Lyceum
Volume I Fall 2018 1
Lyceum A literary science journal Created by Sarah McPeek, Miriam Hyman, Graham Ball, and Anu Muppirala
Edited by Katherine Crawford Jonah Dominguez Lauren Felleson Miriam Hyman India Kotis Sarah McPeek
Featuring Graham Ball Rand Burnette Katherine Crawford Jonah Dominguez Miriam Hyman India Kotis Anu Mupirrala Franny Wiggins 3
Introducing Lyceum Welcome to Lyceum! Lyceum was dreamed up by a group of students who work at the nexus of the natural sciences and the arts. Together, we wanted to create a space where we could share our writing, artwork, and scientific fascinations with the Kenyon community. Kenyon students are diversely passionate, and we sought a space where those passions could be combined, explored, and shared. We hope that Lyceum can be this community of curious, creative scientists, writers, and artists. A lyceum is an ancient Greek invention meaning a place of public discourse. Aristotle led the largest Lyceum of his day, bringing together scientists and philosophers to lecture on their work for each other, and for any members of the interested public.
The Lyceum movement was reinvigorated by the Scientific Enlightenment in Europe and the United States, and it remained a prominent feature of American intellectual life (particularly in the Northeast) through the end of the 1800s. The American version of the Lyceum was essentially a public forum where people like Asa Gray, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson could share their ideas about science and the natural world with anyone who cared to listen, and they were often a place of lively discussion and debate, and a place that inspired incredibly creativity. Hence, our mission as an organization is to provide an opportunity for all students to share their fascinations and questions about the natural world and to discuss and explore each other’s passions. We are committed to communicating science with integrity and creativity. Our work will be published in a print publication and available online at our website: kenyonlyceum.wordpress.com We invite you to join us! If you dwell in a realm between science and art, we are seeking student contributions of fiction and non-fiction prose, poetry, artwork, comics, and photography. Please send us your work to us at our email account: lyceum@kenyon.edu for publication online and in print. Together, we can create a united community of scientists and artists who share each other’s passions, learn from each other, and contribute to a more scientifically creative community.
Sincerely, The Lyceum Team
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Table of Contents Cover by Rand Burnette………………………………………………………………………1 Morbid Christmas by Sarah McPeek with photography by E. Dalton Powell……………………….6 Specimen by Katherine Crawford……………………………………………………….............10 Ode to my Immune System by Miriam Hyman………………………………………….…....11 Immunoglobulin by Anu Muppirala………………………………………………………….11 Consilience of Music and Astronomy by Graham Ball……………………………...………..12 Fungi by Franny Wiggins…………………………………………………………….……......14 Parasite’s Dilemma by Miriam Hyman………………………………………………………..15 The Science and Subject of Mary Anning by India Kotis…………………………………….16 Mysterious Sensarions by Anu Muppirala…………………………………………….……..19 Stunned by Sarah McPeek with photography by Sarah McPeek and Jonah Dominguez………….…...20 Activation Energy by Miriam Hyman………………………………………………………..23 Athenas by Anu Muppirala ………………………………………………………………....24 Comics by Rand Burnette………………………………………………..…………………..28
Lyceum Caption Contest by Rand Burnette………………………………………..…..…….29 Back Cover by Franny Wiggins……………………………………………………………30
Morbid Christmas Sarah McPeek *Content may be disturbing for some readers “Found on the shoulder of junctions 35 and 48 in Seneca county, Ohio, May of 2015.” I copy this information onto a fresh sheet of paper along with the date of preparation: December 2017, and the scientific name, Falco sparverius. It’s a breathtaking American kestrel. Every feather is intact. Aside from the odd angle of the head, you could never tell it was hit by a car. “It’s like morbid Christmas!” I exclaimed back in October as Dr. Wright and I unpacked the kestrel from a giant Igloo cooler filled with specimen donations. At first, you’re thrilled by the beautiful bird in the bag, but you immediately feel guilty for rejoicing. Most of these birds were window strike victims or roadkill. Some had been frozen in storerooms at the back of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for nearly a decade. I rummaged for a place to fit the kestrel among the pile of Ziploc bags accumulating in the freezer; hawks balanced on mallards shelved next to cardinals, rock doves and warblers. It felt slightly inappropriate, stacking birds like firewood. Now in December, I gently place the kestrel on the lab table in front of me. Its feathers are wonderfully soft. This is my first time dissecting an animal that wasn’t a fat green caterpillar, and I’m eager but nervous. We don’t wear gloves. It’s difficult to manipulate our fingers and we’d risk pulling feathers that stick to the latex. Besides, Dr. Wright assures