I will remember everything else about a person–the name of their horse, where they went to school, what kind of work they do. But ask me their name and I draw a complete blank.

    After years of feeling like an idiot, I finally started using the trick of finding a word that rhymes with the person’s name. It doesn’t even have to have anything to do with them (like Melanie, who as far as I know never committed a felony). But like all those other attributes about them, I’ll remember that rhyming word first, then that gets me to their name.

    The strength of my memory is a bit of an obsession of mine because my dad has Alzheimer’s. Mind you, he’s 84 years old. But even still, every time I can’t come up with a word while I’m writing, or when I run downstairs for something and go back up without it because I got distracted by moving the laundry to the dryer, I freak out just a bit. I know that my memory lapses have nothing to do with Alzheimer’s. But I worry nonetheless.

    I’ve mostly accepted my father’s disease and the fact that he no longer knows me by name. He still recognizes me as his daughter most of the time, but I don’t know that he’s aware of which of his four daughters I am. Since I live five minutes away from his care home, he sees me more than the other three. But I wonder sometimes if in his mind I’m a stand-in for all four of us, which is fine by me. He smiles when he sees me, is so happy that I’m visiting and that’s all that matters.

    I keep an eagle eye out for any scientific studies about Alzheimer’s, even though it’s too late to do my dad any good. Two that were reported recently in the New York Times are quite intriguing. They’re related to testing for Alzheimer’s rather than treatment of the disease, but of course it’s necessary to know the condition before treating it.

    One test uses a special dye that allows the plaques associated with Alzheimer’s to be visible via a PET scan. Living Alzheimer’s patients agreed to have their brains scanned using the technique and to allow scientists to examine their brains after they died. Of the 29 who have died and been autopsied, 28 were accurately diagnosed as to whether or not they had Alzheimer’s.

    The second procedure tests the level of beta amyloid in the blood. Amyloid is present in both the brain and spinal fluid in a healthy person. But when amyloid accumulates in plaque in the brain (which increases the risk for Alzheimer’s) less of it will be found in the spinal fluid. The theory is, amyloid will also decrease in the blood, and that is what this study is testing. Blood tests are a lot easier to perform on a large number of people than PET scans, which is why the success of this study would be a good thing.

    Of course once a practical test exists, there’s still the little issue of finding a way of reversing the course of the disease. Drugs are being developed to remove amyloid from the brain, which I presume you’d only want to do if there’s too much there to begin with.

    While contemplating all this, I got a mini-brainstorm that became a germ of a story. What if a near fail-safe treatment for Alzheimer’s were developed? A drug is created that will restore the brain to healthy normalcy. Except there’s a drawback–the drug wipes the brain clean of memories. The person treated would have to re-learn everything. He would not remember anyone from his previous life, including loved ones.

    Would you say yes for the treatment for your mother, father, sister or brother? For my own self, for my dad, I’d say YES in a heartbeat. It’s a terrible disease and nothing would make me happier than to see my dad cured, no matter what the stakes. But wow, what a choice to make.

    So what if you’re the one making the decision in this hypothetical story? That is, you’re the one with Alzheimer’s, still with enough function to make the choice for yourself. What would you choose?

    Not sure if I can make that choice myself.

  • The Future is Now

    Last night, my husband and I used Skype to meet some of the folks our older son, Eric, works with and teaches in Osaka, Japan. It was so very cool to have a chance to meet his boss, his co-workers and some of his young students (Eric teaches them English). He coached each of the girls to tell us in English their name, age and grade in school. It was so neat to see my son switch into “teacher mode” and to hear his boss praise him to the heavens. We had to stay up past midnight for the Skype session (that’s when Eric’s lessons start), but it was well worth some lost sleep.

    We were all a little unsure what to talk about, so we did some show and tell via the Skype display. I brought each of my three cats to the computer. My son’s boss showed off a cute anime-type drawing one of her students had colored for her. They all laughed when they saw our “Japan clock.” It has Kanji instead of numbers and is set to Osaka time.

    Of course, we’re used to using Skype to talk to Eric. We speak with him once a week, usually on our Saturday afternoon and his Sunday morning. It’s currently a 17-hour time difference (they’re nearly 3/4 of a day ahead of us). In March, we’ll “spring forward,” but Japan won’t, so they’ll only be 16 time zones ahead of us.

    But even though Skype is old hat, it was still a wonderful experience to meet some of the folks he talks about so much. It was like we had a window between the U.S. and Japan. It was almost a magical thing, as if we could reach out and shake each other’s hands.

    Skype could someday become even more cool. Scientists are now working on a holographic “telepresence” that could send 3-D video across the Internet. They’re using a special plastic that refreshes the holographic image every two seconds. It’s sort of like running old fashioned film through a projector and each frame is projected for two seconds before moving to the next frame. That might seem too slow (well, yeah, it is), but it’s actually world’s better than the older technology the military uses. That technique can take an entire day to refresh from one frame to the next. The full story about the new technology is here.

