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Two Nights At Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cabin In The Woods

Two Nights At Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cabin In The Woods

By Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (TNS)

When the electric sunset broke through the high wraparound windows and surrounding tree canopy, it looked as if pink, orange and green stained-glass panels had suddenly been installed inside the Seth Peterson Cottage. One more reason the place felt more like a cathedral than a small stone cabin in the woods.

Throughout our two-night stay at one of the Upper Midwest’s most unique and historic cabin rentals, I kept thinking of the cottage as a shrine to the two very different men who were behind such a special hideaway — neither of whom lived to see its completion.

One was among America’s most influential architects and Wisconsin’s most famous sons. The other was a modest state government employee who took his own life at 24.

Tucked away into a thickly forested corner of Mirror Lake State Park near Wisconsin Dells in south central Wisconsin, the Peterson Cottage is Frank Lloyd Wright’s last commissioned work in the state he called home. Work began in 1958. It’s also one of the craftsman’s smallest structures anywhere, with only one bedroom and 880 total square feet.

My wife and I rented the cottage this past summer, but we actually made our reservation in October 2013. That’s how far ahead you have to plan if you want to stay there in the warmer months.

We picked up the keys to the cottage in the town of Lake Delton, from Sand County Service Co., a vacation rental company whose offices are lined with pamphlets for all the Dells area’s water, duck and pony shows. That hubbub felt worlds away from where we were headed.

Set only a few hundred yards off a main park road down a gravel driveway, the cabin delivers on seclusion. A sign at the driveway gate warns that the place is off-limits to non-renters except for the second Sunday of each month, when the Seth Peterson Cottage Conservatory hosts tours.

In part because of its modest size, the cottage stands as a major example of how well Wright married his structures to their natural surroundings. And the surroundings in this case are themselves quite spectacular.

Perched atop a hill overlooking the rambling Mirror Lake, the cottage has a sharply angled flying roof and stone walls that make it look like one of the nearby stone bluffs jutting through the treetops. The walls and floor of the cabin are made of Wisconsin sandstone; the wood of the ceilings and sleek detailing also came from the area.

The large windows tie the cottage to the landscape from the inside. I seriously felt more in tune with nature staying in this architectural landmark than I usually do sleeping in a tent in a crowded state park.

On the other hand, there was a certain unnatural quirkiness to spending a few nights in a cabin that has been written about in Architectural Digest.

After we unloaded the car, for instance, I did what every blue-blooded Midwesterner does upon arriving at a cabin: propped the beer cooler upside down outside the front door to let it dry out. Soon, though, I was struck by visions of some uptight architectural society rep showing up and chastising me for ruining the cabin’s visual grace with my ugly blue plastic Igloo.

The cooler got stashed in the car.

In the end, though, our only visitors were the local pack of raccoons, one of whom climbed right up on the stone ledge outside the windows by the dining room as if he wanted to join our Yahtzee game. My daughters, ages 4 and 7, similarly liked scrambling up the sloped stone exterior walls — another reason I was glad no preservationist snobs ever showed up.

Board games, dinner and conversation felt extra special inside the cottage on the angular, Wright-designed furniture, but the most uncommon ordinary experience was sitting around the fireplace. The literal and figurative centerpiece to the cottage lights up the walls and woodwork in magical ways. It works pretty well for s’mores, too.

Come bedtime for the girls, I pulled out the coffee-table booklets by the fire’s glow and read in depth about the cottage’s tragic history.

Thanks to passion, persistence and the fact that even the master architect had a cash-flow problem, Peterson was able to persuade Wright to build the small cottage. The younger Wisconsinite was little more than an architectural fanboy who worked as one of the state’s first computer operators. He planned the cottage as a hideaway for him and his intended bride.

Whatever the early computer job paid, though, it wasn’t enough to cover the construction once it began in 1958. Peterson soon went into debt. His bride-to-be left him. The young idealist killed himself before seeing his dream finished. Wright died shortly after Peterson, in April 1959.

The cottage was completed but somehow never found a rightful owner. In 1966, when Mirror Lake State Park was designated, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources took it over and proceeded to board up the place. That was its sorry fate for decades, until 1989, when — after falling into dire disrepair — the incomparable cabin was saved by Wright enthusiasts. Renovations took three years.

©2015 Star Tribune (Minneapolis). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Cliff via Flickr

Promising New Antibiotic May Help Combat ‘Superbugs’

Promising New Antibiotic May Help Combat ‘Superbugs’

The rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens — so-called “superbugs” — has outpaced development of new drugs to treat them, posing a severe public health crisis. But a recently discovered antibiotic named Teixobactin may signal a promising new era in drug development, according to findings published in the journal Nature last week.

