Ever notice that a full moon rises just as the sun sets? Most of us are aware that the moonlight we see is actually sunlight reflecting off the moon so it makes sense that the moon is full when the sun is on the exact opposite side of the earth. And if that’s the case, it makes sense that when the sun and moon are in this position, one rises as the other sets. But how many of us have taken the time to think through that logic?

This example, given on the sixth page of the first chapter, is just one of thousands of scientific concepts explored in Natalie Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. From the science we never thought about to the science we thought we kne, Angier capably marches through the nuts and bolts of the physical world in which we reside.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, Angier fluently captures the many disciplines of science through the eyes of some of the best scientists in the world and eloquently relates them to the ears of their slightly-less-scientifically-inclined neighbors. The effect is an introductory-level college course in less than 300 pages that spans the spectrum in terms of breadth, and the globe in terms of expertise. What better way to learn science than from the top experts in each field while relaxing in the comfort of your own home?

Making science fun again is an arduous task, and Angier tackles it in two ways. First, by drawing on examples of interest to everyone, from hard-working parents to the rebellious teenagers they’re trying to raise, she readily captures her audience while still shoving some science in the backdoor. From explanations of how testing positive to a “95 percent accurate” HIV test can mean there’s really a 95% chance you’re virus free to discussions of the paradoxical demands of global warming to both decrease energy consumption and increase the use of your home’s air conditioning unit, Angier successfully brings the science to the reader, avoiding the potentially disastrous results of forcing the reverse approach.

Angier also adds her own flair to the book, letting her linguistic style flow freely in her second attempt to electrify science. In this endeavor, however, she is less triumphant. While her writing has the ability to titillate the mind, it can often be overly vivacious and detract from the science she is attempting to explain. She effectively clarifies some of the toughest concepts in science only to muddle them up again with verbosity and banter. In a book that stimulates the left sides of our brains so intensely, it may be best to give the right sides a break.

But despite her occasional lapses of loquacity, her enthusiasm for the subject matter is obvious and highly contagious. From students to professionals, historians to scientists, The Canon reaches everyone with everything anyone will ever need to know—and perhaps a few things we won’t—about science. In addition to the knowledge this book exposes, Angier does an outstanding job of portraying the essence of science: an attitude of inquiry. She answers hundreds of questions about science while simultaneously encouraging the reader to generate infinitely more.

Why do the leaves turn colors in the fall? Why does steam rise out of the sewers on those eerie winter nights? What are your chances of winning the lottery this lifetime with that single ticket you buy on your way home from work every day? Why is the moon in the middle of the sky in the middle of the day?

Science is everywhere. It governs the world in which we live, the way we develop, the way we live and eventually die. Rather than run away from the unknown, why not embrace it? Learn about it, and it will be less scary. Read Natalie Angier’s The Canon, and learning about it will be a less daunting task.

Satellite view of developing hurricane.

Photo credit

Tropical cyclones plague the American coasts each year and are the costliest natural catastrophes in the U.S. With Hurricane Gustav resulting in the largest evacuation in Louisiana’s history and Hurricane Ike costing an estimated $30 billion in damage, this storm season once again begs the question: are tropical storms growing in intensity?

Over the last 25 years or so, the strongest tropical cyclones are growing in intensity, said Dr. James Elsner of Florida State University, lead author of the current study, published in the September 4 edition of Nature. Furthermore, these upward trends in storm strength closely parallel the rising surface sea temperatures (SST), suggesting a possible link between the two.

Theoretical work has long predicted increases in tropical storm intensity with the increases in ocean temperatures. According to the heat-engine theory of cyclone intensity, the warmer SST provide more energy to fuel the winds of the storm.

“We’d expect that as the seas continue to warm that we would continue to see an increase in the strength of the strongest storms,” Elsner explains.

Early work supported the theory when a 2005 study showed that tropical cyclone threat increased from the mid-1970s to 2005 and was highly correlated with SST.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coasts of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida, and quickly became the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. The theory’s predictions had come to fruition, and the evidence seemed impossible to ignore.

However, inconsistencies in the global hurricane records made many scientists weary of drawing any conclusions, and further research found no global changes in average storm intensity.

Winds from a hurricane on the Yucatan Peninsula.

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In the new study, researchers examined differences between storms of varying strength and found that while not all storms are increasing in intensity, the strongest ones are.

The heat-engine theory of cyclone dynamics is a way of thinking about tropical storms “in an idealized setting,” Elsner explains. Clearly, storms are stronger when they avoid weakening environmental factors. In other words, the strongest storms are those that form in the most ideal conditions. As a result, focusing on the strongest storms allows scientists to see increases in intensity that may be masked by environmental influences in weaker storms.