    What makes this scientific development especially intriguing to me is that in TANKBORN, I use holographic projections throughout the story. In the book, fanciful holo designs are projected onto the plain white exterior walls of the houses, and the designs can be easily switched from one to another. You could be living in a castle one moment and a circus tent the next.

    I learned from the article that holograms need a “screen” to display on, just like the plain white walls of the houses in TANKBORN. It’s nice to know that what I imagined isn’t all that far-fetched. That the future is getting closer all the time.

    I’m still waiting for my flying car, though.

  • Patience & Dinosaurs

    Waiting for stuff has always been a challenge for me. I want it now, whether it’s the cover art for my upcoming book, TANKBORN (which my editor has teased me with), or the new graphics for my website update, or the ARC (Advance Reader Copy) for TANKBORN going out to reviewers. Getting those first reviews is kind of a love/hate thing, but I’m still looking forward to it. Then there’s the release date itself, for TANKBORN, WOLF MARK, and GALAXY GAMES, Tu Books’s launch books. Will that day ever get here? Surely the calendar is stretching and Fall 2011 will arrive a few months later than usual.

    I’ve published 17 books. You’d think I’d be used to waiting for stuff like this. But I’m not. After an author has finished writing a book, it almost always take months and months for the book to come out. In the case of TANKBORN, it will be nearly a year between when I sold it and when it shows up in the bookstores (or on Amazon). Longer than I had to wait for my granddaughter, and that delay was torture.

    Sometimes I wish I could hop into a time machine and zap myself into the future. Watch my book flying off the shelf, becoming a world-wide bestseller. Hey, if I’m going to imagine a time machine, I might as well imagine a fabulous future.

    Eodromaeus Illustration by Todd Marshall

    Speaking of time machines (or rather what I might use them for), here’s my cool science story of the day. Just announced, the discovery of Eodromaeus (dawn runner), a meat-eater the size of a 7-year-old kid that weighs about what a house cat does. What’s interesting is that it looks a lot like another dino called Eoraptor, which is a plant-eater.

    So imagine climbing into that time machine and traveling back 230 million years ago. You confront this kinda cute waist-high fella somewhere in what is now Argentina. Is it Eoraptor or Eodromaeus? You pull up some grass to offer to the little guy to eat. Will he nibble that grass out of your hand? Or will he chomp your hand right off?

    Heh. I guess it would be better to stay out of the time machine.

  • Fear No Science

    I am a self-confessed science geek. I had great fun in my high school science classes and devoured science fiction short stories and novels. In college, I found physics and chemistry pretty fascinating. I always zero in on the science articles on the web or in the newspaper (yes, I still read the newspaper). No big surprise that I’m thrilled that my own science fiction book, TANKBORN, will be published in the fall.

    No big surprise either that science doesn’t scare me. Yeah, people have done some pretty frightening things with science. Weapons of war come to mind. But the benefits of scientific discoveries so outweighs the negatives (medical advances, computers, cell phones, the Internet), it doesn’t make sense to me to fear it. You might not want to dissect that frog in biology class (yeah, kind of ick), but despite the gross factor, it’s kind of cool seeing what’s inside a frog.

    So what nifty science have I learned recently? I learned that babies make a phenomenal number of synaptic connections in their brains. They start with a clean slate, then as they bop around, discovering one new thing after another, they build those connections until they’re a big tangle. That’s pretty intriguing right there, but then when children grow, they start losing some of those connections. By their teens, they have far fewer than they did as a baby. Why? One explanation is that we start to “specialize,” that is, we focus more on certain things of interest. Our preferences and personalities develop, and we lose the extraneous stuff.

    Synaptic Exuberence at“ Birth, at 6, and at 14, Public Library Association

    As an author, my next question is, how could I use this in a story?

    What if scientists developed a virus that kept babies from losing all those thousands of connections they’d formed? What if the virus escapes the lab and sweeps the world? It doesn’t affect grown-ups, but every infected baby (say, under the age of 1) no longer loses any connections formed in their brain.  The scientists’ goal was to improve the human thinking process, that with all the extra connections, we’d be able to do a ton more things than the average person. But instead, what if we’re so swamped with knowledge and experience that we’re frozen, incapable of doing anything? Have the scientists created a race of overachievers, or millions who can’t function because of brain overload?

    Okay, I’ve ventured into scary science here. But even still, it was fun to learn about baby brain connections (especially since I’m a new grandma) and neat to brainstorm a story idea based on it. That’s one thing I like about science as an author–it activates my imagination.

    How about you? Is science scary or fascinating? Did you sleep through high school biology class or fall in love with science in ninth grade? Drop me a comment and let me know.