Talking heads

I’m at Notre Dame (the one in South Bend) today to record a podcast, one of a couple this month. I met the host of this podcast through the blog twenty years ago, when our kids were young, and over the years I have treasured our criss-crossing interests in theology and science. She also introduced me to rose congou tea, a cup of which is sitting next to me as I write. I am also going to the Madeleva lecture tonight — “The Wrath of God(dess): A Spirituality of Feminist Rage” given by theologian Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier. Several of the previous Madeleva lectures are on my shelf, including Kathleen Norris’ The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work’ and Sidney Callahan’s Women who Hear Voices: the Challenges of Religious Experience. Sidney Callahan is a Bryn Mawr alum, and came to speak to one of my (non-chemistry) courses. 

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to sit down with Mike Laskey of the AMDG podcast to talk about how science and faith work in my life as a scientist. (This is a great podcast series, in my Saturday morning rotation, with tons of interesting guests, most with some connection to the Jesuits and things Ignatian — rare books, material science, astronomy, songwriting.) I talked a bit about awe and mystery and finding God in a handful of water. Also tea, perhaps because you can (sorry!) hear the noise of my tea cup hitting my desk periodically (also one loud beep from an incoming text — this was not my smoothest interview). 

Tuesday, after a hard PT session, I checked my email to find a request for an interview from EWTN Nightly News to talk about the Artemis II mission. Sure, when? It was 11:35. Could I do this at 12:15? I was sitting in my car, soaked in sweat in desperate need of a shower. 12:45? I got home, showered, professionally attired and to my office in time. Whew — shades of the first days of the great tea kerfuffle!

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Listen to the AMDG podcast here, and the EWTN clip here. 

Photo is from an interview for On The Media recorded at WHYY 11 years ago, about the Food Babe. 

In transition: Preaching Tuesday of Holy Week

When I was preparing to preach today, I thought that like Peter I've had three chances to preach these readings — for books of Lenten reflections in 2018, 2020 and the one coming out in the fall for 2027.  And when I look back at the reflections I wrote I feel like I've fumbled them a bit, not quite recognizing the weight of what is moving in this liturgy. But as St. Benedict was apparently wont to say, "every day we begin again." So here I try again to capture a little bit of the unfathomably holy space we are sitting in today.

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I sometimes wonder if we think that the Monday, Tuesday and even Wednesday of Holy Week are sort of a holding pattern, where we are just marking time between Palm Sunday’s intensity and the solemnity of the one long liturgy that is the Triduum. (And also some time for rehearsing and decorating and perhaps juggling our regular jobs).

Even if these days are just holding space, space, as musicians know, matters. Rests give shape to music as much as the notes.

But I hear more than a rest marker in the Gospel for today. Today’s pericope from John is a bit of a jumble. It  comes after the account of the washing of the feet and before the Farewell Discourse which will occupy the next three chapters. It’s a narrative transition, setting up the betrayal by Judas, and Peter’s betrayal, too. The choice of this Gospel for today scrambles the timeline a bit. Yesterday’s installment was a flashback — we were clearly outside Jerusalem with Mary and Martha and the anointing with aromatic oils. Today we have skipped past the washing of the feet which we will return to on Thursday. Tomorrow we will see Judas’ betrayal through Matthew’s eyes, positioned, it seems, well before the entrance to Jerusalem.

Praying with this Gospel the last few days, it occurred to me that today is the pivotal moment, the moment at which we are staggering at the edge of catastrophe, the moment when we tumble over the edge into chaos and confusion, into passion, death and resurrection. 

In chemical reactions, there's something called a transition state. It’s a tipping point, a fleeting moment in the course of a chemical change. Move a fraction backward and you return to whence you came, unchanged. But move a fraction forward and you tumble inexorably to completion, transformed — transfigured. From that point on there is no turning back, even if at first little has seem to be changed.

What John recounts in today’s Gospel feels like a transition state. Once Jesus hands Judas that morsel, once Judas picks it up and leaves the room, there is no turning back, even as the disciples don’t yet see what is coming. Peter surely does not. But at this moment, it is all set in train.

This is when theory becomes practice.

I was reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this weekend and I ran across these lines.

"Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest, but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet."

God is not toying with Judas, or with us. For this fleeting moment we stand at a point where we can see Jesus’ life and death laid before us, where we can see all of salvation history spread out like a banquet, where we can see the choices. Jesus' choice. Judas’ choice. Peter’s choice. Our choice. Today. May we have the courage to choose the unfathomably holy, in solemn, deliberate earnest. 

Ultraviolet — light on the edge

 

Violet is the canonical liturgical color of Lent in Roman Catholic practice (and in many other traditions as well), at least since the 16th century and the Council of Trent. Much before that there were not universal norms for the colors of vestments and ancillary textiles.

Why violet? Red for martyrs seems obvious - the color of blood. White and gold for feasts is arguably apt. Green for the Ordinary days, mostly in the green summer months of the Northern hemisphere, seems reasonable. But how did purple, an expensive, rare color associated with royalty come to connote penance?

