“The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity. Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox colonies swim close to a solid surface, they attract one another and can form stable bound states […]
Nature
I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I […]
My favorite tree in the world grows about a mile along my favorite hiking trail in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t say it is the most beautiful tree; it is a little scraggly, and its trunk is not straight, and its needles seem a little thin. There are prettier trees on this particular trail, even, and […]
Note: This post is best read on a computer screen, but a phone’ll still work. One day last year, my friend Tonya messaged our group chat with a lovely update: a heron had landed in front of their house to eat a fish. The rest of us were enchanted by the thought of it, but […]
I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with […]
* Text: If You Were Looking for a Sign, This Is It Yesterday was hard. The day before yesterday, hard, too. Somehow, something about today has made it soft. Not the unrelenting blankness of the December sky. Not the pain in my teeth, or my hands, or my aching heart. Not the electric bill. Not […]
Here’s some moss I saw on a recent walk along the Thames River, west of London. The Thames itself was too high to walk where my traveling companion and I had planned – the trail was underwater, and so were lots of fields and the meadow in the background of this photo, where a woman […]