Shrimp on Prozac

At least 40 million people worldwide have been prescribed Prozac, but how many of them know that they may be sharing their medication with a crowd of shrimp? The poor shrimp aren’t any happier, either: the antidepressant prompts them to swim upward toward the light, which makes them more likely to be eaten by predatory […]

A Summer Science Poem

It’s summer. The perfect time to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Or, if that proves too taxing, just flop onto the grass and watch all the little invertebrates toiling away: an ant carrying a crumb or a seed, a beetle scurrying over grains of sand, a grasshopper leaping. Beneath the surface is a vast […]

Getting It Wrong, Not Minding One Bit

As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way.  It was supposed to […]

Worker Bees of the World, Unite

In 1909, 20,000 garment workers in New York City went on strike, demanding a 52-hour workweek, paid overtime, and union recognition. The “uprising,” as described in Susan A. Glenn’s marvelous book Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, began a cycle of labor organization that helped build the garment industry unions. […]

Science Metaphors (cont.): Critical Opalescence

I’m aging.  I love too many people whose health and wellbeing is too uncertain.  I want to write about too many things, each one requiring too much time and too many brains.  I take on too many assignments and some of the most important are outside my talents and over my head.  I can’t keep […]