I did a bit of research this weekend, but didn’t surface anything particularly compelling. The most popular theory is it’s the color Jesus wore during the Passion (though the four evangelists do not agree on this point, Matthew says scarlet, kokkinēn in the Greek; Mark gives it as porphyran, purple; Luke merely describes it as resplendent; John, like Mark, has purple). The color points to Jesus as king, and so obviously it signifies penance. Which is not so obvious to me. Another theory is that the blossoms of violets (some, but not all of which are indeed violet) hang their heads, a penitential posture. 

I want to float another theory, violet is on the very edge of the light the human eye can perceive. (Weirdly, most of the light in the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot detect with our eyes, we do not have X-ray vision, or infrared detection.) Once you get beyond violet, as the light increases in energy, we can no longer see it. In Lent we stand at the precipice of Easter, at the edge of the resurrection, facing the mysteries just beyond our perceptions. 

Or perhaps it is because violet is the color of the sky just before dawn?

Shout

 

Shout
Shout
Let it all out
These are the things I can do without
Come on
I'm talking to you
Come on

In violent times
You shouldn't have to sell your soul...

Forty years ago Tears for Fears released "Shout". I hadn't thought of the track in years but today as scientists and others gather to rally for science in the face of the cuts proposed by the current administration's unelected minions I find it running through my mind. Can we shout, make ourselves heard above the maelstrom that we are living through?

I am committed in the current moment to being noisy where I can. Like a great wind blowing, the current events are snatching our voices, drowning out the cries of the poor, the marginalized, the hungry, the sick, and the suffering with their drum beat of lies. The beating drums are meant to frighten, to shock into silence, to bewilder.

I wrote the op-ed that follows, which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month. I woke up at 3:45 in the morning with the question running through my head, "Is this what you voted for?" 

Know a Trump voter? Ask them, be specific. Did you vote for an increase in pediatric cancer deaths? Are you willing to forgo treatment with anything developed using funding by the NIH? Really? Have you have had shingles? No? You got the shot? Great, NIH funded. 

Shout.

The op-ed:

“This is what the people voted for.”or so we hear from the White House with each slashed program. But is it? Did people really vote to tear apart the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and lay waste to the nation’s scientific infrastructure? Perhaps you did, wondering what we get for our $48 billion every year.

I know what I have gotten: my life back. The pioneering work that led to the drug that I take for a neurodegenerative disease was done at the NIH, by a foreign scientist here on a visa. Without that drug I struggle to write on the blackboard, walk down the hallway, or even brush my teeth. It's not a cure, but with it I can work full time — and pay the taxes that help support the NIH.

I also know what others have gotten. When a teen-aged friend died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in the 1970s, survival rates were about 25%. Now 90% of children with ALL survive thanks in part to research supported by the NIH. 

A study by Ekaterina Cleary, Matthew Jackson, and Edward Zhou published in JAMA in 2023 showed that nearly every drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019 was touched by NIH funding. Shingrix to prevent the misery of shingles. Dulaglutide to control blood sugar in type 2 diabetics. Stelara for Crohn’s disease. Lifesaving drugs for cancer, including Keytruda and aflibercept. My own research into the mechanism by which the anti-cancer drug taxol works was funded in part by the NIH.

Private investment in pharmaceutical research cannot replace the NIH. The work done by academic scientists is not proprietary and can be shared widely, amplifying the effect of our government investment. Commercial companies have a responsibility to shareholders, they cannot take as much of a risk as NIH funded projects can. Not every research project on lizard saliva will lead to a block buster drug (as it did for Ozempic) but some will. We need both public investment and the private sector to continue to be world leaders in health care.

But you voted to get rid of”wokeness” not real science, you say? The US has a high maternal and infant mortality rate, appallingly so for black women. Cancelling the research related to race keeps us from understanding why these disparities exist and what to do about them. Women and babies will continue to die. 

If ending public investment in biomedical research in the US is what you hoped for when you voted in the 2025 presidential election, then I expect you to look me in the eye and tell me you voted for me to be disabled and unemployed. I hope you can explain to your neighbor why her grandchild was stillborn and her daughter dead. Or tell your father that no cure for your mother’s Alzheimer’s disease is coming anytime soon. Because that’s what you voted for.

If this isn’t what you voted for, then I urge you to call your congressperson and your senator and tell them so. Before it's your life on the line.

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Photo is of molecular model of L-3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine, L-DOPA, the standard of care for Parkinson's.

The Curious Incident of the Rabid Mouse On The Neighborhood Listserv

I’m on one (well, really more than one) of those neighborhood electronic bulletin boards. Recently someone posted on the board asking for help rescuing an injured mouse found in their garage. Surprisingly this didn’t elicit nearly as much conversation about the desirability of saving the mouse as I thought it might. (Given the recent issues in my office, I’ll admit to being not entirely supportive of mouse rescue operations.) 

What did result was a bit of back and forth about mice and rabies. Someone noted that they’d been told mice carried rabies. Given the mouse population around here, that could be cause for panic. Several people (including me) posted the CDC advice about rabies in rodents which notes that they are rarely found to be infected and there are no known cases of human transmission from rodents. No need to panic about mice as a reservoir of rabies, right?

