An Arctic Land without Its Top Predator

I’d just sat down when the first carver approached me. It was my second evening in Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, 2000 kilometers north of Ottawa, and all around me well-heeled bureaucrats were tucking into Arctic char and steak. But the carver, a small weathered-looking Inuk, skirted them and made a beeline toward me. In [...]

Dose Response

The college year in Japan starts in October, so in the fall of 1999 I had an extra month of summer vacation. It was going to be tough committing to a year in such a different place, while navigating a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend in Toronto, but life is for adventure. I arrived at [...]

Science Metaphors (cont): Resonance

My mother was an old lady, she’d lived a good and useful life, and she died a year and ten days ago.  I hadn’t been keeping track of her death’s anniversary but I didn’t need to; I only had to figure out why I was walking around feeling, for no good reason, sad.  One of [...]

Abstruse Goose: A Brief History of Us

AG’s sneaky caption this time is “. . . we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. — Delenn or Carl Sagan.”  It’s apparently a quote from Delenn who is apparently some scifi character who says portentous things.  Carl Sagan was real; also said portentous things; and undoubtedly said something like that, [...]

My mother, on the bleeding edge of health care reform

Among my fondest childhood memories are the hours my family spent discussing B cells and T cells while cruising the highways on our family car camping trips. My mother, Irene Check, is a scientist; both she and my father got their doctoral degrees in microbiology, and my mother has a specialty in immunology – the [...]

Guest Post: Stranger on the Porch

Last week my little black dog wandered off into the sloping hillside behind our Colorado home. Fifteen years old, deaf and suffering from congestive heart failure, she appeared to have succumbed to some primordial call to return to the wilderness to die. She didn’t have far to go. My husband and I live in the [...]

The Last Word on Nothing Jr. Edition, Part Two

Last month, I recommended a few children’s books that I thought reflected the curious, adventurous, and humble scientific spirit of The Last Word on Nothing. Friends and readers have since added their favorite titles to the list — thank you! May these books bring all of you, and the young explorers in your lives, some [...]

Correcting Hollywood Science: Rise of the Planet of the Apes Edition

I don’t have a problem with screenwriters fudging scientific truths as long as they: are internally consistent with their made-up science; and manipulate the facts in the name of telling a good story. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which came out on Friday, follows the first rule and tries to follow the second [...]