Some experts are still skeptical, however. When the data were split geographically, only the Atlantic and Indian oceans showed consistent significant increases in wind speed, and “in the Indian Ocean, the data set they’re using is problematic,” Dr. Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center warns.

Prior to 1997, there was no satellite over the Indian Ocean so measurements for that area had to be inferred from nearby satellites. “That affects the actual measurements of that temperature and biases them,” collaborator Dr. James Kossin of University of Wisconsin-Madison explains.

The researchers attempted to correct for this bias by uniformly adjusting the data collected before 1997, but Landsea worries that this may artificially inflate the numbers in the Indian Ocean. “At best what we have is anecdotal evidence that that’s the right correction to make,” Kossin admits.

Additionally, the Atlantic basin shows cyclical variations in tropical storm intensities on a multidecadal time scale. Because the current study only investigates the storms of the last 26 years, this paper cannot address how this current busy period in the Atlantic compares to previous busy periods, Landsea explains. “Are we seeing a trend, or is this more of a cycle?”

Effects of Hurricane Gloria on the Long Island coast.

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Part of the trend may be caused by global warming while part of the trend may be the result of some natural variability, Kossin agrees. “We can’t really separate those two things. Certainly not with this study.”

Finally, Elsner warns that while increasing intensity of extreme tropical cyclones mirror the increasing ocean temperatures, this does not prove that global warming is causing this increase.

Consequently, this study is by no means an answer to the question of whether global warming is affecting hurricane intensity. “There’s no smoking gun here,” Kossin admits.

“This is a debate that I have every expectation will continue for decades,” said Dr. Roger Pielke of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research in Boulder, CO. For now, he warns against conflating the scientific question with the political debate: “Let’s let science take its course, and in the meanwhile, let’s take all of those steps that make a lot of good sense regardless of how the science eventually turns out.”

Logo taken from the Sengelab Lab webpage.

My First Taste of the Sengelaub Lab

Photo taken from Dale Sengelaub’s webpage.

I thought it would be easy to find the laboratory of

Quadriceps There are four muscles that comprise the quadriceps: the Vastus medialis, the Vastus lateralis, the Vastus intermedius, and the Rectus femoris. In the experiments performed by Dale Sengelaub and lab tech Kelly Coons, a toxin is injected into one of the muscles to see how the motoneurons other muscles compensate for this loss. Photo credit

Apparently, I had picked a good week to join the Sengelaub lab – they were to complete an entire round of data collection, starting with surgery today at noon. In just a few hours, Dale told me, they would be doing some very basic surgery on rats to inject a retrograde tracer into the Vastus lateralis muscle. All that involves, he explained, is slicing open the skin on the thigh, injecting the tracer, and sewing them back up…about 6 minutes per animal.

Kelly Coons takes measurements of dendritic length on one of the lab’s slide viewing monitors.

Surgery #2

Kelly carries the rats for today’s surgery from the rat colony to the lab.

An adult rat.

In this surgery, they injected a retrograde tracer into a neighboring quadriceps muscle. This tracer would be taken up from the muscle into the motoneurons innervating it and “light up motoneurons that are the next door neighbors to the motoneurons that died,” Dale explained.

Previous experiments had revealed that when one muscle dies, another compensates in some way, and that testosterone aided in this compensation process. Currently, Dale and his lab were looking at the motoneurons of the compensating muscle two, four, six, and ten weeks after the initial surgery. They wanted to discover how the compensation response occurs over a ten week time scale and how that response varies as a result of the testosterone implant. The eventual goal is to develop therapeutic strategies for dealing with neurodegenerative ailments.

Kelly returns the animals from today’s surgery to the rat colony and notes the procedure on their charts.

A Brief History of Neuronal Research

When I arrived at the lab, Kelly was already preparing for today’s surgery. Today, the rats that were operated on two days earlier would be sacrificed, and their spinal cords removed for neural analysis.

A 3D neuron model.

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With an hour or so left until the procedures began, I settled myself down at my temporary workstation to get organized for the day. Not two minutes later, Dale walked in with visiting graduate student, Kim Rosvall of Duke University. She was applying to work with Dale after finishing up her PhD at Duke. I know firsthand that visits like hers are whirlwinds of meetings, talks, tours, and more, and I didn’t envy her one bit, but I did take advantage of the situation and tag along as Dale gave her the 5 minute run down on the research that takes place in his lab.

A 3D neuron model.

Photo credit

Eventually they graduated to digitizing tablets. Basically, he explained, it’s just a magnetized pad that can record where this mouse is. So, rather than drawing by hand with pen and paper, scientists could now draw into a computer program by navigating a special mouse over a special pad. The computer would then do the all the calculations of length itself, but again, this was all still in two dimensions.