Nope. Pretty soon someone posts a link to a paper on rabies in rodents and lagomorphs (bunnies, I didn't know that either). I read the paper. There are no reported cases in mice. Not in more than 15 years. The authors do comment on this: "The small body size of most other rodent species likely results in higher mortality rates from injuries sustained during altercations with rabid mesocarnivores and may contribute to the rarity of smaller rodents reported as rabid." Good, so again, no need to panic about the mice as reservoirs of rabies, right?

Nope. I get schooled in science: '"never been known to..." does not mean "impossible"'. True, but since you can't prove a negative, this isn't a helpful statement. Given the size of the mouse population and its proximity to humans, that rabies has never been observed in mice, let alone be transmitted mouse to human says really, there is no need to panic about the mice as reservoirs of rabies.

Apparently if you want to worry about rodents and rabies, you should direct your attention to groundhogs, which account for 90% of rodent rabies cases. Which makes me wonder, is Puxatawney Phil vaccinated for rabies? 

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The whole exchange reminded me of the "What to Expect When You are Expecting" books which listed rabies under "Common Childhood Illnesses." There are fewer than 5 cases a year in humans in the US. Sadly there are closer to 60,000 deaths per year from rabies world-wide, half in children. 

Photo of presumably non-rabid marmota monax (groundhog) from Wikipedia.

Ordinary jewels

Larve acquatiche di tricotteri con guscio

I recently ran across the work of Hubert Duprat, a French sculptor who collaborates with caddisfly larvae (yes, you read that correctly, caddsifly larvae) to create jeweled carapaces. I'm inspired by the caddisflies, who build their houses out of whatever is to hand, whether it's gold and pearls, or sticks and bits from the shells of dead snails. 

I'm working on a couple of pieces on prayer, one very short, one long. The writing has me thinking about how I sometimes complicate prayer, wanting to dress it up and take it out to some beautiful chapel, and waltz with it in down the cool and dark nave. But perhaps I need to take a few lessons from the caddisfly larvae and be willing to gather into my prayer whatever is at hand, precious or not. The weeds growing through the stones on the back patio, the scream of the lawn mower next door, my own inattention. And just perhaps, in that gathering I might realize just how precious those bits are.

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More pictures here. 

When we were young

Several of my siblings have spent hours in the attic of the barn at my parent's house, sorting through boxes of stuff, some of which have been untouched for decades.

Today my brother texted me this photo, taken on a September morning in 1983 in the 5th floor seminar room at UC Irvine. That's me, moments after defending my doctoral dissertation, with a former post-doc from the group who had been a terrific mentor (and who I just had dinner with a couple of weeks ago!). I was 25 — the same age Crash will be on his next birthday.

 I can still remember some of the questions from my defense, it seems not so very long ago.  I still roll up my sleeves when I lecture, still have that silk bow tie in my drawer, though I can't recall the last time I wore it.  My hair is far shorter and grayer, my glasses equally dorky. I can remember the softness of Tom's favorite sweatshirt, tossed on the table while he takes this photo. We had budgeted for a dinner out to celebrate, but by the time we arrived at the restaurant near the South Coast Plaza mall, Tom was feeling ill, and we just went back to the empty apartment, most of our stuff gone on a moving truck to New Jersey.

Things I can't remember - did I use overheads or give a chalk talk? Had I gone to the trouble of making 35 mm slides? Did we drink the champagne right then (it's not even noon as I can see from the clock!)? What was the date?  It's not in my thesis (I checked - there's a copy on the shelf behind my chair).

Less than fours years later, I would be a widow. I would find that sweatshirt tossed on the bed at home, worn to ward off the chill of an early spring morning. I look at these pictures sometimes and wonder, if future me could have warned past me of what awaited her, what would she say? Anything?

The weight of water

It's the UN's international year of the periodic table, so I've been writing and thinking about the elements. While writing a piece for Nature Chemistry about the hidden depths of the periodic table (the more than 3000 isotopes that could be stacked onto their elemental spots), I wandered across an interesting set of papers on heavy water and isotopic tracing, which along with some questions my students had in the intro chem course led to another piece for Nature Chemistry (The weight of water).

Heavy water (D₂O) is water where the hydrogens have been replaced with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that weighs about twice as much as standard hydrogen. Heavy water weighs just over 10% more than regular water, a tablespoon weighs only about a gram more, so it is probably not noticeable should you heft a glass of it.  (Heavy water was a key element of some nuclear weapons programs, check out the harrowing story of the raids on a Norwegian heavy water production facility in WW II.)

In one of the papers I read, future Nobelist George de Hevesy stuffed some twenty (albeit tiny) goldfish into 60 ml of water, in another he reports drinking heavy water and making thousands of distillations of urine to recapture the water, measure its density and track deuterium through the human body.

