Category Archives: My Work
Smell and Memory
Sniff sniff. Sniff. Have you ever had that experience where you smell something and are whisked back in time to your childhood? A lot of people have. Proust wasn’t just making it up with the whole madeleine thing, you know. … Continue reading
chimney swift excrement
Earlier this week I wrote about yet another way that scientists can use poop: as an archive. On the campus of a university in Ontario, a chimney collected 48 years of poop from chimney swifts that roosted on its walls. … Continue reading
big brains
For humans, it’s pretty much crucial to be able to manage social interactions. Some scientists think that’s actually why we’re intelligent–that our ancestors evolved big brains because having a big brain meant you could navigate your social world better and … Continue reading
great leap forward
Famines are awful, but at least some scientific good can come out of them. They can be really informative natural experiments. Toward the end of the second world war, a German blockade cut food off from part of the Netherlands; … Continue reading
bold honeybees
Social insects like ants and bees may be best known for their division of labor. The queen lays eggs; other bees do other jobs, with varying degrees of specialization. In honeybees, nurse bees take care of the young, foragers fetch … Continue reading
adventures in video production
Last fall I went to a one-day workshop on how to make videos for the web. It was part of the ScienceWriters 2011 meeting in Flagstaff. As part of the workshop, we were sent out in pairs to destinations around Flagstaff … Continue reading
more bird skins
In case Friday’s blog post didn’t have enough birds in it–and I don’t know how that possibly could have been enough birds for anyone–here are some more. The day after I interviewed the scientist at Yale for my blue feathers … Continue reading
best issue ever?
I wasn’t totally complete, it turns out, when I posted earlier about all the people I know in the March issue of Smithsonian. Yes, Sarah Everts, Andrew Curry, and I appear on three consecutive even-numbered pages. But three pages before … Continue reading
blue feathers
A little over a year ago I went to New Haven to visit a scientist at Yale who studies the color blue. He’s an ornithologist who started out studying birds in the field, but lost most of his hearing and … Continue reading
snow leopard scat
Proving yet again that I am the go-to writer for all your poop news needs, I wrote a brief item that appeared on ScienceNOW yesterday about studying snow leopard diet through DNA analysis of their feces. The study found that … Continue reading