The thing with having such a common name is that it’s both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because googling yourself brings up tons of other people, all with your name, and you can get lost in the crowd. The bad comes when you go to the emergency room and the nurse…
The ScienceWriters 2010 conference is jammed full of future colleagues. And there is a healthy contingent of Slug alums, in addition to us newbies. When people find out that I’m a slug, they have nothing but good things to say about the program (although I doubt they would start in on any negative thoughts they…
When I hear that otters spend X percent of their time feeding (or some other behavior), how do scientists know that? Surely they don’t follow otters around to see what they do all day… As it turns out, that’s exactly what researchers do. So how do you follow a marine mammal around? What are the…
Although it sounds like an unpleasant way to take dictation, this weighty sounding word has a pedestrian meaning. It is the act of sneezing. The National Institutes of Health says sneezes are triggered when the mucous lining of your nose or throat is irritated. Things like pollen, dust or pepper can set off a bout…
In graduate school, I studied a group of jellies called siphonophores. Most people had never heard of them, except for the Portuguese Man-O-War. (I have now taught spell-check the word ‘siphonophores’) As part of my research, I took pictures of my specimens. I knew nothing about photography, so my time in the field was a…
Working at a daily newspaper is quite a roller coaster of emotions. Panic, excitement, panic, wonder, panic, the satisfaction of completing a story…Learning to function and think while on this ride is no easy task. And sometimes it’s frustrating not to be able to do justice to a topic when you know there are so…
I have been trying for years to get my friends and family to eat more sustainable seafood, use less disposable bags, and generally try to think about what they use and throw away. I’ve had limited success. But, once I started writing about some of these issues for a newspaper, I got comments along the…
