Author Archives: Helen
Snow Around Trees
Up here above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, spring has been slow to come. I suppose technically it arrived on March 20, the same as everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, but we’ve got a while to wait until nature … Continue reading
Greater Wax Moth Ear News
No, not greater moth earwax news. News about the ears of the greater wax moth. It’s a moth that causes problems for apiculturalists around the world, by crawling into beehives and laying eggs so the larvae can hatch and fatten … Continue reading
Love my Livescribe Pen
I just realized I’d never pointed out a blog post I wrote months ago for the website of the Science Writers’ Handbook. I’ve raved on many occasions about my Livescribe pen, so the folks who are running the blog asked … Continue reading
Bug on my Snow
You know you’re ready to be done with winter when you get excited about seeing flies. This bug was on the snow in front of the Swedish Institute for Space Physics in Kiruna, Sweden. It’s a fly. A big, fuzzy … Continue reading
How to Find Out What Dolphins Eat
How do you find out what animals eat? Well, one way is to collect their poop. What goes in must come out, in one form or another. Before the rise of DNA techniques, the only way to analyze feces was … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Cité de l’Espace
Toulouse is a lovely city in Southwestern France, known for its pink-tinged bricks, violets, and art museums. But it’s also a major center for air and space business and science. Airbus has its headquarters there. It was space science that … Continue reading
In Other Book News….
I wrote a Friday Snapshot for the book blog. It’s about a Friday I spent in Switzerland about a month ago – I wrote it then and they held it until there was a hole in the schedule. I actually … Continue reading
Book Coming Soon!
Things are heating up for The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age. I contributed two sidebars to this book, and I think it’s excellent–full of good, solid, practical advice about how … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Musée Saint-Raymond
People have been living in Toulouse for thousands of years. To learn about the slice of that history from a bit before the year 1 to a few hundred years after, I heartily recommend a stop at the Musée Saint-Raymond, … Continue reading
DotW: Berlitz French Compact Dictionary
You can’t buy a dictionary online, or you shouldn’t, anyway; you have to flip through the pages and see if it has the words you want. So, when I found out I was going to be spending several weeks in … Continue reading