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…
Tag Archives | A Tale of Ten Slugs
Scientist Are Like Vampires
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…
All a-Twitter in New Haven
I and six other scribbling slugs rolled back home again after attending ScienceWriters2010. We’ve been basking in the light of the field’s luminaries, gathering advice and business cards and doing what we could to introduce ourselves as up-and-coming colleagues. It was a meeting of many firsts for me: first visit to New Haven, first time…
proceed with caution. love, captain obvious
I’d been warned. But I did not heed the warning: do not look at comments posted about your news stories. I’ve heard various incarnations of this statement, and yet…and yet, I do view online feedback. With trepidation. Sometimes it’s helpful. Sometimes, it’s encouraging. And sometimes it makes me want to throw down my pen computer…
Awesome words
First of all, I need to talk about “awesome.” It’s a lofty word, brought low. Awe describes an overwhelming sense of wonder, mixed with dread and fear. It’s a word more suited to describing enchantment or mystical, non-ordinary states of consciousness, not graphic t-shirts. Eddie Izzard first brought this issue to my attention. Before you…
Disaster, inspiration, and the way home
The biology department at Auburn University has a tradition called Bio-Lunch where graduate students invite a scientist to come and speak about their work over a brown bag lunch. My friend, Sara, came bursting into the lab one day to tell me that she had been chosen to invite the guest speaker for the next…
Museum Mishaps
Last night the National Association of Science Writers held a ScienceWriters2010 welcome reception in the Peabody Museum of Natural History here at Yale. The entrance of the museum is graced with this terrific hanging squid. From airplanes to whale bones, museums display all sorts of heavy, hanging objects. While staring up at the squid from…
Slug Mafia
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…
Perhaps Sinatra didn’t know about E. coli…
…or else these would have been the lyrics to “Strangers in the Night.” The opening party for the National Association of Science Writers annual meeting was Friday. A folk singer, a classical guitar/opera duo, and an astronomical a cappella group serenaded about 600 science writers with songs about science. Some people write about science, others…
Greetings from ScienceWriters 2010
There’s lots of great workshops here at ScienceWriters 2010, with topics ranging from being an effective Public Information Officer, to the social web and online commenting, and how to write great science books. My first workshop today was Profitable freelancing: Starting a business and keeping it productive. I found it very practical and informative, with…