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Kathryn's Dad thought she was going through a tomboy phase. Kathryn's Mom suspected it might be something more. From the age of two onwards, Kathryn herself was utterly certain: "I am a boy," the child insisted.

Kathryn's story was told on the front page of The Washington Post last Sunday, and I found it a gripping tale. It explores Kathryn's sense, expressed consistently through her toddler years, that she is a boy, and her parents' "upheaval" in trying to do the right thing by their child. When Kathryn was four, after seeking professional counseling, the parents decided to let her live as a boy.

Tyler (the pseudonym chosen by the Post for Kathryn's new name) now dresses as a boy and attends preschool as a boy. Is Tyler a transgender child, with a natal sex (female) that does not match his gender identity (male)? Can children so young really know their own gender identity? How can families best support these children?

In a course I teach at William and Mary, Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender, my students and I grapple with questions of this nature. One of our primary texts is Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist and gender-studies expert at Brown University. Three days ago, I spoke with Fausto-Sterling by telephone about some of these issues.

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iStockphoto

Could we distinguish ultra-advanced aliens from gods? I know; it sounds like a preposterous question, but hear me out.

Sci-fi classics, such as Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, explore precisely this idea, that highly advanced alien intelligences would be essentially indistinguishable from gods. This is not news, really, as it has already happened right here on Earth a few centuries ago.

When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, some natives took them to be gods. They looked and dressed strangely, had huge, powerful vessels that could travel vast distances, their origin was uncertain and they could kill from a great distance with weapons of fire. They could do things unimaginable to the natives, far away from their reality.

In our case, "they" would be able to do things we couldn't dream of, such as dematerializing and teleporting to the other side of a wall or, possibly, the other side of the galaxy. They might be able to create new life forms in seconds, or read our minds.

We face serious technological impediments to such feats right now (for starters, just to store the information to reconstruct a human would take so much memory as to be pretty much impossible). But these impediments are in the context of current knowledge. Everyone knows that, in science, the dreams of today often are the reality of tomorrow.

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature," said the great 19th century physicist Michael Faraday.

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Ian Waldie/Getty Images

Today we continue on our tour of quantum-mechanical weirdness. After our last installment on probability, many folks started laying down bets that the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle would be the next stop in the land of weirdness. As the author of the series I, however, was certain they were wrong. In this series I'm trying to go from the most basic assumptions we bring to the world and show how reality, on the quantum level, defies those expectations. So today we stumble across one of the most basic and most weird of quantum conclusions: The Wave Particle Duality.

There is a thing in logic called the Law of Excluded Middle. Aristotle was the first to codify it and it states the obvious fact that a statement about the world should either be true or false.

End of story.

Here we are explicitly focusing on the state of physical or mathematical reality. Statements like "Well, I kind of love her but I am not sure" are not part of the discussion. Think pregnancy. As everyone knows, you can't be "kind of pregnant." The statement "She is pregnant" is either true or it is false.

End of story.

In physics, waves and particles are totally and entirely different kinds of beasts. A particle is a little chunk of mass (mass-energy in fact a la Einstein). Think of a billiard ball. It exists in one place at a time. Waves, on the other hand, exist in many places at once. Think of the ripples spreading out on a pond after a fish breaks the surface. The wave is the entire circular ripple.

Waves and particles behave very differently, as well. When two waves collide they pass through each other. During the moments that they overlap they create either a bigger wave or smaller wave, depending on the positions of their peaks and troughs. This property is called superposition.

At 60 degrees north, at high noon on January 6, in Finland, I saw the sun six degrees above the horizon and truly realized we live on a sphere. Some 10,000 years ago a people speaking a non-Indo-European language, the Finns, migrated into this northern land.

For these past 10,000 years an oral tradition of folk tales and songs called the Kalevala has been kept alive by the people. Generation after generation the Finns sat knee to knee, facing one another, hand holding hand, next to the fire, rocking, telling the tales. For 10,000 years.

The Kalevala was written down in the 19th century. The songs, still sung, had laid the groundwork for a masterpiece similar in its gestation to Homer's Illiad and Odyssey. Just as Homer's works transformed Greek oral tradition into a written form, into literature, so too the Kalevala became literature read by all Finns in high school.

The Kalevala is read in school as we read Chaucer. But the Kalevala is so ancient in its origins and imagery that Chaucer feels a bit like a medieval Days of Our Lives.

A bit of the first song goes something like this:

"The Air-Lass tumbled in the waves, her belly hard with the coming birth of the first bard, tumbled in the waves of the waters. Tumbled for 30 years, hard bellied. Tumbled in the waters."

