Veronique Greenwood

Written in 2007 for Anne Fadiman’s “At Home in America” seminar.

From the door, the interior of the whole building is visible: a gargantuan stove, a dairy-style floor drain, a steel vat, and an unusually large number of industrial garbage cans on wheels. Five cans stand by the entrance, lids sealed tight; one can stands in the corner with its lid off, allowing a black hose to trickle water over the rim. The floor is slick with the can’s overflow, and a sour, light-green smell hangs in the air, tinged with ginger and soy sauce. On the red cement floor, three buckets cluster around a device that bears a disturbing resemblance to a wood-chipper, and on the yellowed wall, a price list hangs: “unchicken, unturkey sandwiches: $3.50 each.” Over in the can in the corner, waiting, is a treasure trove of little golden beans, each the size of a fingernail and greedily absorbing water.

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Head on over to 80beats for daily posts on new discoveries and to DiscoBlog for a quirky scientific miscellany.

I’ll keep posting longer work here, so keep your RSS feeds primed!

Originally published on DiscoverMagazine.com, 14 June 2011

By Veronique Greenwood
When scientists discovered a new bacterium that can live on caffeine last month, it sparked many tongue-in-cheek headlines and ledes. “Bacteria survives on caffeine (like me).” “If you can’t live without a cup of coffee…” “Think you live on caffeine?” But after everyone had a good laugh about the extent to which modern existence is dependent on coffee and run through a few specifics about the bacterium, there was still one question left unanswered. When you get down to it, why can’t humans live on caffeine?

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Originally published on DiscoverMagazine.com, 18 May 2011

By Veronique Greenwood

When it comes to the science of aging, there are few discoveries as intriguing as telomeres.

These caps at the ends of chromosomes protect your genes from being eroded each time a cell divides. When your telomeres are finally eaten away after many years, your cells begin to show signs of age, and this process may be a key part of what makes us grow old. Telomeres’ partner in crime is the enzyme telomerase, which helps keep telomeres long and healthy, a property that’s made it the subject of almost science-fictional fascination: it confers immortality on cancer cells and, in a landmark 2010 study, reversed the aging of telomerase-deficient rats.

Our discoveries of telomeres and telomerase open a Pandora’s box of difficult questions. Like a candle that burns an inch each hour and thus functions as a clock, can the length of our telomeres tell us how much longer we have to live? Can it tell us whether we’re more likely than others to get aging-related diseases like heart disease, cancer, or a stroke? (And do short telomeres cause disease, or just come along with it?) If our telomeres have grown dangerously short, can we do anything to keep them from shortening further?

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Originally published on theAtlantic.com, 9 May 2011

By Veronique Greenwood
Nobody wants to be called a helicopter parent—but who is totally innocent of micromanaging their children’s lives? Parents want to protect their kids. No playing with sticks means no risk of lost eyes.

Yet as Gever Tulley and Julie Spiegler point out in Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) (New American Library, May 3, $18), children who grow up as safe as humanly possible become adults who aren’t adventurous, resilient, or confident. Sometimes you have to fall out of a tree to figure out how to climb one the right way, and learning that you can accomplish such a thing on your own teaches you that you can be self-sufficient.

With Fifty Dangerous Things, Tulley and Spiegler, founders of the Tinkering School summer camp, have written a handbook of activities that are, yes, dangerous at some level—like playing with fire, breaking glass, licking batteries, pounding nails, learning to tightrope walk, and squashing pennies on railroad tracks. The book is a blueprint to help parents and children explore the world, and ensure the children grow up, with a little common sense and a lot of curiosity.

Both the advice and the warnings are down to earth. Yes, there are risks—ranging from frustration to impalement—but the authors provide good ways to learn to avoid them through your own skill. And scientific or historical tidbits are appended: Did you know that the first batteries were made over 2,000 years ago in Baghdad? It takes work to raise a child who can use a table saw, build a campfire, and chart a course for herself after growing up. But with this book in hand, it’ll be a satisfying adventure.

I spoke to Tulley about the impetus for the book, a new school he’s opening in San Francisco, and his favorite (dangerous) things.

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Originally published on theAtlantic.com, 19 April 2011

By Veronique Greenwood

In 1941, imagining the world that plastic would make possible, a pair of British chemists wrote of “a world of color and right shining surfaces…a world in which man, like a magician, makes what he wants for almost every need.” Plastic has indeed completely transformed our lives—everything from modern medicine to food safety has been made possible by its fantastic and varied properties.

But we’ve gradually realized that plastic has a dark side. It leaches chemicals that have been found in our bloodstreams and may cause permanent damage to us and our children, at the same time that it accrues in the oceans with no sign of breaking down.

In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 18, $27), writer Susan Freinkel explores the tales of eight plastic objects—the comb, the chair, the Frisbee, the IV bag, the Bic lighter, the grocery bag, the soda bottle, and the credit card—to explore how plastic’s fate became so entwined with our own. By turns whimsical and profoundly disturbing, Plastic gives a lucid, comprehensive, and, ultimately, galvanizing account of our past with plastic and what our future may be.

I asked Freinkel about plastic’s origins, its dangers, and what we can do to turn this love affair around.

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Originally published on theAtlantic.com, 28 March 2011

By Veronique Greenwood

Blood and the process of removing it from people are objects of enduring cultural fascination, as the glut of teenage vampire novels can attest. It was not much different in 17th-century Europe at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, when a band of natural philosophers armed with knives and goose-quill tubes began to investigate the idea of transferring blood from one person or animal to another. Their story, as told in a new book by Vanderbilt University historian Holly Tucker, is vivid, strange, and reveals much about modern medicine.

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Originally published on theAtlantic.com, 10 March 2011

By Veronique Greenwood

Philip was a bright, nervous child. He was younger than average in his grade, his mother having started him a year early. He was close to his parents, who divorced when he was 13, and then lived with his mother, who struggled to make ends meet. As he grew up, married, and became a father, he evolved into a worrier. He divorced, remarried shortly after. He joined the military and seemed to enjoy it, but later reported that his job was not fully satisfying, and he felt he hadn’t lived up to his potential. He died early, before his 65th birthday, of a heart attack.

Philip was one of 1,500 bright children who were tracked for more than 80 years in a massive longitudinal study begun in 1921 by psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman and his successors—he died before many of the children—collected millions of details about these subjects, including whether they were breast-fed, how much they exercised, what their marriages were like, how satisfying their sex lives were, how satisfying their jobs were. Could this sea of information teach us how to avoid Philip’s fate?

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