Drinking your experiement sounds dicey, but in small amounts heavy water is safe to drink, and as I recently learned, used in human metabolic studies in doses of about 10 ml. An interesting question raised in the papers I read was about the taste of heavy water. One report suggests a burning sensation might be felt when drinking it, another (by Harold Urey, who discovered deuterium) suggests it tastes like undeuterated water. But other reports say it tastes sweet.



With a bit of help from my youngest son, I set up a repeat of Urey's blind taste test. And was surprised to find I could indeed taste the difference. It is sweet.

And for the next few weeks, until the last of the extra deuterium clears my systems, I'll be just a little bit heavier than usual.

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Shameless self-promotion, George de Hevesy is one of the Catholic scientists featured in the audio series I did last year with Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, the director of the Vatican Observatory.

Ghosts of elements, spectres of the universe: Angelo Secchi SJ's stellar spectra

A plate of Secchi's spectra.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of astronomer Angelo Secchi, SJ, the pioneer behind stellar spectroscopy, which opened the door to our understanding of what makes up a star.  I'm spending a couple of weeks at the Specola Vaticana outside Rome, of which Secchi is arguably one of its founders, though the official founding of the current incarnation of the Specola would come nearly 15 years after his death.

[A version of this post is cross posted at the Vatican Observatory Foundation blog, The Catholic Astronomer]

If you’ve seen the flash of yellow-orange flames when a pot boils over on a gas stove, you’ve gotten a glimpse of the ghost of an atom, specifically sodium.  The color is part of the atom’s spectrum, which shows which types or frequencies of light are absorbed by that particular atom.

In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton used the Latin word for ghost, spectrum, to describe the bands of colors he saw when light shone through a prism. In 1814 Joseph von Fraunhofer noticed he could see bright lines instead of the bands of colors when looking at certain flames through a prism.  He went on to develop an instrument to measure these spectral lines, called a spectroscope.

Fraunhofer noticed a series of missing colors, dark lines, when looking at the sun’s light through the spectroscope, and went on to characterize the light from several stars as well.  Fifty years later  Jesuit polymath Angelo Secchi invented a series of spectroscopic instruments specifically for examining the patterns of colors in the light from stars and the sun and used it to build a catalog of more than 4000 stars.  Secchi classified the stars by recurring patterns in the light, which were a clue to the star’s composition.

Around the same time Secchi was building his catalog of stellar spectra, Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen (the inventor of the ubiquitous Bunsen burner) were involved in a more down-to-earth scheme. Kirchhoff and Bunsen teamed up to create a spectroscope that used Bunsen’s new hotter, gas burner to ignite samples.  They noted that that when they combusted a pure element it produced a characteristic set of lines, a spectral fingerprint, that could be used to identify it.

In October of 1860, Kirchhoff and Bunsen announced they had used their spectroscope to discover a new chemical element, which they named cesium, for the blue color of its principal line.  Chemists quickly began to use Bunsen’s spectroscope to find new elements.  A few months later Kirchhoff and Bunsen found two bright ruby red lines in an extract of a silicate mineral lepidolite, the spectral traces of another new element, rubidium.

Thallium’s ghostly green emanations were first observed by William Crookes, indium, ironically named for its violet lines by its color blind discoverer Ferdinand Reich.  Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran spectroscopically painstakingly identified element 66 in a sample extracted from his marble hearth, and instead of naming it for the colors of the lines, called it dysprosium, from the Greek for “hard to get” — because it was.

Hunting for new elements spectroscopically meant you didn’t actually need to have any of it in your lab or even on your planet, as long as you could observe the light from a burning sample.  In 1868 several chemists and astronomers independently observed a faint line in the spectrum of the sun, and assigned it to a new element, helium, which as far as they knew did not exist on earth.  It would take nearly 30 years for two Swedish chemists to confirm that it was present on earth — by matching the spectrum with that of a gas found in a uranium ore.  (All the helium found on earth comes from radioactive decay.)

These ghostly lines produced by elements helped fuel yet another critical discovery that would have far reaching consequences for chemists’ understanding of the periodic table:  quantum mechanics.  Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanical model of the atom opened the door to explaining the line spectra of chemical elements. Though more accurate and sophisticated quantum mechanical models of the atom now exist, Bohr’s model showed the relationship between the lines and an atom’s electron by insisting that the electrons’ energies were quantized, that is, they could only have certain energies.

So why do atoms have ghosts?  When an atom is heated to high temperatures, as in a flame or a star, the energy it absorbs excites its electrons.  You can think of the electrons in an atom as being on an energy ladder. (this isn’t quite correct as far as the quantum mechanics goes, but it is a reasonable approximation and easier to visualize.)  They can only have energies that match the rungs of the ladder, and each type of atom has a unique arrangement of the rungs.

When an atom absorbs energy, its electrons move to higher rungs.  Excited electrons are unstable. They quickly return to their original arrangement, giving off some their excess energy in the form of light as they fall back to their original rung.  The color (the wavelength) of the light emitted depends on the difference in energy between the rungs.  The colors of light emitted are the ghosts of the energy rungs.  Since each element has a unique pattern of rungs, it will have a unique spectrum of emitted light and so revealing their presence to the sharp eyes of spectroscopists.

