Cave lions! Roar!

A new study out of the University of Tuebingen looks at what cave lions, extinct for 12,000 years, ate. What’s really cool is that the techniques they’re using are sensitive enough to tell not just what the big cats were preying on but what their prey was eating — that reindeer ate lichen, or that the cave bears the lions munched on were babies because they were milk-fed. I wrote an article about it for ScienceNOW, and it was also picked up by Wired.com through a content-sharing agreement.

Destination: Dresden

National Geographic Traveler‘s November/December issue includes a “top 20” list of hot destinations, from London to Sri Lanka, Sonoma and … Pittsburgh. Also on the list — and featured in the opening spread, below — is Dresden, one of my favorite German cities. My piece for the magazine about the city isn’t online, but it’s on p. 86 of the print magazine, available just about anywhere print magazines are sold.

It’s hard to find a greater concentration of excellent museums in a city of Dresden’s eminently manageable size. As if the dozen or so museums that make up the Staatliche Kunstsammlung weren’t enough, there’s also the unforgettable (and unforgettably named) German Hygiene Museum and the brand-new German Military History museum, with an addition by designed by Daniel Liebeskind. For porcelain freaks, there’s also the Meissen factory just a few kilometers upriver. I’ve written about Dresden a lot, and it’s always a pleasure.

Weirdly, because it’s only a few hours from Berlin, I’ve only stayed the night there once. I will have to correct that some time soon. My recommendation to anyone traveling from Berlin to Prague: get off the train in Dresden, for a few hours or a few days.

Radioactive mystery box

One of the trickiest, most challenging and most rewarding stories I’ve done in a while is out in the November issue of Wired. In April, I spent a week in Genoa, Italy, trying to find out why a highly radioactive container had been delivered to the port there — and why it was still sitting on the dock more than a year later.

The story, “Mystery Box,” is a peek into the fast-moving, anonymized world of containerized shipping and the risks it holds. The key question facing officials in Genoa: What do you do with a container that’s too radioactive to open, too risky to move and already on Italian soil? It isn’t hard to imagine the scenario repeating itself at ports in Newark or Los Angeles, and the experts I talked to said US officials aren’t exactly on top of evacuation and contingency planning.

I could have written another whole article on the subject of loose radioactive material and dirty bombs, and perhaps some day I will, but in the meantime I’m relieved the story ended as well as it did. In a strange twist, the radioactive source material ended up in Leipzig, Germany, where I spend quite a bit of time.

The piece has already been picked up by Longform.org and I’ve gotten lots of good initial feedback. Check it out and see what you think.

Killing Heydrich

The August issue of World War II magazine features my story on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most feared Nazi leaders, on the cover. Heydrich was a scary individual:

One postwar biographer called him “Hitler’s most evil henchman,” a title for which there was stiff competition; Heinrich Himmler, the infamous head of the SS, eulogized him as “an ideal always to be emulated, but perhaps never again to be achieved.” Indeed, Heydrich was the go-to guy for the Nazi leadership’s most sensitive and difficult tasks.

He organized the Wannsee Conference, where the details of the Final Solution were hashed out; he helped orchestrate the Night of the Long Knives, the internal bloodbath that established the SS’s dominance within the Nazi party, and was a personal favorite of Hitler’s. Heydrich was also an arrogant bastard, and that proved to be his undoing. Ambushed by two Czech commandos, Heydrich was killed despite a string of bad luck on the part of the hapless assassins mostly because he insisted on riding around Prague in a Mercedes convertible, rather than an armored car.

The story of the assassination and its repercussions is one of the lesser-known dramas of the war. But it was a pivotal moment. If Heydrich had survived, he might have risen even higher in the Nazi hierarchy — to the detriment of the Allied cause.

Best American Science Writing 2011

An article I wrote last year on the mathematics of terror was selected for the Best American Science Writing 2011, a compilation of the best science writing of 2010. (The dating is a little confusing, I know.) I’m excited — it’s really nice to be selected, and to be in the company of so many great writers. I’m looking forward to getting a copy of the book here in Berlin, because there’s an incredible variety of stories — from something on pickled foods by Burkhard Bilger to animal rights and the singularity. Interestingly, there are two pieces from Discover in the book, and both were published in the same issue — the other one, by writer Kristin Ohlson, was about coal fires.

Spaceport Sweden

It’s been a big summer, about which more soon. In the meantime, my article on the remarkable little town of Kiruna — 20,000 people living north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden — is out in the August issue of Air & Space magazine. I went up there more than a year ago, in February 2010, to find out more about their plans to turn a snow-covered airstrip, a satellite telemetry station and a scientific rocket and balloon launch site into the world’s second commercial spaceport.

