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• White House Wordsmith
• Impressive Stats
• Spam on the Menu
• A Mammoth Comeback
• Keeping the Talk Alive
Thoreau the Climatologist
Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery, and lived alone for two years in a hut in the woods near Concord, Mass., an experience he described in Walden. Now it turns out that he was also a climate researcher. When Thoreau died in 1862, the Industrial Revolution was just starting to produce the greenhouse gases that most scientists say are a leading cause of global warming. But meticulous records kept by Thoreau (in very messy handwriting) are now helping scientists to determine the effects of climate change on certain plants. From 1851 to 1858, Thoreau tracked some 500 plant species, noting when they flowered. Scientists at Boston University and Harvard say that on average, these plants now flower seven days earlier than in the 1850s. Of the species that were documented by Thoreau, 27 percent have vanished from Concord.
White House Wordsmith
As one of his many staff announcements before Inauguration Day, Barack Obama appointed 27-year-old Jon Favreau as his director of speechwriting. Favreau (not the actor, and no relation to him) has had a hand in practically every speech that Obama has delivered over the last four years, following him from the Senate to the presidential campaign trail. Favreau, a 2003 graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., began his writing career for Senator John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. While legend has it that Obama writes his own speeches in longhand on a legal pad, a better historical account will show that he offers input and Favreau crafts them. Favreau has said that being Obama's speechwriter is like being the batting coach for a home-run king. He says that when he sits down to write, he just channels Obama—his ideas, his sentences, his phrases. Before Favreau wrote Obama's Iowa victory speech last January, he and the Senator discussed it for about 30 minutes and settled on a theme of unity and an opening line: "They said this day would
never come."
Impressive Stats
It's not exactly a page-turner, but the 2009 Statistical Abstract of the United States, published by the Census Bureau, paints a fascinating portrait-by-numbers of the nation. Among the info-bites in its almost 1,400 tables: West Virginia is the only state in which more people have died since 2000 than have been born; more Burmese were granted asylum in the United States between 2005 and 2007 than people from any other country; more Americans are injured by beds than bicycles; and per capita consumption of tea has now surpassed that of fruit juice. But wait, there's more: Enrollment of college students in the U.S. from Saudi Arabia and Iran has returned to the levels before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; and women make up the majority of pharmacists and bus drivers and nearly half the medical students granted degrees.
Spam on the Menu
With the economy in recession, many businesses are hurting. But at the Hormel Foods plant in Austin, Minnesota, which makes Spam, times have never been better. One of the most iconic hard-times foods in the American pantry, Spam was invented during the Great Depression. Since then, people have turned to the spiced-ham product as a way to save money while still putting something resembling meat on the table. Sales are so strong that Hormel now has two shifts of workers cranking out Spam seven days a week. A 12-ounce can that doesn't require refrigeration and can last for years costs about $2.40. Other grocery items selling well these days are pancake mixes, instant potatoes, macaroni and cheese, Jell-O, and Kool-Aid.
A Mammoth Comeback
Though the stuffed specimens in natural history museums aren't likely to burst into life again, they may contain ancient DNA that can be decoded by the latest DNA-sequencing machines. Some scientists are saying that a living mammoth—an Ice Age relative of the elephant first hunted by humans in Siberia 22,000 years ago—could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could theoretically be applied to any other extinct species, including Neanderthals, from which one can obtain hair, horn, fur, or feathers, and which became extinct within the last 60,000 years, which is the age limit for DNA. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have recovered a portion of the mammoth genome from a clump of hair, and they're looking at ways to modify the DNA in an elephant's egg to resemble mammoth DNA. The modified egg would be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths—extinct for 10,000 years—could again roam the Siberian steppes. Many scientists are skeptical, however. Rudolph Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., says the idea is "a wishful-thinking experiment with no realistic chance for success."
