As weird as that sounds, the work is important for what it will tell scientists about the natural history of mosquitoes. It also could have major implications for human health.

Here’s why. There’s a nasty disease called dengue that is just beginning to show up in the United States. It’s caused by a virus, and it’s transmitted from person to person by a mosquito. A mild case of dengue is no worse than flu. A serious case can mean death.

Michael Riehle at the University of Arizona is trying to solve a curious puzzle about dengue: why there have been dozens of cases in nearby Texas and none, or virtually none, in Arizona. Riehle thinks the answer has to do with Arizona’s geography.

“It’s right on the edge of the range where these dengue mosquitoes are found,” he says. “It’s a fairly harsh environment, and we think that they might not be surviving long enough to efficiently transfer the disease to other people.”

So to test his hypothesis, Riehle wants to be able to compare the life spans of mosquitoes in Arizona with those in Texas.

It’s not easy to tell how old a mosquito is: It’s not as if they carry around birth certificates or government-issued IDs. Right now the tools for measuring the age of mosquitoes are pretty crude. For example, you can look at a female mosquito’s ovaries to see if they have produced any eggs. Riehle says if they have, that means the mosquito is at least five days old, since they can’t produce eggs before that. “But that’s all it can tell us — less than five days, or more than five days,” Riehle says.

So Riehle has a new idea. He wants to see if he can use a mosquito’s gene to tell its age.

Looking For Clues In Genes

There are ways to tell when a particular gene is switched on or off in a mosquito. Riehle is looking for genes that switch on or off when the mosquito reaches a particular age. He’s found one so far. He needs more in order to make more age estimates.

To help in his search, he raises mosquitoes in a special climate-controlled room down the hall from his office. The insectary is about the size of a large closet with metal shelves floor to ceiling. This place is a Tupperware salesman’s dream — the shelves are stuffed with plastic containers in a variety of convenient sizes. It’s a level 2 containment facility, so the mosquitoes won’t get out.

Since he knows exactly when mosquitoes are born in the lab, that gives him a precise starting point to see how, or if, different genes change over time. If he can find genes that change with age in the lab, Riehle can look for the same genes in wild mosquitoes and use them to estimate the wild mosquitoes’ age.

This work has implications for a number of mosquito-borne diseases. Malaria mosquitoes need to live at least two weeks before they can transmit the malaria parasite. Knowing more about the age of wild mosquito populations could help prevent, or at least predict, outbreaks of disease.

But the search for age-related genes is going slowly.

That’s not terribly surprising. In science, you usually have to go down a lot of blind alleys before you find what you’re looking for, if you ever do. Riehle says it’s a lesson students coming into his lab have to learn.

“You give them a project, and they just expect it to work, have no problems, get their results by the end of the semester, and they’re on their way,” he says. “It’s always interesting to see them learn that, yeah, a lot of science is failure and building upon what doesn’t work.”

Failure is inevitable in science, so it’s not failure itself that’s bad, it’s just not learning anything from your failures. “Actually, what we call failure a lot of times leads to new lines of discovery,” says Riehle.

So Riehle will continue to search for genes that will reveal a mosquito’s age. With persistence, and enough failures, he thinks he’ll find them. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Ideas come to him. He will be staring at something. It will stare back at him — but from a weird place. I’ve been hanging out with gummy bears most of my life, and I’ve never imagined a gummy “bearskin rug.”

Here’s something he calls a “Java Jacket.” He made it from the recycled paper you’d find on an ordinary coffee cup. It works the same way, keeping your fingers from getting too hot, but this is so much more stylish. Says he: “Your coffee should look its best, no?”

I agree, and the sleeves are fully collapsible, so you can disarm the cup, if you want. He says, “I like it best with them.”

Some cups, of course, have to be watched.

“This was quite easy to make,” he says. “Cut the coffee sleeve in half and tape it to back of cup. Cut a section from the back of the cup to make the hands. Tape it all together and draw a creepy face. Place it on a table in your local coffee shop and see how people react.”

This is a tree house. But it’s not on a tree.

