By the time dermatologist Sanjeev Vaishampayan met his patient, a 45-year-old father of four, the man was in a bad way. Antibiotics had taken care of the infected lesions on his legs, but now the man had a new and mortifying problem: His genitals were bulging and bloated. “The scrotum was huge and its contents […]
Month: December 2013
About a month ago, I wrote a review of a play by David C. Cassidy about Farm Hall. Farm Hall was the English country house in which the British government, just after World War II, sequestered the German nuclear scientists they’d kidnapped. The scientists’ rooms were bugged, and their conversation was recorded and transcribed by […]
My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl. The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.) […]
Several weeks ago I was invited to sit in on a fascinating workshop on journalism. Hosted by the Mexican Society for Science and Technology Communication (SOMEDICYT), it was a collection of science writers from Mexico and abroad gathered together to discuss the definition of science journalism. It was the kind of philosophical dialogue that you don’t […]
This weekend the moon pulled back the curtains on the beach, revealing plenty of sand in the evening hours. I love the beach in the winter, particularly near dusk. The sand seems to go on for miles; when there’s a full moon, it rises from behind the mountains, which are still rosy from alpenglow. I […]
December 9 – 13 Guest Michael Balter would like scientists to understand that by talking to science writing grad students, they’re talking to the people who will one day be representing their work to the public. Please and thank you. I wouldn’t consider reading my horoscope but in any case, it’s always wrong. Abstruse Goose […]
Out of 20 million premature and underweight babies born each year, four million die. Most are in developing countries. Solving this problem is not just a short-term humanitarian effort, it also constitutes low-hanging fruit in the international development field. When infant mortality goes down, we tend to see population sizes decrease as well. Poverty can […]
Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants. After […]