In the 1940s, the first generation of mass-produced antibiotics, such as penicillin, had a profound impact on medicine and public health in the developed world, greatly reducing illness and death from a wide swath of infectious diseases. The organisms that antibiotics were designed to kill evolved over time, however, leading to increasingly drug-resistant strains of bacteria that became more lethal and more difficult to treat. According to the CDC, these antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect at least 2 million people in the United States annually, 23,000 of whom die as a result. In a report released last spring, the World Health Organization warned that a “post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — is a very real possibility for the 21st century.”

Compounding the severity of the crisis, the creation of new antibiotics has all but stopped. Antibiotics are developed by cultivating naturally occurring chemicals that microorganisms produce in order to attack each other in an unending battle for natural resources. Scientists estimate that of all the antibiotic compounds that exist in nature, 99 percent of them cannot be cultivated in a laboratory setting. Most of the remaining 1 percent were mined by the 1960s, and novel antibiotics have been in shorty supply ever since, creating a stalled pipeline for research and development of new drugs.

In 2002, researchers at Northeastern University began working on a new method of cultivating these finicky microorganisms. The iChip, which represents the culmination of over a decade of labor, is a two-inch-long device that scientists stick in microbe-rich mud, yielding tremendous results. The chip isolates the microbes that exist in samples of diluted dirt into distinct holes, and then sandwiches those samples between permeable membranes that allow bacteria to flourish in their natural habitat — the muck. According to the Nature report, the “growth recovery by this method approaches 50 percent,” making it 50 times more efficient than soil cultures grown in petri dishes. It was through this method that scientists discovered Teixobactin.

As of now, Teixobactin has only been tested in mice, but the results have been encouraging. It has been shown to stop common bacterial infections, as well as drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and staph, with no apparent side effects. While most antibiotics work by attacking proteins, Teixobactin takes a different, more effective tack: it shuts down the processes by which bacteria erect their cell walls. This kills microbes quickly, and the DNA that codes the building of cell walls is less likely to mutate than the genes that direct protein creation. All this greatly fortifies Teixobactin against the possibility of bacteria developing a resistance against it.

Human trials of the drug are unlikely to begin for at least two years. Still, the success of the new iChip technology and the early success shown demonstrated by its discoveries point to a brighter future in the battle against superbugs. For new antibiotics, it will be a long road from the dirt to the drug store, but this is a monumental first step.

Photo: NIAID via flickr

We Were All Rooting For The Big Snake

We Were All Rooting For The Big Snake

A divided nation has finally united, if only for a while.

Everywhere you go, Americans are speaking out in a singular chorus of indignation and outrage. Social media is seething with denunciations of brazen deception and cruelty.

What in the world happened that has suddenly brought us all together?

It’s simple: Some bonehead tried to get himself eaten by a giant anaconda.

Four million people watched the heavily hyped broadcast on TV, and untold millions more viewed it on the Internet. Apparently, everybody was rooting for the snake.

But not only did “naturalist” Paul Rosolie fail to be swallowed as advertised, he wimped out of the extravaganza as soon as the anaconda started squeezing.

The reaction from viewers has been merciless and cutting. Some have suggested that the Discovery Channel, which aired the Eaten Alive debacle, should rename itself the Stupidity Channel.

It’s understandable why people feel so betrayed and let down. Rosolie had promised to feed himself to a wild, 25-foot anaconda while a camera crew recorded every crushing moment.

For a nation still struggling to recover from three live hours of Peter Pan, this was something to cheer for.

Unfortunately, nobody in Rosolie’s crew could locate a 25-foot wild anaconda, much less capture one. So instead they used a showbiz ringer, a tame smaller specimen that (like all anacondas) had virtually no interest in dining on a human.

Rosolie came to the feast in a “crush-proof” suit that looked like it had been discarded by an amateur bomb squad. To whet the reluctant reptile’s appetite, Rosolie basted himself with pig blood.

For a while he groped and nuzzled the desultory snake until it finally threw a few coils around him and began to chew. Rosolie soon whimpered that his arms hurt and yelled for help on his customized snake-helmet microphone.

The stunt was halted, and the backlash began almost immediately.

PETA complained that the anaconda had been recklessly exploited, and it’s true that eating something as bulky as an armor-plated man could have killed the animal. (A few years ago, a Burmese python in the Everglades died after gulping an alligator. The gator, which wasn’t getting paid by the Discovery Channel, also expired.)

While the welfare of the anaconda was a sincere concern of some viewers, the predominant theme of the griping was that the public got seriously cheated. We had our hearts set on watching a clown descend by choice into the belly of a huge jungle snake. The guy chickened out, and now we’re pissed.