An online design magazine, designboom, asked Brock how he spends his days. Does he travel a lot? Go for walks? He told them he has a routine:

wake up. drink coffee. play with my son and daughter. drive to work. (ride my bike in the summer) think in traffic. make things for clients. try to avoid meetings. go home. play with my son and daughter. listen to music. stay up late making things for myself. go to bed.

It’s that stay-up-late-making-things-for-myself time that creatively seems most explosive — in these next examples, literally. He did these with a cauliflower stalk carved with an X-ACTO Knife and toothpick. He calls this one “Cauliflower Hindenburg” (after the zeppelin that burst into flames).

And this one is “Cauliflower Nagasaki.”

And finally, here’s a little experiment not with food, but with food packaging.

Some of you may be familiar with Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “Dark Side of the Moon.” This is what that album looked like:

Brock discovered that there are Dorito packages that duplicate all eight colors on the Pink Floyd album. So, using a scissors and an X-ACTO Knife, he cut color strips from eight different flavor packages, Late Night All Nighter Cheeseburger, Pizza Supreme, Nacho Cheese, Throwback Taco (Limited Edition), Toasted Corn, Salsa Verde, Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch and Spicy Sweet Chili, and assembled them to make his “Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd.”

Some people have too much fun. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

If you’ll pardon the self-indulgence, I’m going to take this truism one step further: News is what happened to me.

I was laid low the week before New Year’s Day by a mysterious headache and a blazing sore throat. A few days later I lost my voice.

My doctors eventually pinpointed the cause by snaking a small camera down my nose. My left vocal fold (or vocal cord if you prefer) had stopped working. It was essentially paralyzed, other than the occasional twitch.

Being a science reporter, of course I dived into the medical literature to see what was up. It turns out there good statistics are hard to come by on how frequently Americans suffer from this condition, unilateral vocal fold paralysis.

Dr. Thomas Carroll, a voice specialist at Tufts Medical Center, told me he sees about 100 cases a year. The same is true for Dr. Lee Akst, who ultimately treated me at the Voice Center at Johns Hopkins.

So, given that there are about 150 voice specialists in the U.S., that means there are probably something like 15,000 cases a year that come to their attention.

Other research suggests that about 1 percent of the population may have only one working vocal cord, but the effect on the voice is slight enough that it can go undetected. It may take two to tango, but one vocal fold vibrating next to a silent partner is good enough for a soliloquy.

The disruptive cases, like mine, are often caused by a surgeon who accidentally nicks the nerve that controls the left vocal cord. That nerve actually travels down into the chest, so it’s potentially in harm’s way during heart surgeries. That kind of medical boo-boo is known in the trade as “iatrogenic,” which I guess is what the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates would have said when he meant “oops.”

I hadn’t had chest surgery over winter break, and a CT scan revealed no obvious cause. So doctors call my kind of case, “idiopathic.” That word has the same Greek root as “idiot,” but in this case it applies to medical ignorance. So they half-heartedly blame a virus, the typical medical fall-guy.

Whatever the cause, unilateral vocal fold paralysis is not particularly salutary for someone who makes a living on the radio. To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s a snippet of a report I did back in October, when my voice was hearty and hale:

And here’s what I sounded like in mid-January:

One doctor said the easiest course of action was simply to wait it out. Sure, it could take a few months for my voice to return, but what’s the rush? But waiting isn’t the only option.

It turns out this disorder is common enough that there’s a line of medical products to address it. My specialist at Johns Hopkins showed me a box of the stuff. Inside was a vial containing water, gelatin and sodium carboxymethylcellulose. Yes, cellulose as in the indigestible fiber that tree trunks and paper are made of.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say the doctor injected that gelatinous stuff next to my paralyzed vocal fold, and pushed it over so it was lined up next to the one that’s still working fine.

That closed the yawning gap that made my voice so breathy. And the result isn’t bad, as you can hear:

Over the next six to 10 weeks, the carboxymethylcellulose will degrade in my gullet. That will buy time for the nerve to heal, which it often does. And in the meantime, I’m back on the air. It may sound a bit like I’m suddenly smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. But don’t look for me outside by the ashtray. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

But what does it take to justify closing the school down entirely? That’s a question we should probably answer before the next big pandemic hits.

At one point during the swine flu outbreak in 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, “The potential benefits of preemptively dismissing students from school are often outweighed by negative consequences,” such as disruption of classes and hassles for parents.

