Science In My Fiction

In preparation for this month’s post, I’ve been reading up on the heart. The post was inspired by my friend, Francesca Forrest’s, recommendation that I read The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the HUMAN HEART by Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon, MD. NPR had done a piece on the book discussing the man that toured Europe with a hole in his chest that allowed folks to see his heart hard at work deep within his chest. I was intrigued. Read the rest of this entry »

I came upon this topic thanks to a recommendation from one of my blog readers. She mentioned that after covering love and brains, music and brains might be a nice progression. She pointed me in the direction of  Daniel Levitin’s book, This is Your Brain on Music,  listed below. This topic was exciting to me. I’ve been kicking around a story for a while that considers how music affects our brains as a major component of the plot. Writing this article was a good excuse to get back to that particular story.

When I was little, I claimed that music was my first religion. To this day, it remains an integral part of my being. I remember seeing Fantasia as a kid. It was the first time seeing a visual expression of the way I take in music. It’s only been in recent years that I learned I experienced it in ways that not everyone does. Synesthesia is only a small part of that. I am now married to a musician that is also a writer. It is interesting to me to see how the creative processes differ. Sure, there is quite a bit of overlap, but there are distinct departures as well. We’ve compared notes on both the creative process and how we experience music as well as reading. We both often listen to music while reading.

I guess for all of the reasons above, and plenty more, I decided to share with you the body of my research to this point. I hope that it will spark some discussion. It is my greater hope that thinking about any of these topics will kindle story ideas in your mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Wikipedia goes into a very long definition of love; it has a series of topics revolving around the main one.  Some of these overlap with the other kinds of love, but since this is Valentine’s Day, I am focusing on the love generally related to dating. In anthropologist Helen Fisher‘s book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, she breaks love down to three overlapping stages. These are lust (I am tossing an additional link for libido in here for your reading pleasure),  attraction, and attachment. Most of my research after browsing the main topic included the chemical aspects of interpersonal love.  Based on the neuroscience studies the list of chemicals involved in love include: nerve growth factor, testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin.

If recent neuroscience research into love is any indication, the biologist above is ready to talk commitment. “Couples who have been together for several years show increased brain activity associated with (the hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin) these chemicals, when they look at pictures of their partner. Oxytocin is produced when couples have sex and touch, kiss and massage each other – the hormone makes us more trusting, helps overcome “social fear” and is important for bonding.” (Pickrell, John, Middleton, Lucy, and Anderson, Alun, “Introduction: Love.” New Scientist (Online). September 2006. 04 . Web. February 2011. 14.0)

Crazy In Love:

In the brain, romantic love shows similarities to going mildly insane or suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. Studies show that when you first fall in love, serotonin levels plummet and the brain’s reward centres are flooded with dopamine. This gives a high similar to an addictive drug, creating powerful links in our minds between pleasure and the object of our affection, and meaning we crave the hit of our beloved again and again.

Lust is driven by sex hormones such as testosterone, which can go off-kilter too. As can levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and the amphetamine-like chemical phenylethlyamine, increasing excitement. (Pickrell, Middleton, and Anderson)

Love and Hearts:

I did not want to leave the heart out on Valentine’s Day.

“Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?”

“That’s a tricky question always,” says Ortigue [assistant professor of psychology and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology, both in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University]. “I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.”

Love and Pain:

Researchers in the pain center at Stanford University Medical Center recruited a group of students in the first nine months of a relationship to test the pain relieving effects of love when dealing with mild pain stimulus. The students brought pictures of their significant other and an attractive acquaintance. Their brains were scanned as the pictures were alternated while a computer-controlled thermal stimulator placed in the palm of their hand was heated to cause mild pain. Word association tasks were included to test a non-romantic distraction against the pictures.

Results showed that both love and distraction did equally reduce pain, and at much higher levels than by concentrating on the photo of the attractive acquaintance, but interestingly the two methods of pain reduction used very different brain pathways.

“With the distraction test, the brain pathways leading to pain relief were mostly cognitive,” Younger said. “The reduction of pain was associated with higher, cortical parts of the brain. Love-induced analgesia is much more associated with the reward centers. It appears to involve more primitive aspects of the brain, activating deep structures that may block pain at a spinal level — similar to how opioid analgesics work.

“One of the key sites for love-induced analgesia is the nucleus accumbens, a key reward addiction center for opioids, cocaine and other drugs of abuse. The region tells the brain that you really need to keep doing this,” Younger said.

