Even though I no longer plan to be a biologist… (science music part I)

Science education amounts to a Great Winnowing — from millions of school kids fascinated by science down to orders of magnitude fewer actually making a living, or a life, doing it decades later. Whatever the reasons so many flee or are pushed out of science — and there are many, both personal and institutional — [...]

Humanity Under Attack: The Story of Morgellons

In 2001, Mary Leitao noticed something odd: a fiber poking out of an irritated patch of skin on her two-year-old son’s lip. In the weeks to come, more fibers emerged. Leitao examined them under the light of her RadioShack microscope, but she couldn’t figure out what they were. So she turned to the internet. There she [...]

A Reason to Stay

There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public [...]

When is it time to revise our story?

Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote: At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?” Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even [...]

Abstruse Goose: The Sliver of Perception

That vertical axis — the electromagnetic spectrum which is science-talk for light — actually goes from something like 3 x 102 to something like 3 x 1024 (in the same units), which is from radio waves, through microwaves, to infrared, to the visible (that tiny rainbow window there), to the ultraviolet, to xrays, to gamma rays. [...]

Six Million and Counting

Dry Spells

In the spring of the year 73, thousands of Roman soldiers raided Masada, a fortress on top of a cliff in the Judean Desert. For seven years, the Jews had tried, unsuccessfully, to split from the Roman empire, and Masada was the last holdout. According to the ancient historian Josephus, when the Romans breached Masada’s walls, [...]

Vanishing Points

If the artwork to the left looks familiar, the reason might be that it was part of the argument that Ann made in her post on Tuesday. She suggested that the beauty of the Florentine paintings of the fifteenth century—“stunning, literally; you look at them and can hardly breathe”—couldn’t have been due only to the [...]

The Problem with Patient Zero

On a hot and humid day in October, a man wandered through the city of Mirebalais, Haiti. He was naked, but his neighbors didn’t pay much attention. The man had always been crazy. In fact, townspeople called him “moun fou” — lunatic or fool. He headed toward the bank of the Latem River, where he [...]

Night terrors

This is how it happens for me: I’m completely asleep, and then something terrible creeps across the room, reaches spindly, pincer-like fingers for my hand, and pinches. That pinch is what wakes me up in terror, gasping and whimpering and trying desperately to pull my arm under the covers. But I can’t. I can’t do [...]