The spectra that Secchi so carefully observed (and hand drew!) were not just a way to identify a particular star, but clues to its chemical composition and even more critically to its evolution. Chemists and astrophysicists still use the light emitted and absorbed by atoms and molecules to identify their presence.  We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts.

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If you want a way to see the ghosts of atoms for yourself, try this inexpensive DIY folding spectroscope you can attach to your phone. Use it to check out the light from a neon sign or from a street light!

For a wonderful description of the elements, including stories of how they were first discovered, read John Emsley’s Nature’s Building Blocks.

Want to read more about Angelo Secchi, SJ? Try Adam Hincks SJ's piece in American Magazine or my colleague at the Specola Bob Macke SJ's piece about Secchi's more terrestrial scientific pursuits.

This post is a version of an essay written for a collection commissioned for the UN’s International Year of Light in 2015.  

A wisdom of wombats

A wise wombat, perhaps, but not a wisdom of wombats.

One of my editors wondered in a blog post about submitting a research paper to a journal just what collective noun might best fit a group of reviewers.  @pkennepoh suggested in a tweeted reply  a "murder" of reviewers.

Researchers who publish papers in academic journals have a fraught relationship with reviewers, in large part because we have seen the enemy and he is us. We are both the reviewed and the reviewers in turn.

Peer review is one way academic journals, particularly academic science journals, assess work submitted for publication. The reviewers, two or three, are chosen by the editor for their familiarity with the area of research, closely (you hope) read the work and offer their thoughts to the editor about the value of the work to the field, often its novelty. They are weighing the evidence presented to be sure it is sound. As a general rule, they aren't repeating the experiments. It mostly works.

Great peer reviewers push you to plug holes and sharpen the presentation of your arguments. Awful reviewers can be pedantic and ridiculous. You wonder if they read more than the title of the paper and your name.  Reviewer #2 is often caricatured as the reviewer asking that you cite their work (not so inadvertently revealing their identity) or demanding extra experiments or one more spectrum or climbing on their particular hobby horse regardless of its relationship to your work.

I've had fabulous reviewers, and one reviewer who simply stated that any computational work was nonsense (and in those days of pink carbon copy reviews, signed all the copies, then whited out his name.)  His, you say? His. I held it up to the window to find out who should never review my papers again.  And I had two papers which came back with "Accept without change." from all parties.

So what collective noun might I suggest for these anonymous clusters of colleagues - besides a murder of them? There are a boatload of "terms of venery" (collective nouns for groups of critters) to inspire. My favorites for reviewers:

a shrewdness (apes)
a bellowing (bullfinches)
a busyness (ferrets)
a siege (herons)
an unkindness (ravens)
an ambush (tigers)
and last but not least a wisdom (wombats)

But what I'm truly all in for?  a murmuration.  Applied to starlings, it comes from the Latin for murmurings or grumbling.  The murmurs of supports, the grumbles of the grumpy. It seems to cover it all.

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A video of a murmuration of starlings.
Photo is from Wikimedia, by JJ Harrison.

Trying to ground grounding in science

My ungrounded feet in rubber boots.

This week the Washington Post has an article headlined "Could walking barefoot on grass improve your health? Some science suggests it can."  The link itself is subtitled: The science behind grounding.

The article gets a lot of things right about atoms (they make up everthing!), but it confuses "free-radicals" with positive ions. (Free radicals don't have to be charged.) Then it tries to explain why negative ions can help. And while it is true that a positive ion and a negative ion can react in some circumstance to produce a neutral compound (think of hydroxide and hydrogen ions reacting to make water in an acid base reaction), random negative ions won't necessarily disarm a free radical.  You need an antioxidant for that, a molecule that can participate in a reaction that can soak up extra electrons.  You still need to eat your vegetable and wear sunscreen.

Negative ions and positive ions co-exist quite nicely in your body. You need those positively charged potassium ions, in fact, to keep your heart beating rhythmically. So on its face, the "science behind grounding" given in the article is bunk. If all those negative ions in the ground started neutralizing all the positive ions in our bodies, we'd be dead.

While I get this is a not a science news piece, but a perspective piece (a "[d]iscussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences"), I wish someone at the Post had fact-checked the science.  Yes, it feels nice to walk barefoot on the grass, or to be outside.  I'm pretty certain the negative ions aren't the reason why.

Whose race are we running?

This is the third stop on a blog hop for Chris Lowney's latest book, Make Today Matter: 10 Habits for a Better Life (and World). Find the rest of the tour here.

"Compare and despair, that's the advice I got," noted the young Jesuit novice across the table from me. A group of us were having coffee and a last conversation before beginning the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.  We were nervous and uncertain of what lay before us in these thirty days in silence. Whatever God wanted for each of us during these days and over the next years, it would be different.

Almost a decade later, those words have returned to me again and again.  I have offered them to students worried about their progress in a course relative to their peers, murmured them to myself when looking at a piece of writing that was nowise as good as that essay by...stopping each of us in our tracks.

