Dotting the desert landscape of southern Afghanistan, there are 12 U.S. Marine Corps outposts. Two of them are fairly large Marine Corps bases, approximately 10 miles in diameter, and 2,000 to 3,000 Marines live and work there. They have cinderblock buildings, green circus-sized tents, and hundreds of little white rectangular trailers that serve as living…
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 was in India over winter break, and one of the funnier aspects of being home was trying to explain to people what I was actually doing. Like Jane, I had thought it hard enough to explain to former professors, but most of them at least knew about UC Santa Cruz. Most people that I…
We had some relatively cold weather here on the central coast of California this weekend. There was even some talk of snow down in Santa Cruz, but I think that fantasy melted by Saturday afternoon. Not everybody in the area was hoping for flurries. Some growers in the Salinas Valley, the Salad Bowl of the…
As many of you know, I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. #ilovewaffles (1/2) Some days, I’m tempted to relinquish my membership for reasons that will remain mysterious, (2/2) and other days, I eagerly watch my Twitter feed as if it were the latest episode of “Glee.” #gleek! But until the #AAASmtg, I didn’t regularly…
Where there are science writers, there’s schmoozing. And parties during the AAAS meeting last week elevated the evening social gathering to a new standard of sophistication. One event, at the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., featured fancy finger food and cocktails in test tubes. At another, waiters served bison sausage with jelly. But my favorite…
NASA’s Kepler team announced last week they’d found more than a thousand potential planets – after just *four months* of observation. The numbers make my head spin like…oh, never mind. (Since you asked, my favorite Kepler story lede? Dennis Overbye’s, in the New York Times: “Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and…
If any masthead defines the culture of tech-geek-cool, it’s Wired. For the savvy, info-hungry reader, Wired gives a smart, incisive take on everything . . . with an extra fleck of awesomeness. Last week the folks behind Student Voices, one of the Nature blogs, kindly asked to write about what it’s like to be at…
A couple of good lemon recipes One of my favorite cakes to make, containing a few of my favorite things: zucchini, olive oil and lemons. Zucchini Cake with Crunchy Lemon Glaze With eggs, almonds, cream and lemons, this frittata-cum-tart is a knee-weakening swirl of flavors. Cake, Tart, Frittata: Call It the New Baking I haven’t…
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…