“This tells us that you don’t have to just rely on drugs for pain relief,” Aron said. “People are feeling intense rewards without the side effects of drugs.”

While I was exploring this topic for today’s post, I mentioned my quest for knowledge to my LiveJournal readers. I asked two questions. What did they know of the effects of love on the brain, and had they read any fiction that used this particular area of science for plot points? Ayoub Khote, Sophy Z. S. Adani, and Patricia Esposito get credit for sending me links and giving me an overall reminder of what chemical production is stimulated by love. Please do check out the links in this post. I am sure you will find some interesting reading material.Feel free to discuss any of the linked articles here.  Speaking of reading, none of my friends could offer fiction recommendations. I was disappointed. You can help, though. Have you read a story involving this topic? If so, please share a name or a link. A

Happy New Year! 2011 already has math going for it.  It’s prime, and it is the sum of 11 consecutive prime numbers (2011=157+163+167+173+179+181+191+193+197+199+211)

I knew I wanted to talk about the New Year with you. I spent time trying to figure out what was scientific about the new year. We could talk about what makes December 31st the last day of the year or January 1st the first day. Who made the call and on what basis? The short answer is that Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian Calendar by a decree signed February 24, 1582 as a replacement for the Julian Calendar. (If you follow the link, you will find some interesting information about what this change meant for leap years and lost time.) While the Gregorian Calendar has been largely adopted by the international community as a civil calendar, some countries still follow the Julian Calendar. Many countries, cultures,  and religious groups also utilize an additonal calendar.  (That link takes you to a list of calendars both in use and archaic. It also has a small list of calendars in fiction . Ah ha! My connection is made. Thanks and good night. )

Accepting that this is indeed our year end/beginning, I move forward to discuss my two favorite things abour New Year’s Eve.  I get excited about birthdays; they are personal New Years. I admit that I analyze what transpired during the year.  I look at how I might make the best of my new year. It is deep personal introspection. New Years, be they natal or calendar,  motivate me to push harder towards whatever achievement I  desire. I think this remotely connects to a sense of mortality. Even though I am mindful that we are not guaranteed our next breath, the clicking of years going by does drive it home. 

New Year’s Day is a global birthday. The prospect of a clean slate brings resolutionists out in droves. Neuroscientists have studied New Year’s Resolutions and the people that make them. One study shows that pacing yourself might be the key to success.  My husband reminded me just today that while I want to add exercise to our already tight morning routine, I might want to wait until we have adjusted to breakfast at home instead of on the run via drive-thru.

For those wanting to apply lessons learned in previous years, there is a momentum building in the efforts and resolve of others also hoping that the flip of the calendar year is the perfect catalyst for change. In a way, this is like the writers that join NANOWRIMO for the sense of community. The target is 50,000 words in one month. Take a stroll through the social networking site feed of your choice and you will see resolutionists caught up in the momentum of the new year. Most bundle their goals together and expect to start immediately on achieving all of them.  Others take different approaches to the New Year frenzy. Some remain indifferent while some take time to analyze the failures endured, losses suffered, and successes achieved.

International celebrations of the New Year are just as varied (Click here for a Life Magazine Slide Show).  As this is possibly the largest shared holiday, it offers itself as a subject for social anthropology and sociology studies. On the New Year’s Eve wikipedia page there is a long discussion on how different countries, cultures, and religious groups celebrate the event.  There is a similar list on the New Year’s Day page.

From the prodominant civil calendar acceptance, the leap year calculations, the individual/group resolutions setting and introspection, to the worldwide celebration of one holiday in so many ways representative of individual cultures, New Year’s offers multiple opportunities to put a little science in their fiction.

The Anthropological Science Fiction Wikipedia page has some interesting quotes pertaining to anthropology. It goes on to discuss authors and their works. It isn’t in depth but it offers a starting point. The relevance I find is the opportunity to look at the different ways this holiday is celebrated or dismissed around the world and on your own social networks by the individuals you “know.” Consider the meaning of a global do-over that occurs because an arbitrary page on a calendar is flipped. The people making resolutions haven’t changed in that moment. Perhaps though, the preceeding year has refined them in some way for better or worse and that introspection prompted by the event is the first time they have the perspective to see it for what it is. Consider the value each culture assigns this clean slate as they gather to celebrate it.  Perhaps any of these considerations might serve your fiction in some way.

In the meantime, how did you ring in 2011?

The Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Officially, winter begins on December 21, 2010 at 6:38 PM ET. The sun appears in the lowest position in the sky as the North Pole tilts away from it. The incoming solar energy is at its lowest level in the Northern Hemisphere and greatest in the Southern Hemisphere which is experiencing its summer. After the solstice the Northern Hemisphere’s days will grow longer as the nights will lengthen below the Equator.

There will be a total lunar eclipse on Tuesday at 1:33 AM ET and continuing until 5:01 AM ET. The moon will be full as of 3:13 AM ET. Peak viewing time in North America, Central America, and the Central Pacific is expected to occur at 3:15 AM ET. The view from North Africa, Europe, South America, and Australia will not be optimal. More information on viewing times relative to your location can be found here. NASA will be broadcasting a live video.  NASA is also hosting two live chats for the event. The first is scheduled between 3-4 PM ET today. On NASA’s website you can get more information about the eclipse and details pertaining to other activities scheduled.

When the Earth, the sun, and the moon line up directly a lunar eclipse occurs. The Earth blocks the sun’s rays and casts a shadow on the moon. As the moon moves deeper into shadow, it appears to change color. The moon takes on this new color because indirect sunlight is still able to pass through Earth’s atmosphere and cast a glow on the moon. Our atmosphere filters out most of the blue colored light, leaving the red and orange hues that we see during a lunar eclipse. Extra particles in the atmosphere, from say a recent volcanic eruption, will cause the moon to appear a darker shade of red. The time the moon spends covered completely by the Earth’s shadow is totality. During this eclipse it will last 72 minutes beginning at 2:41 AM. 

This is the second lunar eclipse of the year and the first total lunar eclipse since February 2008. There have been three total lunar eclipses in the north during the winter in the last ten years. However, the occurrence of a total lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice is quite rare. Only one occurred during the Common Era prior to this one. It happened 372 years ago on December 21, 1638. The next time the two events coincide will be December 21, 2094. The 2094 eclipse will not be visible from the Western Hemisphere, but will be able to be seen from Europe, Africa and much of Asia.

Both eclipses and solstices have long held spiritual and cultural meaning beyond the science. For several examples please follow these links: Cultural Aspects, History, and Observances. The two lining up tomorrow has a greater impact for many of my friends that celebrate the Winter Solstice as a holiday. I celebrated my first Winter Solstice last year. I am very excited that the two line up this year and then get chased by a meteor shower. I’ve had discussions with writers in the past that were including an eclipse, either solar or lunar, in their work in progress. I know that Avatar: The Last Airbender the cartoon mentions the winter solstice. Solstice, a thriller appeared in 2008. The solstice was to be the moment when the living world and the other world were closest together.

Per the usual, please recommend some great fiction that includes either eclipses or solstices (in their scientific capacity, cultural impact, or spiritual meaning). Also, if you will be celebrating the Winter Solstice, I bid you merry tidings. Please feel welcome to share how you will be celebrating in a comment below.

For those of you that enjoyed my meteor shower post earlier this fall, I wanted to share this: The next morning (22nd), turn your eyes to Ursa Major (location of the Big Dipper asterism) for the Ursid meteor shower. Unlike the Geminids, the numbers for this shower may be rather disappointing (~10-15 per hour); however, unpredicted outbursts may occur that could be more impressive. Not only that, but the Ursid shower is known for producing some brighter meteors since the debris chunks from its parent comet P8/Tuttle are a bit larger (don’t get freaked out, we are only talking the size of pebbles here!).

I was excited to grab the spot on the schedule this month that falls on a full moon. When I am preparing for a post like this one, I visit my LiveJournal and ask friends to share their perspectives, ideas, and knolwedge. For this post, I asked what they associate the moon with in fiction(many are in the list included below) and in general. This post is a direct result of their input. I will invite them here to claim their share of the credit once it is posted. I also hope that you share some of your personal connections with the moon.

The Cultured Moon:

From my earliest memories, I have been in love with the night sky. The moon was the easiest object to pick out and holds tremendous sentimental value for me. We’ve all seen the moon. As a child, I watched in awe of its changes faces as it cycled through the lunar phases and tried to interpret the shades of dark areas (lunar maria) and lighter highlands as shapes. This same practice has given us the man in the moon, a woman, a dragon, a hare, and more. It connects us. 

The moon guides our tides: All parts of the Earth are subject to the Moon’s gravitational forces, causing the water in the oceans to redistribute, forming bulges on the sides near the Moon and far from the Moon. In a different way it guides our paths, as it provides the light needed to move about in the dark when no artificial light is present. We’ve all felt it seemingly peer down upon us. My lunar companion followed me on car rides.   It protects us.

