A Journey to the Island of Tree Kangaroos

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

The Island of Secrets, by Matthew Power. Published by the Atavist. $1.99 – $2.99. iPad and iPhone version available through the Atavist app. Kindle, Nook. More information available from The Atavist.

Guest reviewed by Oliver Hulland

Matthew Power is the kind of writer everyone dreams of becoming. In the vein of John McPhee and Paul Theroux, Power writes about exotic far-away places, not from second-hand accounts but instead from personal experience. The cuts, bruises, insect bites, and close encounters he records are just as likely to be his own as the adventurers he profiles.

The Island of Secrets is Power's most recent attempt to understand the indomitable urge to explore. We find ourselves thrust into the world of John Lane, a California scientist who looks for fossils in caves and who had accidentally discovered a new species of tree kangaroo on the side of the road while on an expedition in New Britain, an island off the coast of New Guinea. Upon learning of its novelty he later returned for the specimen only to find that it had, to his dismay, been eaten. And so Lane, with Power in tow, mounted another expedition to rediscover the kangaroo he believes holds the key to preserving what's left of the island's vanishing forests.

The Island of Secrets reads like a twenty-first-century explorer's diary, rich with multimedia content documenting an expedition deep into New Britain's jungles. Inline links pop open locations on maps, historical factoids, or images from Power's trip. The intimate photos provide a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the haphazard expedition, including shots of an impromptu shoddily-made raft, the science team's dilapidated jungle base camp, and the odd detail like a local's "Calvin Klain" underwear.

While the quality of the photographs are nothing like those found in glossy magazines, they serve as evidence of the journalistic process, and of the realities of Power's research in New Britain. Even better than the photographs, though, are the small video clips that are peppered throughout the text. One clip records a slapdash attempt to sew shut a careless machete wound, while another shows the slow, laborious process of hacking through the dense Tanglefoot fern underbrush. These short clips are the antithesis of slick BBC nature documentaries, and as a result they succeed in providing gritty, blurry proof of the day-to-day struggle of science in far-away places.

Along with the text, The Atavist app also includes a superbly produced audiobook version, ready by Power himself. You can also listen to snippets of sounds from the jungle including the whirring of cicadas or samples of the local language, Tok Pisin. Some may find these audio-visual elements distracting or unnecessary (notably the looped chirping crickets that function as a soundtrack), more often than not they work in concert to create one of the richest media experiences available on an iPad or iPhone.

None of this would work, however, if it weren't for Power's talent in telling the story of John Lane's obsession with finding the tree kangaroo. By building off the foundation of a good story, The Atavist’s adaptation of The Island of Secrets creates a hybrid of narrative nonfiction that succeeds in bringing the journalistic and scientific process to life.

Oliver Hulland is the editor of Cool Tools, a site dedicated to finding tools that really work. When not reviewing tools, he can be found foraging for mushrooms, exploring caves, and applying to medical school.

Meandering Mississippi: An early journalism iBook is all wet

Posted on May 11, 2012 by admin

Meandering Mississippi, by Mary Delach Leonard & Robert Koenig. Published by The St. Louis Beacon. iPad (requires iBooks 2). $.99 iTunes

Reviewed by Seth Mnookin

A little after 10 pm on May 2, 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers detonated explosives along a two-mile stretch of the Bird's Point levee, just below the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The goal was to save the city of Cairo, Illinois, which was facing such severe flooding that all but 100 of Cairo's 2,831 residents had already been evacuated. It was a dramatic event; pictures of the explosions, like the one below, have a vaguely apocalyptic feel.

Since the initial explosions took place at night, reporters sequestered a half-mile away weren't able to see how fast the water from the swollen river was flowing. In all, officials estimated up to three trillion gallons of water — that's 3,000,000,000,000 gallons — poured onto the Bird's Point-New Madrid floodway, comprised of approximately 130,000 acres of farmland and 90 homes.

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A Time Machine for the Face of Earth

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Fragile Earth. Published by HarperCollins. iTunes, $3.95.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Infinity can be cruel. Tablet computers have become so powerful that it's practically impossible to reach the limits of what you can do while creating an ebook. You can embed videos, sprinkle music and voices here and there, let people post a book-inspired thought to Twitter, manipulate a simulated bat, incorporate an encyclopedia of information about chemistry, and on and on. Unfortunately, this virtual infinity of possibilities may leave ebook creators with a virtual infinity of work. Some science ebooks we've reviewed rise to that challenge. They sport a well-integrated collection of features. Other ebooks seem like wild acts of desperation. And others still are acts of wise self-restraint. Yes, you could make a science ebook that does many things poorly. Or you could make a science ebook that does one thing well. One such ebook is Fragile Earth.

