Last fall, our class visited the sea otter researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sandeep summarized many neat tidbits about otters from that trip on this blog. Two items that really piqued my interest involved otter mortality. In California, many otters die from disease or shark bite. What’s going on? I tracked down the answer during…
One day in the late 1980s, my friend S’mores and I were thrashing a rad quarter-pipe (skateboarding) at his house in the suburbs of Houston. S’mores’ Dad, responsible for a fleet of company cars, was reading about cleaning up spilled oil. He had put a research report titled “Enhanced Biodegradation of Aliphatic and Aromatic Hydrocarbons…
Whenever I have to write about science in detail, or explain a concept, I find that I default to ‘science-robot’ mode. I write in very dry, technical terms, just getting all the facts in there. And I end up with something that, while technically correct and factually accurate, no one could possibly read without his…