One estimate by the 19th century astronomer Julius Schmidt put the number of craters at 30 000. Today it is reckoned that there are at least 10 times that number, with a diameter larger than 1 km, on the visible side of the Moon alone. The largest exceed 200 km. Volcanic craters are rare and comparatively small. The lunar impact craters inform us about the history of Earth’s bombardment since its birth.

The moon is recorded in our earliest cultures.  “What may be the oldest map of the Moon ever made is inside a 5,000-year-old Neolithic burial mound at Knowth in County Meath, Ireland.” It is featured in mytholoy and folklore as people told the moon’s story in their own way.

It continues to inspire us, not just in genre fiction, but in many areas of our contemporary lives. Check out this comprehensive list of moon appearances in art and literature. While I can’t say that I ever actually wanted to visit or live there, I often daydreamed about what it would be like. Some of our first movies were built around such fantasies. In George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon  (1902) his characters land on the moon.

Today there are celebrations across the globe that tie the moon in such as the  Mid-Autumn Festival / Zhongqiu Festival.  Mooncakes, pastry delicacies, are served during the celebration and at other times with varying ingredients in several countries. I live in the southern United States where Moonpies are a popular pastry, consumed with no associated celebration. 

Moon Myth Busters:

Do you remember the commercial from The American Dairy Association, “Behold the Power of Cheese,” mentions our moon landing? I remember it saying that once we found out the moon was not made of cheese, we never returned. Go ahead and laugh. I still do. Yet, one of the things I was most curious about what the geological makeup of the moon.

While the moon’s light provides opportunity for more nocturnal activity and decreases the need for artificial light, it has not been proven to hold power over our behavior. 

The number of days it takes the moon to complete a revolution around the globe is similar to that of a menstration cycle, the greater factor is the amount of articifical light exposure.

This is perhaps my favorite. Do wolves howl at the moon? No. Chances are that humans made the connection because when wolves howled at night, they were more easily observed by the light of a full moon than at any other time. Now if you are interested in why wolves howl, I found these two articles to be informative. (one & two)

With apologies to my editor, I close and post this entry now, late for a Friday. There were so many things I could have discussed about the moon. It was hard to pick which to offer up for discussion and a bit of a challenge to organize the topics. Help me make it up to her with a lively discussion below in comments. Tell me about your love of the moon. What does the moon represent for you? Have you ever observed the moon through a telescope or with professional imaging equipment? What have you read that included the moon? Is the moon included in any of your traditions, rituals, or celebrations? Do you cry when a certain mouse sings “Somewhere Out There?” SHARE!

Austrailian Astronomer Andrew Fitzgeraldsays the Orionid meteor shower is brighter, faster and more prolific than other showers. “The Orionids tend to be bright and they’re quick, often yellow [in] colour as well so they’re fairly distinctive. There’s other showers that are active but they will look different. There’s another shower called the Taurids which is also active, so if you see something slow, that’s Torrid and if you something fast, most likely it’s an Orionid.”

In my last post we discussed Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, specifically the chinampas, or floating gardens, used to feed the population. Tenochtitlan was situated on an islet in the middle of Lake Texcoco, the largest of five lakes. The surrounding four lakes, Zumpango, Xaltoca, Xochimilco, and Chalco, combined with it to cover about 580sq. miles of the valley floor. The four lakes in the Valley of Mexico are now considered extinct with only small remnants to be found. What remains of Lake Texcoco rests about 2.5 miles outside of Mexico City. It is surrounded by salt marshes and its waters are evaporated to access the salts found in high concentrations.

The Aztecs were a hydraulic society. They depended upon these lakes and surrounding mountain spring water for their basic needs such as bathing, cleaning, agriculture, and transportation.  When the Spaniards conquered Tenochtitlan, the leaders ordered the waterways and structures destroyed. When Mexico City was rebuilt in its place, these structures were not restored. Flooding was a common problem. One flood submersed most of the city for five years. The Spaniards began draining the lake by channels and a tunnel connected to the Pánuco River. Yet, the flooding continued until a deep (98-820 ft.) drainage system was installed in 1967. The city fills the lake basin and most of it exists under the phreatic level. The soft, saturated clay base Mexico City is resting on is collapsing due to that extraction and the continued seismic activity that is frequent in the area. This leads to a circular problem. The extraction of ground water causes the city to sink. The sinking has created runoff problems, waste management issues, and flooding.