But a study of swine flu transmission in Alberta, Canada, published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine, lends weight to the benefits of school closure. Researchers compared rates of new diagnoses of swine flu from the beginning of the pandemic, in April 2009, through summer vacation and into the following school year.

“When schools closed [for summer], there was a huge reduction in the amount of transmission among school-age children,” David Earn, professor of mathematics at McMaster University and lead author of the study, tells Shots.

But that’s not all. The end of the school year caused a big drop in transmission among other age groups, too. Earns says rates for all ages dropped by at least 50 percent, and “probably a lot more than that.” School children, in other words, were a major driver of flu transmission to the entire population.

Earns says summer vacation kept the pandemic manageable until a vaccine was produced, which took until October 2009. There was still a spike in flu cases that fall, but having kids out of school for two months “bought enough time that the vaccine was ready before a lot of people became infected,” he says.

His team also used a computer simulation to model what would have happened if schools had remained in session all summer. It predicted a slight drop in transmission due to seasonal effects of temperature and humidity, but would have left a lot more people infected — essentially giving the virus a running start into the autumn flu season.

In the U.S., the CDC took a cautious approach at the start of the outbreak, recommending that any school with a confirmed case of swine flu close for up to 14 days. Within a week it relaxed that guidance, saying local authorities should weigh the benefits of preventing new illnesses against the costs of school closures.

By the end of the pandemic, in Aug. 2010, only a handful of the nearly 100,000 elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. had closed because of swine flu.

The CDC’s guidelines for the current flu season don’t say much about closures, instead saying schools should “focus on early identification of ill students and staff, staying home when ill, and good cough and hand hygiene etiquette.”

Earns says that makes sense. “Nobody’s thinking about closing schools during a normal flu season,” he says. But “if you’re faced with a pandemic in the future…then closing schools for a long period may be worth it.”

In an email, a CDC representative said the agency is studying the impact flu-related closures had on families, and is working on updated guidance for schools.

But in the event of another pandemic, she wrote, “Any decisions would be based on the individual characteristics of the pandemic (severity, how it’s dispersed, etc) and the latest scientific evidence of the time regarding benefits of school closure.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

That was his way of putting me in place for asking why anyone would care about a creepy grasshopper in South Africa.

Apples and oranges, in a way, but he’s making a point: That grasshopper is something like a living artifact, he explained; it has adapted for modern times, but it carries valuable information about Earth’s past. Maybe it’s not as cool as a dinosaur, but it’s still worthy of attention, he says.

“It’s very hard to explain why we should care,” he admits, “and to be completely honest, there isn’t a very good answer.”

Naskrecki is a research associate and entomologist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He’s also a photographer and has a whole book of critters and creatures you might never think twice about. It’s called Relics: Travels in Nature’s Time Machine.

“Relict organisms,” Naskrecki writes in the introduction, “which I prefer to call simply ‘relics’ … are often the last carriers of genes that have otherwise disappeared from the world’s gene pool.”

Take horseshoe crabs, for example. “It was already a living fossil when the dinosaurs first appeared,” Naskrecki says excitedly on the phone. “They go back 450 million years. … And the thing is that they have changed so little. It’s like a peephole into the Jurassic — or even earlier.”

But of the hundreds of horseshoe crab species that used to exist, there now remain only four, says Naskrecki, “and they are declining very fast.”

Born in Poland, Naskrecki recalls an early obsession with natural history, which started with the discovery of a fossil. And he has been at it — doggedly — ever since. He travels the world doing research and documenting his findings.

“I am a scientist first, photographer and writer second,” he says. “I recognize how powerful the tool of photography is in conservation.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Recent experiments involving the H5N1 bird flu virus have caused a furor in the science community, and the WHO was urged to convene an international discussion.

The scientists, journal editors and others who attend are expected to review the facts and the most pressing issues related to this specific work, rather than have a broader discussion about the possibility of international oversight of potentially worrisome biological research.

Critics of the experiments say scientists took a potentially deadly bird flu virus and tweaked it in ways that could make it contagious between people. They worry that the altered virus might escape the lab and cause a global pandemic, and that openly publishing details of the work in a scientific journal could provide terrorists with a recipe for a bioweapon.