Surgery #3

Dale’s Seminar

“I love what I do,” Dale said. “The best part of this job is being in the lab at the bench.

Slicing Spinal Cords

Kelly slices the gelatin block of spinal cords with an 860 sliding microtome.

When I arrived at the lab this morning, Dale and Kelly were just getting started. All four spinal cords that were extracted on Wednesday now resided in a single gelatin mold, with one corner lopped off to orient the block so they knew which spinal cord came from which animal. The block had been placed on what looked like a fancy bologna slicer and surrounded with smoking dry ice. I knew this lab was quite different from my own, but this was starting to look all out futuristic.

The bologna slicer is a 860 sliding microtome, Dale explained. It takes extremely thin slices of the mold (and all four spinal cords within) at a uniform thickness. Every time the knife edge, known as the sledge, is pulled forward, a small lever manually advances the stage. In other words, it clicks down the desired distance in order to prepare for the next slice of exactly the same thickness, in this case 40μm or 40 millionths of a meter!

“It’s a beautifully, functional, flawless, robust design,” Dale raved. So much so that the current models have barely changed from the originals when they were invented almost 50 years ago. And they live forever – good for the scientists who only have to purchase one, bad for the manufacturers who don’t have too much repeat business. The microtome that they were using in the lab today was a 1960s vintage model, left behind by the previous occupant of this lab, and Dale inherited it when he came to IU.

A close up of the gelatin block secured in the microtome for slicing.

Slice by slice, Kelly slowly and very carefully dragged the sledge across the gelatin block and watch the thin slice curl up on the blade. She would then take a small paint brush and whisk the slice from the blade and into one of four grids sitting in a phosphate buffer.

As I left Kelly to her work, I ran into a new face in the lab. James Byers is a freshman working in the lab on a Cox research fellowship. He met Dale on a high school psychology class trip to IU. Now, less than a year later, here he was, working in Dale’s lab. So far he was just observing and learning the lab techniques, he said, but soon he would be starting his own projects.

Suddenly, Dale whisked James away down the hall to show him his next task. Not two minutes later, Katy came in to the lab and started working at the hood behind me. Katy Lenz is a graduate student in Dale’s lab who studies the effects of maternal licking in young rats. Her first four years of experiments in the Sengelaub lab demonstrated that maternal licking was necessary for normal copulatory behavior in adult male rats by affecting the neurons in a specific area of the spinal cord known as the spinal nucleus of the bulbocavernosus, or SNB. Now she was looking for the mechanism.

She was preparing a solution for an experiment she would be conducting over the weekend. Unfortunately, in so doing, she ran out of one of the ingredients. When she went to prepare that solution, two more solutions ran out. This is just how it happens sometimes, she said. But she wasn’t in the mood for such nonsense today. “Leave me alone, world,” she moaned.

The Whole Shebang

Summary of Procedure Surgery #1: • A toxin is injected into the Vastus medialis muscle of the quadriceps to degenerate the muscle and the motoneurons that innervate it. • Tubes of testosterone are implanted into some of the rats to maintain testosterone levels above a minimum level. Surgery #2: • A retrograde tracer is injected into the Vastus lateralis of the quadriceps muscle to label the motoneurons that innervate it. Surgery #3: • After sacrificing the rat, the blood is removed from the body in a process called exsanguination. • The relevant part of the spinal cord is then removed. •Quadriceps from each leg are removed and compared. Slicing Spinal Cords: • All four spinal cords are placed in a single gelatin mold and frozen. •The block is then sliced into 40μm sections. HRP Reaction: • The sections are reacted with tetramethyl-benzidine (TMB) in order to visualize the HRP in the motoneurons of the Vastus medialis. Mounting Slides: •Each section is carefully laid flat on a glass slide for counterstaining and later viewing on a microscope. Counterstaining: •Finally, the sections are stained with thionin, which dyes the cells bodies blue.

After the entire gelatin block of spinal cords was sliced up, the sections needed to be stained. The horseradish peroxidase (HRP) that was injected into the muscle during surgery on Wednesday is a clear liquid. In order to visualize where the HRP now resided in the spinal cord, the sections had to be treated with a chemical called tetramethyl-benzidine (TMB). This chemical reacts with HRP and results in a black color that is then visible under a microscope.

After the reaction was complete, it was time to mount the slices on glass slides. Kelly used the same paintbrush to pull the sections out of the grid one at a time and suspend them in a very dilute acetate buffer. She then placed the glass slide in the buffer with the section and used the paintbrush the guide the section onto the slide. She fiddled with it until it lay flat on the slide, with the cut corner on the bottom right. She put three sections per slide and then moved on to a new slide.

