October 14 – 18 This week. Oh cripes, this week. We’ve been told that the US government shutdown cost more than the NASA budget, and had all kinds of knock-on effects on everything from basic science to public health. But what’s it like on the ground when a city shuts down? Helen gave us the […]
Helen
The first I knew of it was about 11:00 Monday night. The Capital Weather Gang, a brilliant blog that was snapped up by the Washington Post a few years ago, posted on Facebook: “Have seen some reports of a fireball (large meteor) in DC area around 8:25 pm. Anyone see it?” Comments came in. A […]
Whales are impressive, enormous, beloved animals. Whaling has been banned since the 1980s, but it still goes on in a few pockets of the world. I spent three years of my life in two of those pockets, Norway and Japan, but somehow had never eaten any whale meat. Until this spring. Over the 17th of […]
I love museums, and my hometown, Washington, D.C., is full of them. You’ve heard of the big ones—the Air and Space Museum with the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Natural History Museum with its elephant and dinosaurs. We’ve got privately-owned tourist bait, like the Spy Museum and a branch of Madame Tussauds. Then there’s a pile […]
One morning last month a friend and I took a train from London to the city of Gloucester, in southwestern England. The next morning after breakfast we started walking on the Cotswold Way, one of the UK’s National Trails. On its way to Bath, 60-some miles away, the trail passes through quiet beech forests, open […]
Recently I was rehearsing a glorious 16th-century motet with a group of 20 or so people. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, the song begins. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. It’s an Easter text and a lovely thought, whether or not you think the […]
Readers! Please welcome science writer Helen Fields, the newest person of LWON (or LaWON if you prefer). You may remember that she wrote a lovely guest post last year to help us rookies figure out how to visit a natural history museum. The exceedingly talented Helen has written about frogs and crayfish and whales and […]
I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s […]