Other scientists say the possible risks have been exaggerated and that the research is important for public health.

On Jan. 20, top influenza researchers announced that they were putting a voluntary 60-day moratorium on doing any further experiments with these viruses or creating any new ones. Publication of manuscripts describing the work is on hold as well.

Twenty-two people have been invited to an initial meeting at WHO headquarters in Geneva, which will be held Feb. 16 and 17, says Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general for Health Security and Environment at the WHO. But on Wednesday, he said, they were still not fully sure of all of the people who will be coming.

The public isn’t invited. “We won’t be able to have it open to the public because of the nature of the information to be gone over,” says Fukuda, noting that attendees will be discussing unpublished details of the experiments.

He described it as a “fact-finding, context-setting” meeting aimed at identifying the most pressing issues related to this research. “What we’ve tried to do is invite people who are directly involved with either conducting the research or who have, for example, a role in publishing the research,” Fukuda says.

Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, which wants to publish one of the bird flu manuscripts in some form, says the deputy editor from the journal will attend the event. He said on Wednesday morning he had received an email with a list of some attendees. “They’re from all around the world,” Alberts said.

Other attendees will be people who have formally reviewed the research, such as Paul Keim, acting chair of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. Late last year, in an unprecedented move, the NSABB recommended that key details of the work should not be publicly revealed when researchers publish on their findings.

On the day of the meeting, Fukuda says, the WHO will post the names of the attendees. And soon after the meeting, the organization will post a report on what was discussed and any consensus that was reached.

The most urgent, practical issues that could be discussed at the WHO meeting include things like how the research could be published without revealing sensitive information, while still allowing the full findings to be available to public health researchers around the world. Discussions may also cover what additional research should go forward on the lab-created viruses — and under what conditions.

Some experts say the viruses should be moved to a lab with the highest possible security and that any future experiments should be tightly controlled. Others argue that’s unnecessary and that allowing work to go forward will reveal information about flu viruses and how they evolve that’s important for protecting the public’s health. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

You can think of continents as giant puzzle pieces shuffling around the Earth. When they drift apart, mighty oceans form. When they come together, oceans disappear. And it’s all because continents sit on moving plates of the Earth’s crust.

“Continents on these plates typically move, I would say, at the rate your fingernails grow,” says Ross Mitchell, a graduate student at Yale University. That may seem slow, but it adds up over hundreds of millions of years.

Look at an atlas and you can imagine how Africa and South America, for example, once nestled together.

“Rewind the tape and bring all the continents back into their jigsaw arrangement, you have this vast landmass of all the Earth’s continental blocks together,” Mitchell says.

Last time all the landmass clumped up, it formed a supercontinent called Pangaea. The dinosaurs walked there. But Pangaea wasn’t the first.

“There had been three, possibly a debated fourth supercontinent through the billions of years,” Mitchell says.

He has been studying that deep history by looking at tiny magnets buried in rock around the world. Those magnets pointed north when they were locked into the rock. Sample those magnets in layers of rock laid down over millions of years, and you can tell the story of how those continents have moved.

And naturally, that led Mitchell to wonder what the next supercontinent will look like.

There have been two leading ideas. One is that the continents will collapse together again at the site of the last supercontinent, centered on Africa. That would squeeze the Atlantic Ocean shut. The other idea is that the Atlantic would keep growing and growing.

Under this scenario, “a supercontinent rifts apart, and the continents skirt around to the opposite side of the globe, re-creating the next supercontinent, 180 degrees on the opposite side of the globe from the previous one,” Mitchell says.

That would leave us with a supercontinent in place of the Pacific Ocean.

A Supercontinent Called Amasia

But Mitchell’s research for his Ph.D. thesis suggests both those ideas are wrong. Instead, he says the continents seem to be moving north. That means the Caribbean Sea and the Arctic Ocean will be squished shut.

“Think about closing the Caribbean Sea — you have now fused North and South America,” Mitchell says. “And then by fusing the Arctic Ocean, you would suture the Americas with Eurasia.”

That would create a supercontinent called Amasia that would form at the top of the Earth. Eventually it would slump south toward the equator. And under this scenario, Antarctica might remain isolated at the bottom of the world.

