Karen Sandler

Category: Cool Science

  • Weirdness

    Cats are pretty peculiar animals. Cat personalities range from dog-like affectionate gregariousness to the high-catness of I-don’t-give-a-damn. Unlike socially-promiscuous dogs, who tend to be madly in love with any human they see, even a friendly cat is much more choosy, dashing off to hide under the bed if an undesirable steps inside the house. These are sweeping generalizations, of course, but since I’m more a cat person than a dog person and because this is my blog, I can sweep all I want.

    I have three cats living with me: Tenka, Zak and Casper.

    This is the indiscriminate Tenka, who drops and rolls on her back at every opportunity, exposing her belly for a rub. Nearly 14 pounds o’ feline love. She’s both a purr factory (loud and rumbly) and fur factory (I swear, she ejects fur like a porcupine does quills). As a mostly white cat, she especially likes to cozy up to people wearing dark clothes. Black pants are a favorite. Her main weirdness–refusing to eat unless I’m standing next to her.

    This is Zak, our cautious former feral. My son and daughter-in-law discovered Zak and his litter-mates hiding with their feral mom outside their apartment. At the direction of a cat rescue group, Ryan & Dani tried to corral all the kittens, but only managed to catch Zak. After many months of complete skittishness around strangers, Zak is now very affectionate, and scary athletic. A big boy (also nearly 14 pounds), he can stretch up at least three feet and jump far higher than that. Many weirdnesses, such as liking to carry his cat toys around like a dog would, tapping his water with his paw before drinking it (a feral cat trick) and burrowing under covers like a rat terrier.

    At 13.5 years old, Casper is the old man of the bunch. He was a stray (found under the deck at my sister’s house), but not particularly feral. He tolerates people, but doesn’t like them very much. Luckily, he puts up with twice-daily insulin shots for his diabetes. But once when I tried to shave off some matted fur, he snagged my hand with a claw, hitting a vein and some nerves. Lots of blood and my pinky is still numb. Casper as a whole is just plain weird.

    There is another kind of weird that only tangentially relates to cats, which is where the science part of this post comes in. I was reading this morning about quantum entanglement, which relates to the infamous Schrödinger’s Cat. Quantum entanglement involves objects which are linked in such a way that they cannot be measured or described unless all the linked objects are measured/described.

    In the case of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, a cat in hidden in a box is linked to the state of a subatomic particle. One state (say, positively charged) means the cat is alive. The other state (say, negatively charged) means the cat is dead. Since you can’t check the charge of the particle until you open the box, you won’t know until then whether the cat is alive or dead.

    Einstein considered this sort of supposition weird, and he didn’t like it, at least as it applied to physics. He felt that the weirdness of entanglements just meant the theory was incomplete (hence his compulsion to find a unified theory of physics). A colleague of his, Bohr, was just fine with weird ambiguities. Luckily they never came to blows over the disagreement.

    Physics is full of cool terms like “quantum entanglements.” There are the names of quarks–up, down, beauty, strange. There’s photon, vortex and ergs. Just shows that physicists have a sense of humor.

    And by the way…I never let my cats hide in a box with questionable subatomic particles. It just isn’t worth the risk.

  • Breadapalooza

    On Saturday, my son Ryan and I engaged in a bread-baking extravaganza. I’d requested the day as a Christmas gift–I wanted him to teach me how to make artisan breads. As an extra-special, wonderful bonus, he and my daughter-in-law, Dani, brought my beautiful granddaughter over to spend the day. Dani went shopping with her mother and sister and my husband did the babysitting while Ryan and I baked.

    Although he bakes fantastic breads, Ryan’s not a professional baker. He and Dani are working on their doctorates in economics (yes, in addition to being new parents). Baking artisan breads is a hobby (edging on an obsession :-)) for Ryan. I taught him the basics of bread baking when he was a kid, and now things have gone full circle with him teaching me graduate level yeastonomics.

    The night before our breadapalooza, as instructed by the master, I made two pre-ferments, a biga and a poolish, and left them out on the counter to do their yeasty magic. We started the first actual dough around 9:30am on Saturday. Our goal for the day–two batches of each of three varieties. Each batch made two loaves. The idea was that he would mix, fold and stretch, pre-shape, shape and slash two loaves of Italian, then I would do the same when my turn came. Repeat with potato rosemary bread and with rustic French.

    Here’s the tricky part. I don’t have a commercial oven (alas), and I own only one baking stone. So only two loaves fit in my oven at any given time. We couldn’t make our Italian bread side by side because all four loaves would be proofed and ready to go in the oven at the same time.  As a consequence, everything had to be staggered on the schedule. So what does any self-respecting doctoral candidate do to prepare for a breadapalooza? Create an Excel spreadsheet, of course.

    I printed the schedule out on legal-sized paper and we taped it up onto the stove hood. That schedule was our lodestar. We spent half our time running over to check what we were supposed to be doing next. If you haven’t yet done the math–four loaves of each of 3 varieties of bread–we were making a dozen loaves. And because of the staggering effect, we had six sessions of mixing, six of stretch and fold, six of pre-shaping…you get the idea. Mass confusion at times, even with the schedule.

    Which led to one bobble–the wrong batch of potato rosemary bread got shaped and put into the proofing basket. Instead of using the earlier one that my son had mixed, the one that wasn’t ready for shaping (which I had mixed), got prepped for proofing. This may sound like not a big deal, but when you’re going for perfection in appearance, crumb and taste, it was near disaster.

    With a few adjustments, all turned out fine. The end results were quite spectacular as you can see from the picture.

    We took one each of the three types over to Dani’s parents’ house for dinner that night to celebrate Dani’s dad’s birthday.

    It was a lot of bread, but it was oh-so-wonderful. And what a fantastic day with my son. Bonding over fermentation, gluten development, and autolizing. What more could a mother ask for?

    If you’d like to see Ryan’s perspective of the day, hop on over to his blog entry at The Fresh Loaf. He’s got more pictures to admire.

  • 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.