Pollution, waste management, and drinking water scarcity are issues the city must deal with. You can read more about this here. The lakes are no longer in proximity to the city to support its population. There are other ecological consequences involved with the extinction of the lakes. Species that were indigenous to these lakes also became extinct or are endangered. Some parts of the valley are now semi-arid while Mexico City remains subtropical. “In recent years, architects Teodoro González De León and Alberto Kalach, along with a group of Mexican urbanists, engineers and biologists, have developed the project plan for Recovering the City of Lakes. The project, if approved by the government, will contribute to the supply of water from natural sources to the Valley of Mexico, the creation of new natural spaces, a great improvement in air quality, and greater population establishment planning.” (Wikipedia)

This is not an isolated incident. The Aral Sea in Central Asia was once considered one of the four largest lakes in the world. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union diverted the two rivers that fed the sea, and it has been shrinking since. I came across this disaster after I concluded my research on Mexico City, and the parallels were not immediately apparent to me. Both areas suffered major repercussions as a result of the depleted bodies of water. The Wikipedia link above discusses the history behind the situation and the ecological/economic impact it has had on the inhabitants of the area. The article I had been reading at the time I first encountered this story featured someone’s travel journal and tons of photos of ships listing to the side or wedged flat into the bottom of some dead sea. It looked more like a desert. You can see some similar photos at Artificial Owl.  I thought of Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl during their adventures in the sand at Davy Jones’ Locker.  

I encourage you to read more about both situations and the long-term effects. These were not natural disasters. The situations were caused by humans and their political agendas. The consequences have been severe for these regions. Have you come across this in your reading? This is fodder for your imaginations. Does it spark a story idea or two?

Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Aztec empire, was founded in 1325 and was situated on an islet in the middle of Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. When the Spanish conquered the city in August of 1521 after an eight month siege, the city was destroyed. In its place, Mexico City was established. At the time, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world. Population estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000.

The links above are from Wikipedia. There are so many history resources available that recount those events and detail the culture of that time. It was hard to pick one aspect to share with you. When I was reacquainted with Tenochtitlan during a research tangent, the small pox outbreak brought by the Europeans that killed a third of the inhabitants of the valley was what kept me reading on. What has stayed with me though and kept my creative mind ticking away is the feat of civil engineering that was Tenochtitlan.

The Aztec city-states in the valley were hydraulic societies. They used bridges, causeways, dikes, sluices, canals, aqueducts, terrace farming, and chinampas (artificial, floating gardens) to sustain the population and allow for navigation about the city. The city was quartered into campans or zones with twenty calpullis or districts in each. There were main roads and canals crossing the calpullis. Bridges were made to be removed at night in defense of the city. While the idea of symmetry excites me, it is the amount of planning in advance for growth that I find jaw dropping. Each calpullis had a market. Public buildings that served spiritual and educational functions were in the center of the city. All new development had to be approved by the city planner, the calmimilocatl.

The Tenochtitlans used the aqueduct water from Chapultepec for bathing and cleaning. They used mountain spring water for drinking and cooking. Residences had private bathrooms and public ones were made available. What I found fascinating is that roughly one thousand men would float through the city collecting garbage and human waste. That waste was used along with lake bottom sediment to fertilize the crops grown on the chinampas.

The chinampas answered my biggest questions. How did Tenochtitlan manage to feed its population? How did the city expand in the middle of a lake? It turns out that the lake was not deep. Each of these gardens was built in a very shallow location. It was staked and then fenced in with waddle. The lake bed was dredged for its rich sediment, and the beds were built up with this material along with decaying vegetation. Trees were sometimes planted as anchors. Canals separated the chinampas.  These raised beds were above lake level. As the beds dried and expanded, the city’s land surface did as well. The lake on the other hand shrunk. The growing system was so efficient that the chinampas could turn three crops a year.

I searched floating gardens on the net to see what I might come up with. Several articles can be found discussing the Aztec chinampas. Believe it or not, the Hanging Gardens come up as well. I also found a cool instructional article, “Floating Gardens in Bangladesh.” The floating garden is suggested as a sustainable way to overcome land scarcity and flooding in Bangladesh.

