Not much is off limits. In research, if you can quantify it, you can study it. In journalism, if you can justify it, you can do it. Our class stories appeared on mongabay.com this week. I wrote about researchers who study cheetah fertility with ultra-sonography. It’s gotten me interested in other ultra-sound uses, beyond the…
I watched a fantastic Nature special on PBS this week about wolverines. I always thought of these critters as small bears with exceptionally angry attitudes. But they’re actually quite fascinating. First off, the wolverine is a weasel, not a bear. They’ll kill and eat deer, small bears, and rodents; meat scavenged from a carcass makes…
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…
In preparation for a spring class in investigative journalism, my classmates and I began filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests this week. There is a certain amount of glamour in investigative journalism. Think clandestine meetings, code names, scandals, lies, and top-level resignations. Here are some tips on investigative journalism from Bob Woodward, a man…
I realized there were no photos of the UC Santa Cruz campus on this blog, so I thought I’d add a few. These are photos that I snapped on my phone’s camera on my way to class in the morning. I apologize for their quality, my phone can only do so much… I never get…
Full disclosure: I’m a dog person. (So is Sascha.) I love their exuberance. Excessive tail wags radiate into full body wiggles. At dinnertime, table manners are optional as they snarf their food. And then there are cats. From my cat-ownership experience, felines are completely aloof and obsessed with cleanliness. They eat dinner one nugget at…
From today’s Twitterverse: Apparently Dick Van Dyke fell asleep on a surfboard and woke up to no land in sight, but fins all around. The fins belonged to a group of porpoises that pushed the actor back to dry land. ~~ What’s the news here, that Dick Van Dyke was surfing at 84, or porpoises…
I am a world-changer, at heart. I have led a privileged life, not without its challenges; but it still provides a stable place from which I feel an obligation to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Sometimes, you never know what impact you’re going to have on the world, as we learned this week…
Here are some pictures from a field biology trip a few years ago. We went from Auburn, Alabama to Portal, Arizona and back in 9 days. We camped on BLM lands and surveyed small mammals (bats and rats) at every stop. The picture with the bucket shows how you catch a ground squirrel (should you…
Interviewing scientists in academia presents unique challenges. A lot of the researchers I have interviewed so far have been friendly, funny, and happy to answer questions. I get great quotes from our conversations. Sometimes I send quotes and explanatory paragraphs back to researchers to make sure they are factually accurate. Some of the researchers take…