me, tucking her purple hair into a tight ponytail, there aren’t many diseases that we know of that we could catch from these specimens. She’s prepared over 1,200 birds to date, some by headlamp crouched in a tent in the Trinidadian jungle, so I trust her judgement. Handling the birds with gloves also feels too impersonal. It’s a point of respect for the animal to work skin on skin. First, I weigh the bird on a digital scale and measure wing cord, tail length and bill length. I comb through the feathers for any damages or signs of molt. These are the same data I would take from a live animal, but it’s much easier when the subject isn’t wriggling in your palm and trying to bite your fingers or steal your pencil with its feet. I imagine those sharp, curved talons digging into the flesh of my arm. When you’re staring at a tray of surgical instruments, your thoughts tend toward the macabre. Licking my fingers to make the feathers stick, I brush the bird’s thick breast fluff to the sides. Once I’ve exposed the pink belly from neck to hip, I make an incision at the base of the rib cage. Dark red muscle bulges through the widening gap in the chest. We use yellow corn starch to coat the exposed muscle and dry out any fat or blood that could sully the feathers. I massage some into the bird’s chest. Dr. Wright tells me to be liberal with my application; we recycle the dust by sifting away any bits of tissue. Her graduate lab used the same barrel of corn starch for years. The first step to separating skin from body is severing the neck. With larger animals this would require a bone saw, but with birds and their hollow bones, scissors will suffice. I hear a crunch as I guide the blades through muscle, trachea and vertebrae. The head lolls backwards. From here I can slide my thumbs under the slippery skin. My progress is laboriously slow as I work the skin off the shoulders and down the back. It’s like peeling away feathered cling wrap. I’m terrified of sticking my metal probe through the skin or pulling out a handful of feathers. Dr. Wright tells me about a time back in grad school when she tugged too hard on a male mallard’s neck and came away with a shiny green head in one hand and a limp duck body in the other. 6
photography by E. Dalton Powell Sarah McPeek
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Her advisor’s only advice: ‘sew it back on.’ The moral here is not to worry too much about being gentle. “A lot of taxidermy is covering up mistakes.” She shows me where to cut the wings and legs to keep part of the bone in the skin while removing the rest of the body. I use forceps to strip every last ribbon of muscle away from the bone. The idea is to remove anything that could rot. Once I’ve completely extracted the body, I lay the bird’s skin on its back. The wings and feet splay out and the head falls to the side. Okay, now it really looks dead.
E. Dalton Powell
The naked body on the tray reminds me of a skinny dwarf chicken, though this bird doesn’t have a bit of fat, and it doesn’t have that meaty odor like chicken breasts. A friend once asked me if birds smell. I thought she wanted to know whether birds have a sense of smell, but she was really asking if birds give off a scent. I couldn’t answer her about living ones then, and after experiencing dead ones up close, I’d say no. Aside from a faint odor of stale blood, it doesn’t smell like anything at all. I cut out the right breast muscle to weigh the pectoralis major and the smaller supracoracoidius that attaches the pectoralis to the shoulder. Our lab studies flight evolution, so we always gather data on the size of the flight muscle, data we can only measure when the animals are dead. Much of Dr. Wright’s work involves comparing anatomical measurements of specimens with different aspects of the bird’s life history, what we know about how it lives. What do these birds eat? What eats them? Where do they live? How high and far do they fly? By studying both living and dead birds across many different species, we can examine how a bird’s flight anatomy influences its life history, and how that anatomy has adapted through time to help birds excel in their particular environments. This bird was a strong flier. 8
Slicing open the bulging yellow stomach reveals the bird’s last supper: an impressive tangle of insect carcasses. At least it didn’t die on an empty stomach. I dig out the tiny purple heart and weigh it. Probing further down behind the intestines, my fingers brush two pink pearl ovaries, tiny and round but firm to the touch. I don’t know why, but it’s usually my convention to refer to animals as male until proven otherwise. Birds like falcons have few external differences to mark their sex, so the only way to tell is through surgery. At the base of the tail I find the bursa of Fabricius, which disintegrates once the bird reaches sexual maturity. She wasn’t even a year old when she died. I’m struck with my first real twinge of sadness and I have to stop my inspection a moment. We are, were, in the same phase of life, two girls on the precipice of adulthood. She, a fierce predator swooping over golden farm fields under the wide midwestern