Brendan Murphy studies supercontinents at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. He says the Yale team’s idea is provocative, innovative and plausible.

“What they’ve done is they’ve thrown another possibility out there that, quite frankly, many of us hadn’t really thought about. And so even if the model is wrong, we will learn a lot by testing it.”

And he says the challenge isn’t simply finding different ways to put together the Earth’s jigsaw puzzle continents.

“This is really important because it influences the evolution of our entire planet, including life that lives on it,” Murphy says. “For example, many people believe that supercontinents form and stood apart their fundamental changes in climate.”

Of course, the next supercontinent isn’t likely to form for another 100 million years or so. And Mitchell says the human species will probably be long gone by then, so we won’t know, “but it’s certainly fun to think about.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

We asked, “Who was it?” And he said, “Have you ever heard of the mad monk, Rasputin?”

I knew of Rasputin. He lived, I’d thought, in a Russian palace with the Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and had magically healed the Czar’s son from a supposedly incurable disease, then gained great sway over the Romanov family, and then, in a ghastly scene, was shot, clubbed and poisoned to death by a group of noblemen just before the start of the Russian Revolution. In my mind, all this happened in a different age. The pictures I’d seen showed him with a 19th century beard, dressed in robes.

How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn’t seem possible. Yet the old guy said, “Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea.”

I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70 year old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.

Human Wormholes

There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. When “Long Ago” suddenly becomes “So I said to him…” long ago jumps closer.

There are many examples of people who shrink history this way. The blogger Jason Kottke has been collecting examples. He calls them “human wormholes” because these people help us leap across space/time. Here are my favorites.

1. Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness Goes On TV In 1956

In 1956, on the game show I’ve Got A Secret, host Garry Moore brought on 96-year-old Samuel Seymour. Here’s his secret: he was sitting in Ford’s theater the night Lincoln was shot. He was 5 years old, and remembered John Wilkes Booth bounding from Lincoln’s box onto the stage. Here he is on television, describing what he saw:

2. Oliver Wendel Holmes Shakes Hands With Both Presidents Adams And Kennedy

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes lived long enough (1841-1935) to shake hands with both John Quincy Adams (b. 1767) and a young John F. Kennedy (d. 1963). One man, says Kottke, “spanning 200 years of American history.”

Tony Hiss, son of Alger Hiss, says when his dad clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, he remembers Justice Holmes saying that as a kid, his grandmother used to talk of day at the beginning of the American Revolution when she was 5 years old and stood at her dad’s front window on Beacon Hill in Boston and watched “rank after rank of Redcoats marching through town.” So that’s grandma to grandson to us. Two bounces.

3. President John Tyler Has Two Grandsons Who Are Still Alive!

President John Tyler, born in 1790, tenth president of the United States, has two grandsons who are reportedly still alive today. One, Harrison Tyler, lives in Virginia and recently gave an interview to New York Magazine. He was asked how someone born in 1790 could still have living grandchildren. Said Harrison:

Well, [President Tyler] was a good man! [laughs] Both my grandfather — the president — and my father, were married twice. And they had children by their first wives. And their first wives died, and they married again and had more children. And my father was 75 when I was born, his father was 63 when he was born. John Tyler had 15 children — eight by his first wife, seven by his second wife — so it does get very confusing.

Does he ever tell tourists at President Tyler’s home (his too) that he’s a grandson? And do people believe him? Said he:

I don’t know, I don’t bring it up.

4. Civil War Widows Live (And Collect Pensions) After 2000

Three Civil War widows, Maudie Hopkins, Alberta Martin and Gertrude Janeway, lived into the 21st Century. Two of them collected their husbands’ pensions until their deaths.

Alberta Martin, for example, married a Confederate veteran when he was 81, she 21. They married in 1927, after which she shared a $50-a-month Confederate pension, guaranteed by the State of Alabama. When her husband died and she’d remarried, the checks stopped coming. Alabama, presumably, had lost track of her, then presumed her (and all other Confederate widows) dead, but with assistance from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Alberta’s pension rights were restored in 1996, she was awarded backpay and she continued to collect her husband’s pension until she died in May, 2004, 139 years after the Civil War had ended.