The idea would be laughable, except for the fact that Kiruna managed to turn two of the few things they have in abundance — snow and ice — into a resounding commercial success. I spent a night in the IceHotel, which is essentially a 60-room igloo. Lots of people pay lots of money to spend a night (rarely more than one) in the hotel sleeping on reindeer-skin covered foam mattresses. The IceHotel has turned into a global brand, with bars made of ice in several countries around the world. With that kind of marketing genius, I give Spaceport Sweden a strong shot at becoming a reality.

Egyptians Set Sail

Boat wrecked off the coast of Egypt.

At the beginning of January, I flew to Egypt for a week. I wish I could say I was there to beat the rest of the world’s media to the story of the protests, but no. I was there not for breaking news (which didn’t actually break till two weeks later) but rather to meet some archaeologists working on a story 4,000 years old.

My story – a tale of serendipitous discovery and painstaking archaeological and historical research out in the June issue of Discover — is about Mersa Gawasis, an Egyptian seaport abandoned around 1,800 BC. The finds there include some of the best-preserved evidence for Egyptian seafaring, and make a strong case that the ancient Egyptians were capable of voyages of over 2,000 miles, round-trip.

I spent three days at the site, including hours inside caves carved out by the Egyptians thousands of years ago. The most impressive sight was a side-chamber (really a separate cave accessible through a collapsed wall) filled with piles and piles of thick papyrus rope, brought from the Nile Valley over 100 miles away by the ancient voyagers and stored — then forgotten — in the cave. The caves are just a few hundred yards from the Red Sea, close enough for the archaeologists to take a break sitting on the beach, but might as well be in the deep desert. (A preview was featured here.)

Weirdly, the accommodations were luxurious by typical dig standards. The Red Sea is a popular destination for European tourists, and there are direct flights from Berlin to Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada, two resort towns on the Red Sea coast. Mersa Gawasis is about an hour drive south of Hurghada.

The site is far from the trashy Hurghada beach resorts, but there is a pair of isolated dive hotels a 15 minute walk from the excavation, so there were hotel rooms, a pool and an all-you-can-eat restaurant to relax in after a day in the sand. The restaurant had Egyptian beer, but I made myself very popular among the archaeologists with a bottle of scotch I picked up at the duty free store in Berlin.

Check the story out on newsstands or at Coverleaf, where you can buy a digital version for less than the magazine cover price. The full text will be posted later in the year.

June 2011 Discover magazine

Desert Blossoms

Flimsy plastic shopping bags are everywhere — except at the supermarket down the street from me in Berlin, or stores in Dublin, or in the dozens of communities around the world that have banned them. Why? They’re dangerous to wildlife, for one good reason, choking marine animals and birds. And they’re an eyesore, caught in trees and clogging gutters. But I get the feeling that they’re most important as easily-grasped symbols of our modern throwaway culture.

Banning bags — and carrying durable, re-usable cotton or plastic ones instead, is a statement that’s easy to make, visibly “green” and doesn’t take much effort or dramatic lifestyle changes. It’s a lot easier than, say, giving up your car, or buying less stuff, or forgoing plane flights. And it makes much less of an impact than those more dramatic gestures. But anything helps, right?

I wrote about the energy cost of bags for National Geographic News last week. Check it out.

Physics archaeology

Credit: Siggi Bethke

I’ve got an article out in this week’s Science about one physicist’s struggle to resurrect data from an old experiment. Siegfried “Siggi” Bethke, now the head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, worked at a German supercollider in the 1970s, and in 1995 he wanted to take another look at his old results. What he found “was a disaster.” The problem, as I explain in the article, is that physicists are accustomed to working in large collaborations and moving swiftly on to bigger, better machines.

“… particle physicists have no standard format for sharing or storing information. “There’s funding to build, collect, analyze, and publish data, but not to preserve data,” says Salvatore Mele, a physicist and data preservation expert at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland.”

Bethke ended up reconstructing the data he needed from old 9-track tapes, scattered hard disks and even stacks of ASCII printouts. He compared it to “physics archaeology,” which I loved. It’s always hard to know in the moment what might be valuable in the future. That’s not an argument for hoarding, just something to think about as we race off to the next new thing.

Roman Weather Reports

I’m up to my ears in Roman reading these days, and took a little time to write up a very cool study for ScienceNOW. A paleoclimatologist in Switzerland used tree ring data to determine annual rainfall and temperature for the last 2,500 years.

The results line up with what we know about history amazingly well — wet, cold, miserable summers coincide with plagues and famines in the Middle Ages; severe droughts happen to take place when the worst barbarian invasions wash over the Roman Empire, suggesting starvation set the tribes in motion; and warm, wet summers line up with the peak years of the Roman Empire.

It’s not proof that climate chaos caused the fall of the Roman Empire, but it’s very interesting supporting evidence — and a warning for us today.