Does this make us callous and shallow? Not necessarily.

We happen to live at a time when the dumbest behavior is often visually documented, and globally accessible. Thanks to smartphones, the Internet is swamped with videos of brainless acts by humans. Some of the humans are actually sober.

Popular TV programs showcase the “world’s dumbest” fill-in-the-blank. The Jackass series and its movie spinoffs impishly celebrated the concept.

The difference between Jackass and Eaten Alive is that Jackass didn’t pretend to be anything but inane. The goofball who stapled his own butt cheeks never denied it was idiotic. That was the whole point of doing it.

Paul Rosolie, on the other hand, seems stung that people have questioned not only his intelligence but his motive for staging the anaconda spectacle.

He claims his purpose was a noble one: to call attention to the plight of the South American rainforests. “The whole reason we did this show is because I’ve worked in the Amazon. I’ve seen it being destroyed,” Rosolie told Jimmy Kimmel.

And what better way to save an endangered habitat than to get yourself grotesquely devoured in prime time by one of the creatures that lives there?

Morbid curiosity isn’t the only reason so many people watched Eaten Alive. A set of values was at play, too.

Viewers wanted justice. Deep down we all believe that nature can rise up and punish foolish human behavior, and in this case the human behavior was preposterous.

The concept of smearing yourself with pig blood and feeding yourself to a snake is so perverse that it borders on farce. The only thing worse would have been for Rosolie to insert himself from the other end, like a human suppository.

Not that we’d want to give him any ideas.

Because you know he’ll be doing another show. Lock up your anacondas.

(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132.)

Photo: Jeff Kubina via Flickr

Study: Polar Bears Sniff Pawprints To Find Clues About Potential Mates

Study: Polar Bears Sniff Pawprints To Find Clues About Potential Mates

By Yereth Rosen, Alaska Dispatch News, Anchorage (MCT)

Polar bears looking for mates appear to be following their noses over the sea ice, according to a newly published study.

Like brown and black bears, polar bears make a practice of sniffing scents left behind by other members of their species. But unlike brown and black bears, which leave their odors on trees or other vertical surfaces, polar bears have to rely on paw prints left on the horizontal surface of snow-covered ice.

They appear to be using these scents to decipher messages about the other polar bears that are nearby, according to the study by scientists from the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, Polar Bears International and the U.S. Geological Survey. The study was published online in the Nov. 3 issue of the Journal of Zoology.

The study used smell swabs collected from the feet of tranquilized Chukchi and Beaufort bears sampled between 2004 and 2009. The Arctic field work on the wild bears was done by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In all, the agencies took samples from about 200 Beaufort bears and about 100 Chukchi bears.

The preserved odors from the bears’ feet were strong and “generally unpleasant,” said the lead author, Megan Owen of the Institute for Conservation Research at San Diego Zoo Global.

“We don’t know the ultimate source of the scent, but it is possible that it is an accumulation of urine or body odor, a collection of apocrine gland secretions (sweat) or a combination of both,” she said in an email.

The paws’ smelly secretions, preserved and stored in deep-freeze, were spread on cardboard — considered a neutral surface — and placed in boxes that were presented at different times of the year to 26 polar bears in 10 zoos in locations ranging as far south as Memphis and San Diego and as far north as Toronto and Quebec.

Once they presented the boxes, the scientists watched the zoo bears’ reactions.

They measured the number of approaches, the amount of time spent sniffing to investigate and a physical behavior called the “flehmen” response, in which mammals curl their lips, raise their heads and inhale through their mouths — a sign of keen interest.

Though the people conducting the experiments couldn’t distinguish between paw scents, the zoo bears could, the study findings suggest.

The scientists found that the zoo bears were most likely to investigate the scents of opposite-sex wild bears in the spring — the polar bear mating season. The male zoo bears seemed to be able to identify which smell was left by female bears in estrus.

The findings raise some concerns, said the authors.

If the sea ice is serving as polar bears’ smell-message board, that could spell trouble for the animals, Steven Amstrup, chief scientist for Polar Bears International and a co-author of the scent study, said in an email.

“The spring sea ice is far less extensive and more fragmented than it was historically. I saw its character change dramatically during the 30 years I did polar bear research in Alaska,” said Amstrup, who spent several years studying polar bears for the USGS’s Alaska Science Center. “Such fragmentation can only worsen as the world warms, and any scent trails left on the ice will become more fragmented. I cannot hypothesize how increasing fragmentation could make trails anything but more difficult to follow.”

Photo: Ansgar Walk via Wikimedia Commons