My first real job in New York City, I worked in the city’s Municipal Building and down the hall from my office was a room reserved for Civil War veterans. That room was always dark, the door always locked, nobody visited. The war, at that time, was 100 years past. Then one day a crew of workmen showed up and began removing what was inside: a bunch of regimental flags, photographs, ceremonial cups, badges — this gathering place no longer gathered, so it, and all the things in it, were carted off, I suppose, to a museum. I thought: Now, our Civil War is over. Demographically over. It has stopped touching the living.

But I didn’t know about Maudie, Alberta and Gertrude. They weren’t over — so through them, the past dangled into the present for another…wow…40 years.

If you want to consider another way to time travel — this time using a mental trick that works wonders — check out a post I wrote a few years ago called “The Junkman And The Madonna.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Suppose you’re a robot. If you had a camera in your head, and you could watch a human doing a simple task, like bunching a pair of socks, could you, just by watching, learn to do it too?

Well, let’s see…

Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls “Apprentice Robots.” They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given “perception mechanisms” to analyze what they’ve seen, then “planning and simulation” mechanisms, to copy tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn.

In this case, the robot in the video has to grasp the correct (open) end of each sock, even though they are pointed in different directions, and then put them on the post. Apparently Abbeel’s robots can study a person or even a series of photographs and figure out how to do this, sometimes after only ten or so demonstrations.

Folding Laundry

Technology Review magazine says “Abbeel taught one robot how to fold laundry by giving it some general rules about how fabric behaves, and then showed it around 100 images of clothing so it could analyze how that particular clothing was likely to move as it was handled.” No live human instruction. Just pictures.

In this towel-folding video, you can almost feel the robot studying the cloth, trying to figure out which two points are farthest apart and therefore the best places to grasp and fold. It’s spooky.

What these videos tell us, is that what we humans can do so easily — most three year olds can fold socks and towels — are, when you break them down, highly complex behaviors. “Socks,” Abbeel writes, “are extremely irregular. [They] may be right-side-out, inside out, or arbitrarily bunched.” Knowing how to unfold and handle them is, mathematically, an extraordinarily subtle business.

It’s not that robots are stupid. It’s that we are so smart. And what Abbeel is exploring, is how to give the robots a kind of bottom-up intelligence that allows them to, on their own, do tasks and make sense of an anything-can-happen world.

The most amazing robot I’ve seen lately is designed for just that — to improvise solutions in messy, chaotic situations. Boston Dynamics has a bot they call “Big Dog”. This is it:

It looks like a 4-legged tube, its legs oddly facing each other. But if you give it a fierce kick, try to knock it down, make it climb through mud, skid along ice, trek through snow, climb a jumble of cinderblocks, while it sometimes falls into a helpless plop, much of the time it can right itself, and keep going. How it learns this, I’m not sure. Developed by the Defense Department to go where soldiers fear to tread, it has, (or this music video makes it look like it has) an almost animal-like ability to cope in a slip-slidy, bad, bad world. Even without the music, I’m bug-eyed with admiration. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

She was a poet and she died this week. She was, the obits say, a modest woman. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature, she was so discombobulated by the attention, she stopped writing poetry for awhile, until the world settled down and she could be ignored again. She needed the quiet to notice the astonishing, quiet things we might see every day, if we only had her eyes.

She had eyes for modest creatures. One time, she was wandering down a path — in my imagination it’s a dirt path through a field somewhere in Poland where she lived. She looks down, and there, lying on its back, sits a beetle. It is dead. Nobody notices. Which is the point:

A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.Instead of death’s confusion, tidiness and order.The horror of this sight is moderate,its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.The grief is quarantined.The sky is blue.

To preserve our peace of mind, animals diemore shallowly: they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.They leave behind, we’d like to think, less feeling and less world,departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,they know their place,they show respect.

And so the dead beetle on the pathlies unmourned and shining in the sun.One glance at it will do for meditation –clearly nothing much has happened to it.Important matters are reserved for us,for our life and our death, a deaththat always claims the right of way.

Wislawa Szymborska’s passing is as precious as that beetle’s. No more. No less. She taught us about weight in the world. We all have it. Every last one of us.

“Seen from Above” from Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 by Wisława Szymborska. English translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]