sky; me, a budding scientist working in her first research lab. It’s pure serendipity that she is my first specimen, though it feels almost like fate. But that isn’t a very scientific way of thinking. I dump the remains of her body into a plastic bag. Turning back to her skin, I turn the skin of her neck and head inside out so I can access her skull. I cut a window in the back and scoop out her brain lobe by lobe. It glops onto the tray, looking more like pink icing than anatomy. I strip out her tongue. Dr. Wright cautions me to be careful about puncturing the eyeballs when I pull them out: “eyeball juice stains everything black.” I maneuver my forceps into her eye socket with extreme caution, flinching with every bulge of the membrane. But I don’t poke through, plopping one eyeball then the other neatly onto the tray. They look like overripe blueberries. With all the gross anatomy accounted for, we move into taxidermy. I rinse the blood off my hands and fetch the roll of cotton. I poke two little cotton balls through the back of her skull to fill each eye socket. Another ball winds around a dowel rod to fill her skull cavity, and I stick the other end of the rod through the cloaca, where her eggs would emerge if she’d lived to lay them. I roll more cotton into a cone to fill her body. I want to make her nice and plump. I never had much patience for sewing when I was younger, but now I thread each stitch to close the gap in her belly with fastidious care. The needle slides easily through her skin membrane. As I pull the final stitch through, her feathers fall into place, masking the seam. I carry her over to the counter and pin her to a Styrofoam board to dry. I poke pins between the digits on her feet to open up her impressive talons. Lastly, I initial her information tag and tie it around one of her legs. I’m proud of my handiwork. She really looks whole again. Almost alive. Over the next couple of weeks, she’ll stiffen into what Dr. Wright calls “a nice little bird puppet.” We mount our birds on sticks so students can handle the specimens in lab without mangling their feathers. When we get through all the baggies in the freezer, we’ll have a modest sample of 75 or so birds to start our collection, hardly scratching the surface of the estimated 18,000 species currently sharing our world. My bird will represent kestrels in our humble collection for decades to come, and once we enter her data, she’ll be a messenger for her species in huge collaborative databases, participating in scientific inquiries all over the world. She’ll guide us to a better understanding of kestrels and their evolution alongside their diverse avian relatives, and how we can help protect her kin into the future. I stroke the silky feathers of her head. She’ll never know it, but she’s going to be our teacher.
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Specimen Katherine Crawford
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An Ode to My Immune System Miriam Hyman Oh knights in shining arm or leg My chest is filled with thee For I have never had to beg, Or kneel on one knee. When pestilence is pestering You’ve come to rescue me, If preemptively I’m fighting, Or peaceably asleep. In war you are intelligent And nimble with your fleet. Your fevered fire’s competence Assures a swift defeat. Come wind and snow and rainy bog I look to you with pride My knight in shining arm or leg That saves me from inside. So here I languish in my bed With Netflix on replay. I’m waiting in my castle, love Please come and save the day.
Immunoglobulin By Anu Mupirrala Walk into Dr. Arianna Smith’s Immunology class and you’ll find students working together on a MAJOR arts and crafts project. An ode to our immune system is really an ode to our antibodies- each antibody is incredibly complex and has multiple pieces called immunoglobulin domains that come together to form a functional protein to fight off infection. This antibody was the final result when Dr. Smith’s class put all the immunoglobulin domains together.
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Consilience of Music and Astronomy An Interview with Dr. Gabriel Lubell I also do actual music research. One of my main research interests is how albums are structured and put together. I’ve done graduate work on galaxy morphology kinematics and evolution. Basically all kinds of galaxies, their shapes and how they work. Albums are a whole lot like galaxies in that there are consistent truths about their shapes. You have a bound system of disparate and individual parts that are yet related in some way. How the songs are related informs the individuality of an album in the same way that the stellar distributions, the ratio of baryons to dark matter, and the spiral structure make the galaxy an individual. Dr. Gabriel Lubell is a visiting professor of music with a master’s degree in astronomy and a doctorate in music composition. When he’s not composing music inspired by scientific phenomenon or publishing papers on stellar populations of globular structures, he’s combining his passions for music and science through interdisciplinary courses at a variety of institutions.