Kelly mounts the spinal cord sections onto glass slides.

While Kelly worked, Dale took me into another room down the hall to explain the next step in the process. It was like a cooking show: with Kelly still in the lab working on mounting the slides, James was counterstaining a different set of sections that had already been mounted, and then Dale pulled out the final product from a box where the slides were drying after being counterstained.

Over the weekend, the slides that Kelly was working on would dry in this box. This is to keep the cockroaches from eating them, Dale explained. Upon noticing my quizzical look he added, I’m not kidding.

Katy’s Research

Katy weighs a rat pup.

Katy Lenz is a Ph.D. student in Dale’s lab. She studies the effects of maternal licking behavior on pups. So far, her experiments have shown that maternal licking is necessary for the proper development of adult male copulatory behavior.

By labeling the neurons that control such behavior, she has also learned that this change in behavior is mediated by changes in the neurons in a specific area of the spinal cord known as the spinal nucleus of the bulbocavernosus, or SNB. Now she is looking for the mechanism by which those changes to the SNB occur.

She subjects young rats to one of three treatments: 1) a ‘licking’ treatment in which she holds the pup and gently touches its genital region with a paintbrush, 2) a ‘handling’ treatment in which she holds the pup but does not brush its genital region (this controls for the effects of handling versus the effects of licking), and 3) a control in which she does nothing to the pup.

A 10-day-old rat pup.

The method Katy uses to sacrifice the young rats in decapitation. I’m not generally a squeamish person, but this part was hard for me. She held the pup over the sink in her left hand, and with her right, used scissors to snip of its head. Just like that.

It immediately started squirming wildly, and I winced, ignorantly assuming it must be a reaction to pain. But if I had thought about it, I would have realized the error in my logic. The rat was headless. Without a brain, it does not have the ability to process pain.

Katy explained the real reason for the post-mortem activity: spinal cords want to be tonically active. The brain is constantly inhibit that activity and telling it what movements to make. As soon as the brain is severed from the rest of the body, that inhibition stops, and the muscles start going crazy.

Knowing I was going to see this process today, I had been talking about it with my boyfriend on the phone late last night. I understand the need to sacrifice animals for the sake of research, but I also sympathized with his compassion on the issue.

Sure enough, during the night, I had a nightmare that I was repeatedly sacrificing my dog by way of suffocation. I woke up in a panic, covered in sweat, to find my dog sleeping peacefully beside me. I gave her a big hug and tried to stop by hands from shaking. She stirred from her slumber just long enough to glare at me for doing so.

I told this story to Katy, and she immediately sympathized. She said she often would hug her cats as soon as she got home after surgery days.

“It used to really bother me. I mean, I still don’t like it. I didn’t think I could ever do decapitations. But once you refocus what’s stressful for you versus what’s stressful for the animal…” She explained how some researchers use CO2. That’s easier for you, she said; “you just stick ‘em in a box.” But that animal is suffocating. Decapitation may be hard on us to watch, but it’s really the simplest and most pain-free method from the animals’ perspective.

Katy carefully identifies the section of the dissected spinal cord that she is interested in.

Once the pup has settled down, Katy laid it on its stomach in a metal tray. After cutting open the skin along the center of the back, she scraped away the muscle from the vertebral column. It’s an easier process in babies, she explained, because their bones haven’t ossified yet.

She removed its spinal cord and laid it out in a petri dish for a closer look. Peering through the microscope, she identified the section of the spinal cord she is interested in, the part containing the SNB. Once she isolated it, she quickly weighed it and put it in a tinfoil cap on dry ice to freeze it, thereby halting the protein degradation that had already begun and preserving the current levels of oxytocin.

Later, she will grind up the tissue to measure and compare the oxytocin levels of the pups that received the three different treatments. If oxytocin plays a role in how licking affects the pups’ behavior later in life, she might expect to find higher levels of oxytocin in those pups that had undergone the licking treatment as opposed to one of the two controls. Eventually, she hopes to inject the rats with a chemical to block the action of oxytocin to see if that minimized the effects of licking.

Concluding Remarks

Ron Winslow, deputy editor, health and science and senior medical writer, The Wall Street Journal. In the past 18 years, he has written more than 1,100 articles describing new medical and health care research and chronicling the economic forces transforming the nation’s health care system.

Betsy Mason, science editor, Wired.com. She spent four years as the science reporter for the Contra Costa Times. Before that, she freelanced for publications including Nature, Discover, New Scientist and Science.

Erika Check Hayden, senior reporter, Nature. Before joining Nature’s staff in late 2001, Erika worked for Newsweek magazine, reporting on science, health and news events, including the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York.