Last weekend, reading Chris Lowney's latest book, Make Today Matter, I scribbled "compare and despair" in the margins of the section on his third habit:  "Don't win the race, contribute to the (human) race." When we focus on winning, on besting those around us, we are never quite content with what we have. Someone always has more.  More money, more time, more honors. So we compare ourselves, and come up wanting, despairing of what we haven't achieved, rather than rejoicing in what has been given to us. Turn it around, suggests Lowney, and look not to get more, but to do more. To consider making the next move not one that positions you to move up, but makes the world a more just and a more loving place.

Science can be pretty competitive at times, no one wants to have their research scooped by another group barreling down the same road.  But another weekend read reminded me again what winning could mean.  The abstract for a feature article in the latest issue of Chemical Communications ended by noting that the translation of this chemistry "into real-world applications, starts to demonstrate the power of this approach, and its potential to transform the world around us for the better." Prof. David Smith goes on in the article to explain why he shifted his research to tackle fundamental questions in supramolecular chemistry from a different perspective: "[E]xplaining to someone with a life-limiting condition that you are using all of your skills to understand how peptides interact with one another in toluene somehow felt inadequate."  There were many directions he could have taken with his initial groundbreaking work, some more likely to "win" the science race than others, but he chose to seek a win for all of us, not just himself.  Something that might make this world a more loving place.

As I start to plan for the summer's research and writing, and my work with students next fall, I'm reminded to ask the question, not how many people will read this paper or cite this work compared to my peers, but what is the potential of this work to transform the world into a more just and loving place.  It's a good habit to get into.

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Full disclosure, Loyola Press gave me a copy of this book.  You can watch a short clip about Habit 3 here and read a sample chapter or two here.

Coffee or when in Rome

This isn't coffee either, hot chocolate at the local coffee house.

When in Rome...I drink coffee.  Nowhere else. Everywhere else in the world,  I drink tea.  So it's perhaps more than a little ironic that I'm quoted in a recent Washington Post article about the brewing controversy in California requiring the labeling of coffee as a carcinogen.

But coffee is iconic.  I say, "let's get coffee" to mean, let's find a time to talk that's not over a meal and not in someone's office but at a place where hot beverages are sold and consumed.  But where there will never, ever be a good cup of tea to be had.¹ So I talk about coffee.

When I talk about the molecules we eat and drink, I also talk about coffee, a complex brew of a thousand or more different molecules, that most people have some experience with. It is my push back point for molecular madness of all sorts.

Yes, some of the names for chemicals are harsh and discomfiting. What is acrylamide anyway, I imagine acrylic nails or crunkled tubes of paint in high school art class. It certainly doesn't sound like anything I want in my morning pick-me up.  Nor does oxidane, an industrial solvent used extensively in the preparation of coffee. But that last is just water, while the former is perhaps a carcinogen.  The names aren't important in assessing the risk a molecule poses.  Molecular structure and the resultant reactivity are.

Nor does source matter, natural or not. In this case acrylamide is an all natural carcinogen.  Acrylamide is found at much higher concentrations in other foods (see this list at the FDA).  It doesn't matter if it is "clean," organic or non-GMO. If it has sugars (this means fruit) or starches(vegetables) in it and you cook it at high temperatures, it has acrylamide in it, and often far more than coffee. Tobacco smoke has acrylamide in it — if you need another reason not to smoke.

This rush to judgement on coffee makes me wonder about a strain of chemophobia that I see circulating from time to time, one with an extra dash of Puritanism.  Pleasures are bad for the soul, and so by extension must be for the body.  I wonder if coffee and sweets and even artificial sweeteners come in for more than their share of judgement for this reason. 

I'll still drink coffee in Rome, though not in California. 

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1.  This is true in the US, and in Italy.  But in Ireland I can get better cup of tea at a gas station convenience store than I can at very good restaurants in the US.

Mystery of science in the sacred

In my last post I noted there are two Catholic scientists who are honored in virtually every Catholic church in the United States.  And for that matter, many other worship spaces across the world.

Who are they?  Not Galileo.  Or Luke, the physician.  You aren't likely to find them in the stained glass windows, and you might have to open a cupboard or a drawer to find them.

One French, one Italian. Both men. Working at the turn of the 18th century to the 19th.  A mathematician turned physicist and a chemist.

Ready for the answer?

Andre-Marie Ampère and Alessandro Volta.  Both have units named after them, to honor their work, the ampere (amp) and the volt respectively.  Both these memorials are in evidence on the power supply shown in the first photo, e.g. 12V, 12 volts; 2.5A, 2.5 amperes.  Photo taken in the sacristy at my parish!

Talking Catholic Scientists

What do Catholic scientists talk about?  Well, I spent the last several days in Washington DC at the studios of Now You Know Media, recording a dozen conversations about the lives and faith of Catholic Scientists with my boss at the Vatican Observatory, Br. Guy.  I’ve been working on material for this series on the lives of Catholic Scientists since September: “spend an hour working on the Catholic Scientists project” has been a regularly scheduled item on my to-do list, an often welcome respite from grading and administrative tasks.