How do you make a cloud into music? Dr. Lubell composed a piece called Cloud Physics. I read this book cloud physics which conveys the physical processes which are important to clouds’ existence. It was, in an artsy, creative kind of way, a relatively straightforward process to think about these phenomena and think how can I convey these physical movements into musical ones.
How has your background in astronomy helped you as a musician?
There are other times where I get more symbolic about it. For example, I wrote a movement in a string quartet about the solar atmosphere where I took the spectral lines data of abundant elements there and converted it to pitches and rhythms. A very literal transfer of data into musical form. Then there are in betweens where I’ll use intuition along with symbolic representation.
It’s most helpful in my composition and my research. I don’t have any expectation that anyone should care about my thoughts and feelings, but I have this compulsion to create music, and music is expressive. It’s at this point that things get sciencey. I choose a concept that people will actually be interested in and that I’m interested in, too. So I come up with some kind of problem or question that I think music can solve and then compose music that will actually do that on some abstract level.
These decisions are based on what I think will best serve the original concept while also creating good music. With solar spectrum, I couldn't do it poetically because I’ve studied that, and I understand the realities of the subject on a deep level. I had to honor that and not go too abstract. It was one of the hardest pieces I've had to write. The cloud piece, I was just thinking about clouds.
As a performer, it’s helpful because I actually know how sound works. I know how sounds go together. To understand what is physically happening has practical value.
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When you’re writing a piece, what is your goal for people to take out of the piece? I would say that I have two goals for every piece of music. One is that I want people to have a good time while listening to it. The other is that I want people to leave the experience with their imagination or curiosity sparked. When did you start combining your interests in science and music? That’s a good question. It’s been a relatively recent phenomenon. I’ve been interested in both since elementary school, but always for different reasons and in different ways. In college, I pursued physics, astronomy, and music majors simultaneously. I was doing all these things but not explicitly combining them. In grad school, I had to make a choice, because you can’t double major in grad school and stay sane. I did Astronomy full time and then I started doing music full time. When I went to get a music degree, I went with the understanding that I’m going to composition school to be a composer. So I separated it in my head because I wanted to become a good composer first. I didn’t write any science music for a while. But later into my education I felt ready for it and decided that my skills were at a point where I could do justice to the science.
Do you think that your interest in astronomy or music is greater? Has one had a bigger hold over your life than the other? No. I work professionally as a musician. It’s how most people think of me, and it’s how I seem to present, but I’m always very clear about this. I’m a scientist. I cannot undo that. You don’t go through doctoral coursework in astrophysics and come out unchanged. This has manifested in the way I look at the world, the way I go about problem solving, even the way I talk. I can’t help throwing around words like morphology. I can’t help myself. My publisher that I publish my music under is actually called ‘Peculiar Morphology Publications.’ On a very fundamental level, I identify as a scientist, as an astronomer specifically. I would never want to abandon that. It's always been there.
I’ve been lucky to teach a lot of astronomy and I’ve taught classes on music and astronomy. It’s still an active part of my professional life even if it has been deprioritized on paper. It’s a hard road to walk, this is my fourth temporary job, I’ve yet to find a place that is okay with me doing this forever. The world seems to like people to fit easily in one category. What advice do you have for someone who is interested in pursuing that kind of professional dualism? Stay strong. Keep up the fight. You have to make your own opportunities. It’s hard but it's a matter of persevering and being honest with yourself about what you actually want to do. Don’t let the man hold you down. I don’t know where I’m going to live forever; I have to move states every year. But if that's what I have to do to do this kind of work, then that’s what I’ll do. What projects are you most excited about? I’ve been working on a water infrastructure composition project and I want to do another album of chamber music soon. I’ve been commissioned to write a piece for Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute, which will be performed at Kenyon in February. Aside from that, I want to start writing a book about album structure, or a music and science book. I have to think about which project would be most useful to my career goals.
Next semester, Dr. Lubell is teaching Music Theory 2, Intro Computer Music, and Composition Seminar. You can listen to Dr. Lubells compositions on Spotify, Soundcloud, and Youtube.
