I didn’t grow up eating Thanksgiving dinner, but over the years I’ve learned how to do the traditional American turkey-day right. There’s the carving of large birds, the mashing of potatoes, and of course, the skipping of lunch. Most people I know skip lunch on Thanksgiving. We may call it “saving room for dinner,” but…
There’s a room at UC Santa Cruz filled with chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon and green tea, bananas and pineapple. But far from ready-to-eat desserts, all are leafy and green, basking in the humid light of one of the three UCSC campus greenhouses. A certain former UCSC student and plant aficionado in my life recently told…
This past weekend I willingly deprived myself of sleep in order to participate in Science Hack Day in San Francisco. What is a Hack Day? Well, a hack is a quick solution to a problem. Not necessarily pretty, but probably clever. A Hack Day is usually a 48 hour event where people with ideas get together and make…
One minute I’m milling around the dock of the Santa Cruz harbor, the next minute I’m hurtling out to sea on a 23-foot motorboat named “Aquaholic,” a chilly Pacific gale plastering hair across my face as I shout out questions about crab fishing and scribbling down the answers in a notepad that threatens to be…
So I was a little worried when I read that birds are apparently getting bigger in the central Californian area. A team led by Rae Goodman from San Francisco State University studied data of bird populations of 40 years at one site and 27 years at another and found that, slowly but surely, bird wing…
On Halloween, an adventure-seeking Santa Cruz surfer braved wintery water temperatures and paddled a half-mile out past Seabright Beach wearing only a bikini. But she wasn’t trying to catch a wave. The scantily clad surfer was trawling for an intimate look at the humpback whales that had been feeding off the coast. And she was…
Would you like lemon on your transgenic fish? In the interest of subduing the emotional reaction many have to genetically modified salmon when calling it ‘frankenfish’, I’ll refer to it by its technical title. But what is an appropriate name for a modified fish operating under the guise of two different fish genes— a deepwater…
It took me a long time to learn that I have a touch of road rage. The first time my husband watched me come slightly unhinged in gridlock, he only had one thing to say: “If you’re complaining, you’re part of the problem.” Now that I’m spending a year as a California road warrior, it’s…
Zooommbieeees… Hordes of people—numbed by the Great Recession, perhaps—have once again staggered toward fresh zombie fare. But unlike other zombie fever outbreaks, splatters from the pop-culture feast are landing in the far corners of science—and they’re leaving quite the mark. Since George Romero’s 1968, genre-defining film, Night of the Living Dead, zombie zeal has lurched…
Wake up, Linus, the Great Pumpkin is finally coming! On Oct. 10, Leonardo Ureña of Napa won the Half Moon Bay giant pumpkin weigh-off with a 1704-pound behemoth — a new California record. Ureña is part of a blooming subculture of competitive pumpkin growers that are smashing pumpkin records left and right. The world record,…