Since there are literally hundreds of scientists who are Catholic and who made significant contributions to their fields (check out the @catholiclab Twitter stream with daily tweets about Catholic scientists), it was both easy and difficult to come up with a set of interesting people to talk about. And once you realize there is no way you can do justice to the history of science over the last 1000 years even if we spent all 12 episodes on it, you’re free to pick a thread for a setting.

We ended up talking about 40 some odd scientists, who lived over a thousand year period on 5 different continents, all Catholic:

11 women
2 saints (and a “Servant of God”)
2 doctors of the Church
2 popes
11 Jesuits
1 Augustinian
4 mathematicians
9 chemists
8 botanists

Fun question:  There are two Catholic scientists that are honored in virtually every church in the US.  Neither of them are saints. Who are they? [[Update:  Answer is here.]]

Our big point?  Catholics have been, are, and will continue to be scientists.  Not in spite of the Church, not separate from their faith, but because of their faith.  It’s a delightful and joyful way to seek the face of God, to play not just with creation, but with the Creator — to pray.  And all these scientists are people, just like the rest of us, with their faults and failings as well as their strengths.

The project has been a delight so far, from doing the research and writing the biographical sketches and brief settings we worked from to finding our rhythm during the recording sessions.  The give and take of a conversation takes a different type of preparation than a straight lecture.  And I suspect for both the scientists in this conversation, working without visuals was another sort of challenge.

Living water, live water

How do you like your water?  How about live? A California company is marketing incredibly expensive "live water."  This $70 per gallon water comes from a spring and hasn't been 'killed' by removing the minerals or bacteria in it, one must trust that there are only beneficial bacteria in it.  The science on the site makes my eyes cross, and the Washington Post's Lindsey Bever does a excellent job of sorting through some of the issues. (Full disclosure, I'm quoted in the article.)

But what I found truly stunning was the comment at the end by a high profile Silicon Valley guy about drinking this kind of water, “The pundits will say water is H2O, but I think as you break it down, there's a lot more to it. And I feel very vibrant on its consumption.”

In his encyclical Laudato Si', Pope Francis devotes an entire section to water, noting how the lack of clean drinking water particularly affects the poor, resulting every day in many deaths and about the commodification of this precious liquid.[29-30]  WHO data shows more than a thousand children under the age of 5 die each day from illness caused by drinking water contaminated with microorganisms. Every day, a thousand little ones, a half million children a year. I doubt their parents are feeling "very vibrant" on the consumption of water that hasn't been treated.  Or that the people still lacking water in Puerto Rico are very happy either.

You want to buy incredibly expensive water, 7000 times as expensive as water from the tap, with a wacky pseudoscientific backstory, fine. But to somehow imply that clean water isn't desirable seems to disparage the very real needs of millions of people in the world for water they can drink, for living water.

#realDesksOfAcademia

My desk at its worst.

My study-under-the-eaves has two tables in it.  My computer resides on one and the other, tucked into a gable, is for spreading out and thinking.  Except when it's not. For the last three months I have been dropping stacks of papers and books on it, as one project has moved into the next without respite.  The surface vanished somewhere in late September.

Giving a talk at another institution earlier this fall, I was captivated by the states of various offices.  From starkly empty — nothing on the walls or desk or shelves — to stacks of paper on every surface, the monitor for the computer half on, half off a pile on a small side table. And every permutation in between. These are the #realDesksOfAcademia.

I really don't work well without a clear surface to spread out, and two current projects are in the stage where I really need that space.  And my office at the college (where the desks are indeed clear, and thus where I have been doing that sort of work) is going to be inaccessible for the next several weeks due to construction.

"Clear off the desk." was stuck on my Saturday to-do-list all November, finally morphing into an (aspirational) item on my daily list — "30 minutes on the !@#$& desk" — staring at me each morning, mournfully.

I finally got a breather on Thursday and spent an hour on the desk.  It's progress.  Perhaps next week I will see its surface.

Light aborning, light bearing

A summer sunset over the gardens at Castel Gandolfo.

As I drove home from an errand yesterday evening, there was a single, vein of pure gold in the indigo clouds piled up on the horizon.  So, too, in these days do obligations and crises pile up while I scan the leading edge of my calendar for any sign of hope, of relief, for cracks that will let in light, and not the cracks that presage collapse.

It was a vivid reminder that Light is what I yearn for, but am I longing for passive illumination or am I willing to expose myself to a light that will not leave me unchanged, a light that I will be expected to bear. For...

"Chemists see light as active. It doesn’t just illuminate, driving away the darkness, it can fundamentally change what it touches. One molecule becomes another, electrons shift allegiances, marching ‘round materials like armies of stars. Yet more wonderfully, once the light has soaked in, it can shine forth again, in new ways and new directions: fluorescence and phosphorescence appear at different wavelengths from the exciting light. And from these depths, the light speaks to us, telling us what was and perhaps, what will be. What is the shape of this molecule? By what pathways can it change?Light of the world, light of my heart." — read the rest at the Vatican Observatory Foundation's blog. 