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Pine Grove
Franny Wiggins
River Trail
Franny Wiggins
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Trametes ochracea
The Parasite’s Dilemma Miriam Hyman Oh happy day! I’ve found a host To house me for the night, And she’s endowed so bountifully I might just stay for life. For I’m so small and she’s so greatShe will not sense a thing If I just take a little bit For me and all my kin. And maybe just a little moreWe’re growing up so fast Because she gives us all we need Without our giving back. Though yesterday her fever spiked… I’ll find her some Advil. With seven billion lives to feed, How dare our host fall ill?
Franny Wiggins 15
The Science and Subject of Mary Anning India Kotis In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl and her brother were digging for fossils off the coast of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. Fossils were the family business. The tourism industry had recently exploded in Dorset, as eager vacationers fled from the French revolution and towards the British seaside. The girl’s name was Mary Anning, her brother’s name was Joseph, and in just a few moments they would discover the skull of an Ichthyosaur. Ichthyosaurs, those mammoth prehistoric marine reptiles, had been found in fragments in the years leading up to the Annings’ discovery. However, the skull unearthed by Mary and her younger brother was the first specimen to take the English scientific community by storm. In the months that followed, Mary succeeded through painstaking technique in excavating the full specimen, which was eventually procured by the British naturalist William Bullock. Bullock took the skull back to the London Museum of Natural History, where it was promptly examined and Portrait of Mary Anning described over the course of six academic Anonymous- circa 1842 papers by Sir Everard Home. Home presented his research to the academy and flocks of Londoners came to visit the fossilized beast. But nobody knew about the little girl or her brother who had discovered the skull together in 1811. Mary Anning was born on May 21, 1799 in Lyme Regis to a congregationalist family, at that time a religious minority. She was a fossil collector, dealer, and self-trained paleontologist. Her father, Richard, was a cabinet maker and a miner. Her mother, Molly, had 10 children but only Mary and Joseph survived to adulthood. There was never much money around. To bring in extra income, the family scavenged for fossils along the English coast. They sold these fossils to unassuming tourists as souvenirs- ammonites became “snake-stones”, and belemnite shells were sold as “devils’ fingers”. Through their business, the Anning family, but especially Mary, cultivated a respect for and fluency in the ancient ecologies of the English seaside. Paleontology is the study of fossils. Fossils are the remains of any biological organism that has been petrified into rock. These fossils help paleontologists reconstruct the ancient past. Paleontologists study everything from pollen to megafauna, but most are drawn to vertebrate paleontology. Usually, dinosaurs get all the vertebrate paleo-limelight, but many other organisms populated the ancient past, including pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Mary Anning made substantial discoveries in them all. 16
Dimorphodon macronyx- Pterosaur from Anning, 1828 Illustrated by Treacher Wittiaker, 1830 Anning’s career spanned a unique era, both in paleontology and museology. At the time she began working, most English people subscribed to creationism. However, archaeological and paleontological discoveries challenged the idea that God created the world in seven days. Vigorous debates raged within the scientific community- perhaps God created and destroyed the world multiple times? Perhaps these animals are relics of a previous creation?- Anning’s work contributed to this debate. Charles Lyell himself, the scientist who first proposed that the earth was older than the biblically supported 6,000 years, once wrote to Anning for geological insight. Museums were also gaining prominence at this time. Developing from the German tradition of “Wunderkammer”, or “cabinet of curiosities”, wealthy individuals would stock a room in their homes with natural knickknacks and cultural “curios” to entertain dinner guests. These precursors to public museums served both as a declaration of socioeconomic status and a repository for research. Many researchers came to Anning for specimens. Among her customers and colleagues were Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgewick, two of the leading geologists of their day. Murchison described Anning in a letter as “celebrated”. In 1824 Lady Harriet Sylvester, noblewoman and fossil admirer, wrote of Anning:
The extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved... It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.
