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Guest Post: The Trajectory of the Sting
Who doesn’t love hijinks? Last week, science journalist John Bohannon brought the hijinks. He wrote on io9.com about how he joined a sting operation designed to reveal the lightning-quick path from bad...
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Guest Post: Praised Be
“I have an idea,” said my friend Chris. We often walk and talk briskly together in the California beach town where we live. Not long before, we’d talked about how the Earth’s huge population is a...
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Guest Post: Upvote This Post, Pleeease!
Is your cat slowly killing you? Here’s why you should…SQUIRREL! Haha, so cute You won’t believe the 17 ways you’re doing online science journalism wrong! Number 25 will make you cry[1] Are you a...
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The myth of the breastfeeding diet
Breastfeeding is often sold to new mothers as a bulletproof way to lose the baby weight. The promise is the same whether you’re getting advice from lactation experts, mummy blogs, Unicef, midwives, or...
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Guest Post: Waiting Out the Latter Days
Steven Smith — a photographer who grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church, and whom I’ve known a long time — sent me a book he’s just published. It’s called...
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Guest Post: On Being Pro-Frog
Northern Leopard frog in marsh on my land When my first daughter started getting teased for her obsession with sharks I comforted her by lying that everyone had an animal they especially loved. When...
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Guest Post: I Had a Hamster. I’m Pretty Sure He Killed Himself.
This week, while working on a little story for Science about hamster emotions, I decided to do some hard-hitting journalism, so I called my mother. “Mom, I want to know what happened to Hamlet,” I...
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Guest Post: How to Stop a Tsunami in Three Easy Steps
Right now, parents newly versed in the vocabulary of doom are discussing the Cascadia subduction in Seattle backyards, in Portland parks. They’ve read the recent New Yorker article about the...
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Guest Post: Postcard from El Salvador
Agricultural engineer Irene Varela is a compelling presence. Six farmers are gathered on the patio of a church library in Santiago Texacuangos in El Salvador, about an hour outside the country’s...
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Story, History, Story
Ann: Some time ago, I got interested in why European languages so often use the same word for “story” and “history.” Every English speaker knows that having one word for two such different things —...
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I’ll Miss You Summer
My son’s new school supplies shine too brightly in the corner of my office. It’s the standard fare: glue sticks, soon to be dried out felt pens, a rainbow of highlighters, a cheap pencil sharpener made...
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Guest Post: The Lords of Yesterday
As my husband and I drove into Ouray, Colorado recently, we both gasped. The red-grey cliffs of 14,000-foot mountains cradle the old mining town, with waterfall lacework tracing down the mountainsides...
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Guest post: Water Unbound
It has been raining for three days now, really raining, the kind of rain that can only occur in a place that receives upwards of 7 meters of rain a year. Three days ago, water began pouring out of the...
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Guest Post: the Grandmother Hypothesis
Recently I’ve started seeing examples of those much-mocked New York Times trend stories that are not about Millennials, the way the trendiest trend stories usually are. In the articles I’ve been...
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Guest Post: How the Bolivian Navy Became Landlocked
Cassandra wrote a post about the landlocked Bolivian navy in which she explained, in passing, that Bolivia once had a coast but lost it to Chile in the War of the Pacific. One of the comments on that...
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Guest Post: Science Fail
When I was in 4th grade, my teacher gave everyone in class an ice cube. Our task, she said, was to keep it from melting for as long as possible. In a room full of 10 year olds, that task turned into a...
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Guest Post: Why humans suck at earthquake preparedness
Driving through my hometown in Kentucky, I admire the old-growth oaks, the spires and stained glass of Victorian era homes, and the tall brick chimneys. Then I think about how they would crumble in an...
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Guest Post: A Mathematical Mastermind Gets His Head Examined
On a December day a few years ago, John Horton Conway settled in for an interview at the office of neuroscientist Sandra Witelson. Conway wasn’t there for an appointment proper, but rather to provide...
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Guest Post: How to Navigate a Rising Sea
When Alson Kelen was young, he used to lie at night against his father’s arm, on an island where there were no lights and no cars. He listened to waves slapping against wet sand, the breeze shaking...
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Guest Post: The Lizards of Hastings-on-Hudson
The legend begins thus: In 1967 — or maybe it was ’66 — a pet store truck overturned in Long Island, sending a few dozen finger-length Italian wall lizards scampering into the bushes of Garden City....
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