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Guest Post: Reaffirming Reason in Chattanooga
Almost exactly a year ago, as I drove across one of the bridges that span the Tennessee River near my home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a bumper sticker “Proud of everything a liberal hates” flashed...
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Guest Post: Long Live Bears Ears
Bears Ears is one of the last places in the desert southwest where the marks left by mankind on the landscape are whisper-light. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that our President has never set foot...
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Mary Anning, Paleontolopeep
Once upon a time there was a fossil seller and paleontologist named Mary Anning. In the early 19th century, she and her brother found the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton. In the early 21st...
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Guest Post: Astronomer’s Telegram Rediscovers Mars
Early on 20th March, professional theoretical cosmologist and amateur astrophotographer Peter Dunsby of the University of Cape Town was imaging a beautiful part of the sky, in the constellation of...
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Guest Post: Ballooning Spiders
My favorite walk. Of course the paragliders hid today. Most spring days on my favorite walk, I watch a small group of people wearing packs trudge up a grassy hill. Once they reach the top they spread...
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The Last Word
April 16-20 For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and...
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Guest* Post: The Scientist Who Became Obsessed with Magic Lanterns
A magic lantern slide. When Kentwood Wells was 12 years old, he and his parents stumbled across a magic lantern in an antique shop during a Maine vacation. The instrument, an old image projector that...
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Guest Post: This Isn’t the First Time Central American Children Have Been...
On November 14, 2017, about 25 women gathered in a large white community center in Morazon, a remote district in eastern El Salvador along the country’s border with Honduras. The meeting was in second...
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Guest Post: The Candi Cane Cooper Caper, or, The Mathematics of Dr. Dolittle
A few weeks ago, I started a long-anticipated, summer-long camping trip, with my dog Frances, my cat Lao, and my husband John joining us part of the time. One evening, we were in our camper van in an...
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Guest Post: Forgotten Stories
Every science journalist has a mixed portfolio. Some stories go viral. Others feel as if they’re read by five people including your parents. Our pieces also have a spectrum of meaningfulness. I’ve...
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Guest Post: Geology 101
My husband and I went to Scotland to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We walked on footpaths in the Highlands and noticed all the ways the landscape differed from our favorite hiking trails in...
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Guest Post: The Power of Water and Its Absence
As I put today’s fifth pot of water on the stove to boil, I think about how this has become part of my daily routine. Bring 5 quarts of water to a boil, set the timer for 3 minutes, pour some in the...
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Guest Post: Window Tree
All year long, I’ve been haunted by a poem. When I sit down to work or go for a walk, it drifts into my mind: Tree at my window, window tree My sash is lowered when night comes onBut let there never...
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Guest Post: Bright Buggies, Bright Futures
In rural central Pennsylvania, in a long narrow valley originally named Kishacoquillas, now nicknamed Big Valley, the Amish buggies are not black and grey but white and yellow. You might think these...
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I Had a Hamster. I’m Pretty Sure He Killed Himself.
This was my first guest post for LWON, in 2015. I’m reposting it because there’s yet another update: A few days ago, my mother revealed that, CONTRARY TO ALL HER PREVIOUS CLAIMS, it was the cat. …...
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Guest Post: Christine’s Killing Fields
Years ago, when I moved into my house, I had a dream. I was going to remove all the grass, destroy the lawn and never have to mow. My yard—nay, my patchwork of service-providing gardens—would offer...
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Guest Post: Weird Rock, Weirder Story
“There is an aspect to this story that is weirder than you can imagine.” That sentence was e-mailed to me by a geologist, Jan Kramers, at the University of Johannesburg in the waning days of 2017. I...
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Once a Wolf
Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, slightly fixed up. A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab...
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Guest Post: How to be alone
I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter,...
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One Voice, Many Vaccines
Twenty biomedical companies. Seventy nations. An aggressive search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is underway worldwide. Yet even 21st-century technology can’t match one man who curbed a major...
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