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It is important to note that while these people did pay Anning, they were paying her for fossils, not research. It was well-known that she was an expert in the field, someone researchers often came to for advice. Despite this, she was prohibited from attending meetings at the Geological Society of London on account of her gender, and never published an academic article. Still, the infuriating status quo did nothing to stop Anning from diving deep into paleontology. Though she had a limited education, she devoured the scientific literature. She would often hand-copy academic articles that she borrowed, annotating as she went. Anning dissected modern fish to get a better idea of their forebearers' anatomy. She wrote eloquent letters to the editor at the Magazine of Natural History. And she was in no way ignorant to her exclusion from the geological community. Annie Pinning, her friend and field assistant, wrote that Anning “[Said the world had used her for ill]...these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal of publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.” Clearly, Anning considered herself a scientist. It is irrefutable that her work contributed to our understanding of the mesozoic era. These contributions included, among others, the discovery of that first complete Ichthyosaur, as well as plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and countless other fossils. Although they wouldn’t allow her into their meetings, the Geological Society of London raised money for her treatment when Anning was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1846. When she died in 1847, the geological community felt her loss. The contributions that Mary Anning made to the paleontological field, and to science more generally, both made women’s history and challenged our understanding of natural history. Her work irrevocably changed western paleontology, and she deserves our recognition.
Duria Antiquior- ‘A More Ancient Dorset’ Geologist and friend of Anning, Henry De La Beche, 1830 18
Mysterious Sensations A Poem for Ben Barres, Neuroscientist and Transgender Advocate 1954-2017 Anu Muppirala
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Stunned Sarah McPeek
We huddle together on the ground, the handsome male chestnut-sided warbler and I. I’ve never seen one so close before, and I feel guilty for my giddy excitement. Against the green grass, his white underbelly and black wings shine with slashes of vibrant yellow and deep chestnut brown. I’d been admiring him and his partner from our porch earlier today as they flitted among the flower bushes lining our backyard. How different he looks now, inches away from my nose, and paralyzed by shock. I didn’t see him hit our window. My mother found him under the sill and we carried him down onto the grass. Now he sits dazed, eyes shut, quivering faintly, and I lie beside him on my stomach, eyes wide, anxiously waiting for him to breathe.
Sarah McPeek Chestnut-sided warbler Setophaga pensylvanica His bumpy eyelids remain closed and still, and I begin to fear the worst. Against my better judgement to leave injured animals be, I stroke my finger between the ridges of his half-folded wings. He barely flinches, too stunned even to shy away. I want to cry: Please, I’m not your enemy! I’m trying to save you, but staring at the disheveled bundle before me, I realize that it is my fault, because it was our window. The back of our house is cut apart by wide panes of glass to filter in natural sunlight. Through the gaping windows I can enjoy the trees, the lawn, and the hill sloping down to the sparkling lake, all without leaving the cool comfort of our kitchen table. Windows give us the illusion of being closer to nature, but nature is under an illusion as well, and a dangerous one. Just as I glimpse my own mirrored face overlaying the landscape when I gaze through the glass, all a bird sees are the green of the trees, the blue of the sky, the beauty of open space, and the reflection of another bird.
Sarah McPeek Eastern bluebird Sialia sialis
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I’ve slammed my head into glass doors and screened windows more times than I can count, but for me the only damages are red-faced embarrassment and a sore lump on my forehead. For a bird, the impact can be fatal. An estimated one hundred million birds die every year from smacking into windows, some instantly from blows to the brain, others languishing for days with severe internal injuries. Cupping the warbler in my hands, I can feel his hollow skeleton, so fragile that I could snap him like a twig. Bird bones are delicate and hollow, built more for air than Earth. With their keen vision and balance, they swoop through dense forests and prickly meadows, easily avoiding obstacles in their path. But even a bird is no match for the deception of a transparent wall. Sarah McPeek
Eastern bluebird Sialia sialis
At last, he opens his eyes and begins to pant, like a dog on a hot day, or a person gasping for breath after a scare. It’s at once heartbreaking and endearing to see the trauma in his little face, and I giggle at his lolling pink tongue. Once his heaving settles, he swivels his head and stares directly at me. I return his stare, nose and bill mere inches apart. AsI gaze into his glimmering black eyes, I try to imagine the world as she sees it; While humans have three types of optic cone cells to detect light, birds have a fourth that captures the ultraviolet spectrum. Where we see a dull sheen in their feathers, birds may see a rainbow of indescribable beauty and light.
