Or, “How the article I wrote got ripped-off within an hour” I was excited this week to publish an article about a new kind of underwater robot in Nature News. I basically got lucky and happened to talk to a researcher about the right thing at the right time, and found out about this story….
Since I’m sure we’re all friends here, I’ll admit something to you. I’m a tidier person when I’m living with someone. I’m looking at my kitchen table as I type. It is a kind of wounded battlefield of Post-its, notebooks and slips of paper covered in a familiar hand. I will spare you the description…
The otters our class saw on our field trip to Monterey Bay were awfully cute. But I have to admit there was a piece of my former engineer’s heart that was touched, not by the furry faces, but by the antennas, radio transmitters, temperature and depth recorders, and GPS computers the scientists showed us. The sensors were…
Nads is on a roll and I thought I’d share a set of my own loose associations triggered after my facebook status update netted a comment by an astronomer. My original caption: “See, otters. OR It otter be illegal to kayak near otters. Oh wait, it is; 50 meter restraining order on all Homo sapiens.”…
Never turn your back on the ocean. [images captured during SciCom trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Tuesday, 10.26.10, to observe and learn about otter-observers learning about otters.]
I found another writing trick this week. This one helps me make sure my story flows in a logical order, and that it addresses all the important points. Editing our own work is hard. We all gloss over sentences when we already know what we meant them to say. We know how we got from…
1. Sea otters have the densest hair of any mammal – around 900,000 hairs per square inch (140,000 hairs/cm2)[1]. That’s more than 500X denser than the hair on the human scalp, which averages at 1600 hairs per square inch (250 hairs/cm2).[2] 2 Sea otters have individual preferences for prey. Some sea otters prefer to crunch…
I got a little taste of the perils of field research when some of us got drenched by a wave where the researchers first set up. They assured us they’d never experienced something like that in over 10 years. Once we got set up though, things went smoothly, and we actually got to collect sea-otter…
Here is a short video of our class field trip to see the otter trackers in action. I’m just learning to use iMovie so this was an editing film exercise for me.
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…