"A small bird appeared over the Air-Lass in the waters, looking for a place to land. The Air-Lass lifted her knee. The bird landed, grateful."

"The bird laid nine metal eggs: eight iron, one gold. Three hatched. The Air-Lass moved and the other eggs fell into the water. One cracked open. The yellow became the sun. The white became the moon. The bottom half shell became the earth. The top half shell became the sky."

It makes me cry.

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The inner, neural zombie exposed?

Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

The inner, neural zombie exposed?

The zombie within: the idea that we don't know what we are doing, or where we are going, when we think we best know, is an old one. (The words I've just paraphrased are Emerson's.)

James Atlas, in a recent New York Times article, is probably on to something when he notices that there has been an explosion recently of what he wittily calls Can't-Help-Yourself Books. These are books that take as their starting point something like the idea that science now teaches us the "choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system" and that, therefore, in some sense, we are not really the authors of our own actions, responses, choices.

Today I want to come at the question of whether we are really controlled by a neural zombie deep within by considering one route that might lead to that conclusion. This has to do with how we think about thinking, action and the intellect.

John Raoux/AP

The Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket stands ready for launch at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

It was almost one year ago that the space shuttle Atlantis rose into the sky on a pillar of flame for the last time. The shuttle program ended forever with that mission. American astronauts were left to hitch rides on Russian space capsules, and American kids were left with no tangible direction forward for their dreams of a high-tech, space-happy future.

Tomorrow morning, the unmanned Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral so that supplies can reach the space station.

What's the big deal? The Falcon 9 is a private spaceship. It was fully developed and is owned by the private company SpaceX, brainchild of Elon Musk, the Internet billionaire who made his fortune from PayPal. With contracts from NASA to develop new launch platforms, SpaceX and other companies are poised to make space the domain of profitable businesses. And Musk has been explicit about his intentions to go beyond Earth's orbit and build commercially viable ventures that might take people to Mars in a decade or two.

His timing couldn't be better or more urgent. Even with the shuttle program over, America needs to remain a leader in space.

When I was a kid, the U.S. space program fueled my imagination and led me into a life of science. But as I got older, it became clear that the real business of building a human presence across the solar system was going to have to fall to business.

Governments might get the exploration of space started, but the vagaries of election and budget cycles meant that it could never go further. Now, we've reached the point where it's the exploitation of space that matters.

While exploitation might seem a dirty word to some folks, they should stop to consider how dependent we've all already become on the commercialization of that region of space called Low Earth Orbit.

Think of the billions of dollars in commercial activity tied to weather prediction, global broadcasting and global positioning. All this business depends on satellites orbiting overhead right now.

But if, as a species, we want to go beyond the thin veil of space directly overhead, then the basic principles of private venture and risk will have to apply.

These are the ones that have always applied. While Queen Isabella may have given Columbus his ships to cross the Atlantic, it was private companies that built the seagoing trade routes and brought folks across to settle (for better or worse). Likewise, it's only through commercially viable endeavors that large numbers of humans are getting off this world and into the high frontier of space.

It is no small irony that many of the billionaires bankrolling the new space entrepreneurship built their fortunes not in jet-fighter aerospace manufacturing, but in the dream space of the Internet. Like so many of the post-Apollo generation (myself included), these former high-tech whiz kids had their visions of the future forged in rocket fire. In that way, the wide vista of their dreams is uniquely American.

While no one can doubt that problems enough exist here on Earth, the high frontier of space has always called to us as a nation. In stepping out across that threshold, who knows what new solutions we might imagine, what new expressions of our own creativity we might invoke.

But none of it will happen unless we ... get ... out ... there.

I am counting on that small step that SpaceX will take tomorrow to one day prove to be a giant leap for us all.

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When do you think it's socially acceptable to disrobe in public?

Michael Regan/Getty Images

When do you think it's socially acceptable to disrobe in public?

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, the artist Stuart Ringholt leads unusual, after-hours tours: art-gazing in the nude. One day last month, 32 men and 16 women signed up. The New York Times was there to document the tour, in all its glory.

The link between art appreciation and clothes-shedding is pretty tenuous. Ringholt's naked tour may strike you as a mere stunt. Yet it also leads to some interesting questions.

How do we come to be comfortable with certain patterns of dress (or undress) and wildly uneasy about others? What factors influence how different groups or individuals think about nudity and other aspects of body image?

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NASA says an impact with a 500-km-diameter asteroid would effectively sterilize the planet.

Don Davis/NASA

NASA says an impact with a 500-km-diameter asteroid would effectively sterilize the planet.