Everything around us blurs into flashes of movement and color- and peril. The dark crow looming in the branch over our heads, waiting for him to keel over. Every tree, bush, wall, and fence an obstacle to be avoided, the very wind rustling the leaves an imposing force that could blow him off course. There are biting ants in the grass, stinging wasps and mantises with no scruples about attacking a defenseless creature. And then I see myself, perhaps the greatest threat of all: a giant who could crush him in my talons if I dared. I feel so small, and simultaneously so massive; so endangered and yet, so dangerous. We continue gazing into each other’s eyes, two lives experiencing a moment of recognition. Watching the rise and fall of his rumpled breast in time with my shallow breathing, I sense he understands me, too. He cocks his head at me- could it be quizzically? I am curious about him, and he seems to be curious about me, too. I experiment, poking my finger in front of his bill. He focuses his eyes on the tip. I slide my finger to the right, he turns his head to match, quicker than a blink. Is it fear, the paranoia of watching for a sudden strike, or is it something like playfulness? I draw circles in the air, he follows them with his eyes, his head, his pinprick bill. We mirror each other, moving in a slow, hypnotic dance. I am both his doctor checking for signs of lingering injury and his friend playing at copycat. Pursing my lips, I whistle, and he mimics with a clear, sweet song. Then, he bursts into a flapping yellow and chestnut fireball, swerving just over the top of my head and out of sight. 21
Sarah McPeek Northern cardinal Cardinalis cardinalis
Jonah Dominguez
I’m stunned. I stare at the empty patch of grass and I feel it’s me who has hit a pane of glass, a barrier which I tried to convince myself didn’t exist. I’ve been fooled as well, thinking I was looking at a mirror, a reflection of myself, and not a momentary window into another being. Now, I’m confronted with the cruel knowledge that I will forever be an outsider in the outdoors. The central crux of my human experience is that it is only a human experience. I can imagine having wings instead of arms, feathers instead of hair, I can even feel the wind buffeting my cheeks as I soar over purple mountains and golden valleys. But I can’t see colors beyond the spectrum of visible light. I can’t feel the tug of the Earth’s magnetic field guiding me home; I’m lucky if I can follow the voice on my GPS. There are aspects of a bird’s world that are forever absent from mine. He and I are two lives connected by a moment of collision, but I can’t escape the reality that our experiences of the world are fundamentally different, distant.
Gray catbird Dumetella carolinensis
Despite our differences, I’m convinced that he and I found a connection, until he severed the ties by flying frantically into my face and away. So close, and yet so far from understanding. It’s safer to maintain a distance, for I just experienced firsthand what tragedies can befall when the wild strays too near the house. I must content myself with looking through binoculars, feeling close enough to reach out and touch the eagle in its nest, when really we are separated by a wide lake. Still, with the assurance that he’s alright, I can cherish these rare moments when nature opens its windows and lets me seek these answers. Pleased pleased pleased to meet’cha! The stillness of the afternoon, and my reverie, are broken by the lusty song of a chestnutsided warbler. It’s him, I’m sure of it, calling from a faraway tree. I squint but can’t make out a flash of chestnut and yellow in the late afternoon light. And it may be merely my human projection of language and emotion onto another unknowable soul, but from where I lie against the cool, soft earth, it almost sounds like gratitude.
Eastern bluebird Sialia sialis Sarah McPeek
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Activation Energy (Why We’re Not Together Yet) Miriam Hyman The boy and girl are restless Upon the bench, his knee perspires And she fidgets with her fingertips Through tips of hair They smile But wish of their mouths A more forceful acknowledgement Of their potentialReleased, They would lay side by side In quietude Surrendering themselves to the expanse, Platitudes dissipate in their needlessness And pulses merge. A word A kiss A kindling glance And they would be singular But their catalyst has eluded them. The girl untangles her hair The boy stands, pauses, and walks away. So much for spontaneous combustion.
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ATHENAS Aiming to heighten her experiences near and around science‌ and mine too Anu Muppirala
When I was 5 years old, I wanted to be Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. When I was 10 years old, I wanted to be an FBI agent. From 13 years old until half way through college‌ I wanted to be a neurosurgeon.