Fragile Earth got its start in 2006 as a beautifully disturbing coffee table book published by Collins, filled with satellite images showing how humanity is reworking the planet. "Before" and "after" photographed were paired to show how deforestation, climate change, and other factors have changed the face of Earth. Now Collins has turned it into an app. The Youtube video below gives you a good run-through of its features. The most important one is that instead of putting images side by side, the app does what a book cannot: it lays them on top of each other. You can then use a screen button to slide one picture away to reveal the other one underneath. I'm not quite sure of the visual neuroscience behind this effect, but it works very well. Seeing the same landscape in Alaska covered by glaciers a few decades ago now turned to mostly bare Earth is a sobering experience.

Fragile Earth is not perfect, though. The book and the app alike are presented as a way to see how we're changing the planet. But the app is loaded with other images that show natural changes, such as the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Combining these images together makes no thematic sense; the only thing that joins them together is an elegant slider. There's no introduction where you might find an explanation for what a volcano and the deforested Amazon have in common. Instead, Fragile Earth has short caption that describe the specifics of each set of images but leave you wanting more.

That's too bad, because Fragile Earth illustrates on a profoundly important fact about our species. In 2005, Bruce Wilkinson, a University of Michigan geologist, published a paper called, "Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective." [free pdf] "Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet," Wilkinson concluded. We're also having other huge effects on the planet–acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, for example. Humanity isn't just leaving a mark on the Earth you can see from space. It's a mark that will be preserved in the fossil record for millions of years to come.

Before and after pictures can go a long way to showing the magnitude of that change. But without context, they can also oversimplify it. If you were to select a before and after pair of pictures of glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, you would not see a frightening retreat over the past decade. In fact, you might not see any change at all. Such specific cases are ripe for cherry-picking by global warming denialists. The reason that this one case does not refute global warming because of the overwhelming evidence of changes caused by global warming on a planetary scale–such as the overall loss of ice from the entire Arctic Ocean.

Fragile Earth would thus be a better app if its pictures had more context and a more coherent point. But I'm also glad that its creators didn't try to grasp for infinity.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Blowing Windmills and Seeing the Future: Al Gore’s Our Choice

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Our Choice by Al Gore. iPhone or iPad

Reviewed by Dan Fagin (guest reviewer)

If you’ve heard Al Gore give a speech, watched An Inconvenient Truth or read anything the former vice president has written, you probably know that two of his obsessions are the innovative use of information technology and the visual image of a spinning Earth, as seen from space. So it’s no surprise that both are central to his first true e-book: Our Choice. Created for the iPad and released in the spring of 2011, it’s anything but a cut-and-paste digital version of the 2009 print volume, as Gore’s previous digital efforts have been. This time, the text has been tricked out with all sorts of digital-only features. There are dozens of unfolding photographs, tightly edited videos and startlingly clever interactive graphics. There’s even a page where you can blow into your iPad’s microphone to spin the blades of an on-screen windmill. Really.

The introductory image sets the tone. It is, predictably, a striking view of our planet, spinning serenely, seen from space. Touch it, Gore’s voice instructs, and when I comply the Earth spins quickly in the opposite direction for a few seconds before stopping and resuming its normal rotation. But now the surface has changed. Huge typhoons loom menacingly near Japan, India and Mexico, and a whopper hurricane is bearing down on Florida. Most of Africa (not just the Sahara) is parched brown; so are Italy, Spain and portions of the American Midwest. The familiar solid white of the Greenland ice sheet now includes patches of exposed land. (You can get a rough idea of how it looks, without the movement, by running your mouse over the planet here.)

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The Frozen Future of Nonfiction

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Why The Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization. By David Eagleman, Canongate Books, 2010. (For iPad)

Reviewed by Seth Mnookin

Unless you landed at Download the Universe with the mistaken impression that it’s a new torrent aggregator, chances are you’re already familiar with David Eagleman, the 40-year-old Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist/author/futurist. Perhaps you’re one of the millions of people around the world who was dazzled by Sum, Eagleman’s breathtaking, oftentimes brilliant, collection of short stories about the afterlife—or perhaps it was Incognito, Eagleman’s exploration of the unconscious, that caught your eye. (It’s not everyday, after all, that a pop-sci book pulls off the tricky balancing act of simultaneously appealing to the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi.)

Or maybe you haven’t read any of his books. Maybe you heard him on Radiolab, offering his interpretation for why time seems to slow down during moments of heightened awareness or explaining how walking can be understood as the transformation of falling into forward motion. Maybe you first encountered Eagleman in a recent profile, like the NOVA special that aired last February or the 9,000-word New Yorker piece that ran last April or the Houston Magazine spread in which Eagleman, decked out head-to-toe in Versace, was featured as one of 2011’s “Men of Style.”

If your enthusiasms tend more toward the musical realm, perhaps Eagleman first appeared on your radar when he and Brian Eno performed together st the Sydney Opera House; or, if you’re more a Black Flag than Talking Heads and U2 type of person, maybe it was the time he interviewed Henry Rollins about dreams at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

Or maybe you’re like me, and you can no longer remember when you first became aware of Eagleman and his work–you just know you’re curious about whatever it is he decides to tackle next because it will inevitably be interesting and erudite and thought-provoking and, in all likelihood, fun.

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