Sometimes death comes from unexpected places. If you were a dinosaur living some 65 million years ago, your greatest fear was probably other dinosaurs; especially if you weren't a mighty meat-eater like the tyrannosaur, who had little to fear apart from, perhaps, other mighty meat-eaters. Yet, in spite of possible downward trends in some types of dinosaurs, what finished them off was a cosmic cataclysm of untold proportions, the collision with a six-mile wide asteroid.

The impact left a 100-mile-wide crater off the coast of Mexico in the Yucatán peninsula. It's hard to imagine that a single impact could do so much damage. But doing the math, the collision with a rock that big traveling at about 20 miles per second (150 times faster than a jet airliner) would deposit as much energy as one-hundred-thousand times the energy that would have been produced by the detonating all the H-bombs that existed at the height of the Cold War. Apparently, the violence of the impact was such that the rebound shot debris half the distance to the moon.

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Mountains rise, mountains fall: change is constant.

Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

Mountains rise, mountains fall: change is constant.

The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.

We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem.

It might even be THE problem.

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Heads or tails? It should be a 50-50 chance either way.

Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images

Heads or tails? It should be a 50-50 chance either way.

Last week I started a new series of micro-posts touching on the different ways quantum physics is weird. The motivation comes from my summer project of reviewing old notes and reacquainting myself with the mechanics of quantum mechanics. But no matter how many theorems on Eigenstates and Unitary operators I crank out, I am still bothered by how strange the quantum world is compared with our common sense expectations (of course the world cares not a whit about our expectations).

So today's weirdness can be summed up in a single word: probability. We are all familiar with probability. You flip a coin and before it lands there is a 50 percent chance it will come up "heads" and a 50 percent chance it comes up "tails."

The reason we don't know which side we'll get before it lands is because of ignorance.

From this primate mother to all others out there ... Happy Mother's Day!

I'm sharing here a beautiful two-minute video from the forests of Sumatra; it shows the intense, prolonged mother-infant bond among orangutans (great apes from Asia).

You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

Let's call it Heimat is a show by Hans Schabus, a 42-year-old Austrian artist, now up at Simon Preston's gallery at 301 Broome Street in New York's Lower East Side. The focus of the show is a video installation entitled "Atelier." A roughly 10-minute loop, "Atelier" takes as its score the final shoot-out scene in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 movie The Wild Bunch. Cut for cut, and camera angle by angle, "Atelier," which documents the artist's studio and its Vienna neighborhood, is a match to the Peckinpah original.

The dynamics and visual logic of the Peckinpah battle organize our perceptual encounter with what appears to be a safe, benign urban locale. We hear the Peckinpah soundtrack, very loud — mostly the violent noise of gun fire — as it builds energetically to a bloody conclusion.

The effect is darkly hilarious and even shocking; it is mysterious and fascinating, even once you are in on the joke. (See here for a short, very positive review.)

Thanks to Bad Astronomy for posting this beautiful fly-over of the asteroid Vesta via the Dawn space probe.

Enlarge Courtesy of Farm Sanctuary

Courtesy of Farm Sanctuary

Franklin and Lila had no clue they were making history earlier this week when they went to the hospital in upstate New York.

Franklin is a piglet and Lila is a goat. Each was rescued from a life-threatening situation and taken to Farm Sanctuary's new animal hospital, the country's first to be dedicated to what a Sanctuary press release calls "the victims of America's industrialized food system."

I see the new Melrose Small Animal Hospital in Watkins Glen as an excellent step forward in how we may think about, and work to protect, farm animals.

So, the semester is over, which means I have a little more time to turn to issues that keep me awake at night. One thing I am trying to do this summer is relearn some facets of quantum mechanics I may have forgotten over the years. In the process I am getting hit over the head, yet again, with how weird the world is at the micro-level. I was thinking that it would be fun to share these little tidbits with the 13.7 community. So today I begin an ongoing series of little posts on what makes quantum mechanics so strange.

Let's start with the most basic fact. On small enough scales, the world, which seems like a seamless whole to us, resolves itself into sand. What I mean is that, ultimately, reality is granular. That is what "quantum" in physics means: "package." To paraphrase Oliver Morsch:

"The photon... is the the quantum of light and as such indivisible: it is the smallest denomination of the currency of nature representing electromagnetic radiation. With a real currency such as the dollar you can, in principle, speak meaningfully of a fraction of a cent (when quoting for instance, stock market prices) although as a physical object it doesn't exist. No so in physics. A photon cannot be divided into anything smaller, period."

What is true of a photon is also true for something like spin. The spin of a particle is quantized. There are only certain values it takes and nothing else. Everything in nature, including energy, motion and space and time comes in discreet chunks. It's as if when, walking from one side of the room to another, you could only appear and disappear from discreet locations as you cross. That is weird.

And it only gets stranger from there.