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While I wish I could trace back my reasoning for the first two career decisions, I can only speak for the last one. Growing up in an Indian family, I was labeled the “future doctor” the second I told my dad I thought plant cells looked cool under a microscope. If you asked me how plant cells relate to treating patients...I have no idea. For a long time, I honestly didn’t know there were career options in science outside of medicine. Once I realized I love research, I started to question whether other students were brought up in similar situations as myself. While I had an epiphany about science opportunities in the last few years, my perspective would have been crafted differently if I had been given more chances to explore science, interact with science—play with science. Well, I got my wish to start playing this year, albeit late in the game, on Saturday, November 10th. As part of ATHENAS (Aiming To Heighten her Experiences Near and Around Science), I got the opportunity to conduct fun chemistry science projects with middle school girls on Kenyon’s campus. The day started off bright and early, and us volunteers were waiting in a lecture room in Hayes Hall for participants to trickle through after registration. As I waited, manning the massive bubble station, I couldn’t help but smile and see myself in every shy and boisterous girl who walked through the door. I handed the first girl the giant bubble wand, and within seconds we were having a serious discussion about various tactics to twirl the wand and make the biggest bubble—a true troubleshooting experimentalist in the making. After registration was complete and everyone was accounted for, I couldn’t even recognize the Hayes lecture room. It was no longer the hall I associated with 3-hour long physics exams and two cups of tea for mental stamina, but a magical place with a room full of energetic students of various ages ready to explore the fun in science. I’ll admit—I think I was looking forward to it as much as the middle schoolers. The day was separated into two main experiment groups: food chemistry and explosion chemistry. I was part of the latter group (I was secretly really giddy about that), which involved building rockets and constructing baking soda vinegar volcanoes with the students. 25
The day was separated into two main experiment groups: food chemistry and explosion chemistry. I was part of the latter group (I was secretly really giddy about that), which involved building rockets and constructing baking soda vinegar volcanoes with the students. For me, the most memorable part of the day was working with the students on the rockets. First, we used glue and borax to make silly putty nose cones. This process, which we predicted to take about 5minutes, went on for an extra 15 once the kids got their hands on food coloring. I walked up to one girl who was so focused on her nose cone color that she looked like she was conducting an acid-base titration where one extra drop of red food coloring would mess up the whole thing. When I asked her if she was ready to move on to the next step, I was made aware the incredible importance of the correct color nose cone for overall rocket function. If that nose cone wasn’t the right shade of pink then there was no point in trying to launch the rocket. Once the rocket engineers were content with their colorful nose cones, we put the putty on the top of film canisters (which served as the body of the rocket), placed water and a seltzer tablet in the canister, and then stepped back. Within seconds, the room was filled with the repeated pattern of a sudden pop from canisters flying, followed by thuds from nose cones falling off, and finished with kids’ laughter. We even took the rockets out to the stairwell to see how high they could launch—hey, the kids asked if we could, the staff were told to never say no…and let’s face it, we all wanted to—so we did.
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Ok, ok. I guess I lead with the notion that this day was about chemistry, so I would be doing a disservice not to mention the chemistry lesson from it all. In essence, the rocket experiment was to demonstrate a chemical reaction from the seltzer tablet mixing with water. The reaction in the film canister lead to carbon dioxide gas build up, producing enough pressure to make the rocket shoot. But the students didn’t just hear me say that. They were a part of the creation and the experimental design, and the best part? They asked the questions and came to the answers on their own. Through my own journey to find my career interests, I never realized what I loved about science until I started doing it. I got involved in research, and it brought everything in my classes to life and clarified that medicine wasn’t my passion. And who knows, if I had unique hands-on experiences with science, like ATHENAS, perhaps I would’ve explored the possibility of being a research scientist earlier.
Aside from my introspection, being involved with ATHENAS made me feel like I was a small snippet of each of these girls’ own journeys too. And even if they don’t ultimately want to pursue science in their future, at least they are getting the opportunities to make those decisions after building positive associations with science and seeing science in a different context than just the classroom. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.” And my interactions with these middle school girls as part of ATHENAS was a great testament to that. Now if everyone will excuse me—I have a hypothesis about bubble blowing optimization to perfect with my fellow junior scientist and colleague.
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Comics Rand Burnette
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Lyceum Caption Contest
Every issue, a-la The New Yorker, we provide a caption-less cartoon. You, the reader, submit your caption to lyceum@kenyon.edu. We choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Comics will be provided by the resident cartoonist, Rand Burnett
Comments? Suggestions? Submissions? Contacts Us! Website: kenyonlyceum.wordpress.com Email: lyceum.kenyon.edu 29
Franny Wiggins 30