Red Badge of Courage (Or, The One Where I Jinx Myself)

Guest poster Mary Caperton Morton wrote a lovely post about poison oak a few years back, but I just had this itch… I saw an old friend—or foe, I guess—on a run last weekend. Leafless during winter, the poison oak in a nearby park has started to push out shiny green triads along the trail [...]

The Last Word on The Science Writers’ Handbook

LWON is a group blog run semi-anarchically by 12 science writers. If you think that sounds like a recipe for chaos, just contemplate SciLance, an even more anarchic group of 35 science writers. Usually, SciLance is just a discussion group, so the chaos is relatively subdued. But last week, the writers of SciLance published their [...]

Look Out My Window, There Goes Home

Most of the people I follow on Facebook are friends from high school and college, so I usually see photos of kids, drinking establishments, and scenic shots of the West.  But recently I caught on to what 710,000 twitter followers and 219,354 Facebook friends (as of Tuesday) already knew–and started following Col. Chris Hadfield, a [...]

Whereas the Microbe

An important decision faces Oregon’s lawmakers this week. It concerns a $2.4 billion industry, an organism that’s important in genetics and other research, and a ritual that boosts the happiness of the multitudes, starting around 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I know, I know. I could have just said that Oregon is considering making brewer’s [...]

TGIPF: A Deep-Sea Squid Does It Upside-Down and Backward

Let me start with the squid “penis” and get to the mysterious grooves on the seafloor later. Last April an ROV called Little Hercules, cruising around the seafloor in the northern Gulf of Mexico, spotted a distant, possibly cephalopod-like shape. As Little Hercules got closer, NOAA researcher Mike Vecchione reports in the mission log, “the [...]

The last word

25 February to 1 March This week, Ann blew all our minds with the story of the Farm Hall tapes, the greatest-ever lesson in counterfactual thinking.  Also, just off the cuff, who else thinks a dubstep group called “Hitler’s Uranium Club” lurks in our future? Cameron says no one does austerity quite like the people [...]

Teach Your _____ Well

When I was a teenager, my dad installed a timer on my bedroom light. After 45 minutes, the light would flash a few times. Then, darkness. My dad was tired of me falling asleep with my light on. It was such a waste of energy. This, he said, was the perfect solution. I started thinking [...]

TGIPF: Alligator Awesome

We now return to our occasionally-scheduled Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in [...]