Vincent Callebaut is an architect with an eye on the future. He has designed a whale- shaped floating garden. Its primary purpose is to filter out pollutants from the world’s rivers. He has another biomimicry design meant to imitate lily pads.  These are intended to serve as sustainable floating cities whose residents are climate change refugees that lost their homes to rising ocean levels. He has also proposed a floating vertical garden tower the looks like a pair of dragonfly wings for New York City’s Roosevelt Island. This is another example of urban farming and would also augment an island as the chinampas once did. While this urban farming skyscraper by Romses Architects does not float, it does take into account the reuse cycle apparent with the chinampas.

The how-to article and the project examples offer food for thought and possible plot bunnies. In the articles pertaining to the buildings, utopian and dystopian come up. It isn’t only about the future though. It’s terrific is that these new concepts draw from such an old technology. The answers to current problems might be arrived at after an exploration of the past. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Where would chinampas fit in your story? If you have any fictional examples to recommend, please include links or at least the title and author in comments.

When Mexico City was built on top of what was Tenochtitlan, the dams were destroyed and never reconstructed. The city dealt with constant flooding. The conquistadors began draining the lake as they settled into the city. The five lakes that were situated in the valley are now considered extinct even though a small portion of Lake Texcoco still exists in Mexico City. When I return later this month, it will be to discuss the long term effects of this development and how the concepts might be useful in fiction.

One of my favorite recent movies was Disney’s “Up.” One of the characters in the movie is a dog. It speaks through a collar that translates its thoughts. I grew up around pets. My parents always had at least one dog and some other kind of animal. We spent a good amount of time traveling in Maine during April one year. It got cold enough that the goldfish tank had a layer of ice on the top. The four goldfish inside were fine and actually lived rather long in comparison with some others I’d had over the years. I have a suspicion I know what was on their minds without the benefit of that translator.

With that much exposure to pets, you get accustomed to their mannerisms. You learn to speak their language. It isn’t always about barking, chirping, or meowing. A simple nudge can tell you they want your attention. My parents’ Rhodesian ridgeback, Biddy, a dog the size of a small horse, would knock her nose into the Christmas bell hung on the inside of the front door to signal her desire to venture outside. She loved to sun herself. A stroll over to where their food ought to appear in the next five minutes lets you know they are hungry. I am wondering if Pavlov was equally trained by the dog. In fact, when I think about pets in science that is my first thought which is closely followed by cloning.

Biddy passed away Tuesday from seizure complications. The timing of this article is uncanny, and I find it is hard to write it in all honestly. Both of my moms struggled with a call many owners/guardians face when it comes to pets in poor health. As Biddy’s seizure events came with more frequency all of the options offered by her vet were explored. Homeopathic treatments were also employed. In the end, the seizers were a bigger enemy than we could stare down.

Some of the medications even robbed Biddy of her body language that often told us what she wanted or needed and blunted her personality. I don’t live with my parents. I do see them almost every day. I think the changes were more obvious just because of those little breaks. She was never much of a barker. She couldn’t communicate how she was feeling and would often whine and pace. While her emotions and needs became less obvious, we were much more aware of the impending seizures. While I never witnessed one of her seizures, both my parents and my son had. I’d even caught some of the signs while visiting and my mom and I matched them up to the seizure event that happened that evening. Soon we could tell how the onset expressed itself in her system. I wondered if this was how assistance animals knew seizures were about to occur in the humans they aided. I found myself often wishing for that collar in “Up.”

Dealing with the loss of a pet is difficult. For many of us, they are members of our family. Biddy was part of mine. We weren’t prepared to let go, so I do understand the desire to keep them with you as long as you can. If you can’t have them, could a clone be the next best thing? In science fiction, I’ve often seen cloning depicted with grown specimens emerging and some data storage mechanism implanted in their brain. Both of those circumvent the influence of environment and experience. The clone is not subjected to new experiences and environments during development. It comes with its original’s bank of memories and experiences already downloaded.

The reality of clones so far is that they have to be born just like the original. This allows for those clones to have their own experiences in unique environments. This likely makes them different than the original. I wonder in the case of the first household pet clone, Mira, born in 2007, if the fact that she has been raised by the same people that raised Missy, the dog whose DNA she is derived from, is a factor in that she is physically and behaviorally similar.

The company that was formed by the scientists that cloned Missy and produced Mira is no longer in operations. While Mira was a success story, there were complications with the business as well as physical anomalies in some of the clones. After closing, the company is on record in many sources speaking to the experimental nature of cloning as well as denouncing the current cloning black market.

I only mentioned two pet science topics and a couple of fictional references. Fill me in. Toss some ideas out here. Always, correct me if I am wrong. And please, just this time, allow me to dedicate this to my good friend, Biddy.