 Light born, light a'borning, light to bear.

Memory management

One of the platters from the 80 Mbyte drive I used in grad 

school.  Note the magnetic materials has been scraped down

to the bare metal. Always back up.  I lost six weeks of work

that had to be retyped in.

It's the start of fall break here and fall weather seems to have arrived with it. (Though not quite to stay, the temperatures for next weekend exceed the 90th percentile for high's at this point in October.)  I've been looking forward to some time to write and some time to do some of the low priority things I'd pushing to the back.  Even as I write this, I keep remembering things I wanted to accomplish!

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at St. Edward's University in Austin for their annual Lucian symposium.  Four speakers, a dinner, a student poster session. My talk was organized around the tools that chemists have for exploring structure, including some we might not think of as "modern" such as paper models, making the case for broadening the base of tools chemists have access to along with modernizing them.

Along the way I showed some of the computational tools I had used, including our "big" drive.  80 Mbytes and the size of a washing machine.  I can now keep 128 Gbytes on my key chain and forget I have it.  One feature of the coding I did in those days was the need to intentionally allocate memory for lists and arrays, including deciding could be moved into memory as a piece. For these computationally demanding tasks, having a carefully designed overlap was key.

My to-do list feels like that old-fashioned overlay.  I have the teaching list, the administrative list, the writing list, the personal lists. Load them in, wiping what is currently in memory.  Repeat.  Can I keep things from accidentally writing over what I need to keep in working memory (the load of wash in while I write?).

Aliens have landed on my roof

Classes have begun at the college, a season about which I have selective amnesia.  No matter how many times I have done this (33 times, I'm counting), no matter how prepared I am with handouts and room arrangements and...it is always nervewrackingly chaotic and utterly exhausting.  It's fun like riding a really big wave is, equal parts exhilaration and terror, and you can feel pretty bedraggled by the time you wash up on the beach.

And of course, while you are riding this wave of new school year energy, you can't do anything else. All this to say, it felt delightful today to have some quiet time to do some research and a bit of reading.

I had Jon Larsen's  In Search of Stardust¹ on my stack of books to read because last spring the upper division research methods course I taught did an experiment to measure the heat capacities of meteorites, using the method developed by the Vatican Observatory's Guy Consolmagno, SJ and Bob Macke, SJ and colleagues.² The students were curious about the astrochemistry context (where do the samples come from, how can you distinguish regular rocks from these stony aliens) and I've been collecting resources for this coming spring when a new batch of students will make these measurements.

I tend to think of meteorite strikes as spectacular and rare events, fireballs roaring through the sky that finally come crashing to earth.  Still they aren't as rare was you might think — tens of thousands of meteorites weighing as much or more than a euro coin hit the earth each year, most of them landing in the water.  But what takes my breath away are the hundreds of trillions of micrometeorites that come to rest on earth each year, adding as much as 100,000 metric tons to the earth's mass.  Invisible, unremarked.  Perhaps as many as one a day hits the roof of my house, there are surely some of these ancient bits of dust in the water I drink, still others stuck to my hands after weeding the garden.

Larsen, a Norwegian jazz musician, discovered that you could find and identify these micrometeorites by looking at the dust on urban roofs, previously it had been thought you couldn't find them in the midst of the general detritus of a city. But a careful eye is rewarded, as these cosmic intruders have a characteristic morphology. Their shape and appearance means you can sort them out under a microscope, much like Pasteur manually sorted the crystals of tartaric acid, and they are astonishingly beautiful.

From J. Larsen, In Search of Stardust , p. 51.

Larsen offers a brief and readable glimpse into the science of micrometeorites, but I enjoyed simply browsing the images, reading them as I might clouds.  There is a golden glass meteorite with deep blue inclusions (p 51) that looks like some alien aquatic creature's shell, while the burnished cryptocrystalline specimen on page 45 looks like a bronzed wasp's nest — until one remembers it is less than a millimeter long. One scanning electron microscopic image of an ablation spherule from the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 looks like a tiny alien skull.

As much as I learned about the dust from outer space, Larsen's register of the terrestrial imposters gave me an entirely different view of road dust, which contains polished spheres of glass from the reflective markings on the roads and tiny crystals, microgemstones.

In one of the most beautiful passages in Isaiah (Is 54:11-12) we are told, "I lay your pavements in carnelians..." Who knew it was literally true.  The world is a beautiful place, if only we know where and how to look.

(A version of this post appeared at the Vatican Observatory Foundation's Catholic Astronomer blog.)

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1. J. Larsen, In Search of Stardust   If you get it at Amazon through this link, the Vatican Observatory Foundation will get a donation. There was an article in the NY Times last spring about the project as well.

2. Guy J. Consolmagno, Martha W. Schaefer, Bradley E. Schaefer, Daniel T. Britt, Robert J. Macke, Michael C. Nolan, Ellen S. Howell, "The measurement of meteorite heat capacity at low temperatures using liquid nitrogen vaporization" Planetary and Space Science, 87 (2013) 146-156