Making decisions about your own medical care is tough. Making decisions about a child’s medical care is tougher still. But making decisions about care for your unborn child? Nothing is harder than that. And these days, there is no end to the decisions that must be made: genetic testing? Birth attendant? With or without medication? […]
Month: March 2011
There’s this idea, and I don’t know who started it, but it’s definitely floating around, out there, that science journalists are disheveled, frazzled, socially awkward and overall, just not very cool. That nasty rumor, if I ever believed it, was quickly dispelled the day I met Erika Check Hayden. This woman is polished — in […]
The subject line in the e-mail was, “Congratulations, I think….” The message itself said, “Just read about Dark Matter finally outing itself.” “Huh?” I wrote back. “Haven’t you heard??? Dark Matter has been telescopically (is that a word?) observed!” The message came from a graduate student of mine during holiday break this past December. He […]
Re: Heather’s post on people who’d lost people in recent, godawful earthquakes and found them again via Google technologies. I’d watched another high-tech-mediated search and though it doesn’t really bear thinking about, I’ll tell you anyway. On February 1, 2007, I got an email from an astronomer named Alex Szalay saying in case I hadn’t […]
Baltimore has a hard-core drug problem. The evidence is unmistakable. Head down an alley in the wrong part of town and you’re liable to find a discarded needle, some broken vials, and maybe even a shell casing or two. Why, yes. That was a gunshot. See that guy on the corner? No, he’s not tired. […]
Ann, I see your crows and raise you ravens. With a beak like a Swiss army knife and an intellect to match, the raven is an icon, mascot and pest, as mysterious as it is ubiquitous. For me, as for most people up North, these winged scavengers hover just below my conscious radar. They steal […]
In late February, I had my first experience of worrying from afar about a good friend caught in a catastrophic earthquake. The anxiety started just before six in the evening of February 21st, after I’d knocked off work for the day and idly flipped on the radio to catch some news. I was only half […]
You doubtless remember quantum mechanics: the deeply incomprehensible chain of reasoning about how particles are also waves; and the waves aren’t physical but waves of probability; and any given thing about which you’re certain means you’re uncertain about something else. And so on, far into the night. The worst thing about it is, apparently it’s […]
