I’ve always admired time-lapse videos. You can watch the seasons turn or cloud banks roil against a mountain range in a matter of seconds. One guy shot a time-lapse of himself driving across the country, although this takes several minutes to watch. After learning how to make my own time-lapse sequence in class, I spent…
I don’t normally watch reality tv, but I’ve recently started watching one show. Filmed high up in a tree in Decorah, Iowa, two cameras record the lives of a family of bald eagles. This weekend saw some excitement, with the hatching of two of the three eggs mom laid about 40 days ago. Here’s a…
Who needs an alarm clock when you’ve got the Whomping Willow wailing on your deck? Or Whomping Pine Tree as it were… The part that smashed into our house around 10:30 last night completed its ground assault early this morning (7:30am), waking everyone in the house. It also took our neighbor’s power line with it….
We’ve been having some intense weather today. Wave after wave of hail woke me up this morning – little stones clattering on the roof. Anything that isn’t nailed down has been wildly bouncing in the wind. Our power started to flicker off and on earlier in the evening. I was speaking with one of my…
Coming back from last week’s AAAS 2011 Annual Meeting in Washington D.C., some of my classmates and I went through Dulles International Airport. After a fun, but stressful, three-day meeting, I was ready to come home. But as airport security herded my fellow travelers and I towards the metal detectors, I wound up facing those…
I am an intern at an organization I used to work at as a science graduate student. I was really nervous about seeing people I had worked with again….I would not be talking to them about the latest data points my computer spit out, or the difficulty I was having in lab. Instead, I would…
A friend of mine died one year ago today. Stomach cancer. It was quick, but not painless. When she was diagnosed it was already pretty advanced, and she wasn’t ready to go. Near the end though I think she was just tired. I hope it was a relief for her. I know she was surrounded…
Many people have heard about the great migrations Monarch butterflies undergo each winter. But I had no idea what they did the rest of the year. It turns out that entire generations live and die before we see the next wave of migrants sweep through California. The Monarchs that we see during the winter migrations…
I started today with a plan. I would go into my internship and finish up an article about robots that never showed up. Then I would write a short piece about a local girl scout troop that won a robotics competition. But, an hour into my day, I got tasked to write about an instructor…
I had a chance to cover a demonstration last week involving the military and unmanned autonomous vehicles (a.k.a. robots) for my internship. The robots were designed to fly out, locate wounded soldiers on a battlefield, and relay the soldier’s vitals like heart rate and blood pressure back to doctors and medics at a base. Since…
