Several times a week, I drive over a Hudson River bridge to pick up my daughter from her school in Troy, NY, and bring her back home to the Albany side. Back and forth I go, and every time my eye wanders to the frozen surface below. Even when it’s dark and there’s nothing to […]
Month: March 2014
Ann: Will Storr is a phenomenon.* His specialty is writing good stories about people in bad places. He’s got a story in Matter about an extremely unpleasant disease called Morgellons. People with Morgellons have terrible itches, then tiny fibers creep out of their skin and make oozy sores. The disease sounds like a horror story out […]
I’m a lover of science and a devoted knitter. Science-related projects that appear on the internet and have to do with yarn find their way into my inbox. That means I am aware of the project in Glasgow to knit microbes for elementary schools. I am in love with that shawl that depicts the night […]
March 10 – 14 This week, Christie told us that story she doesn’t tell. Then lots of other people flocked to the comments to tell theirs. Guest poster Daniel O’Connell asked if there’s gold in them thar evolutionary hills. Cameron wondered if deep-sea species will be soon be forced to have their own reality show. […]
Joey Pakes was swimming in a cave in Mexico on July 4, 2008 when she spotted her first remipede. Pakes, a graduate student in biology at UC Berkeley, had seen pictures of these aquatic centipede-like creatures before. But when she encountered one in the wild, the experience was completely different. “They’re such graceful animals,” she recalls. “It […]
“Did I ever tell you about the time I got charged by a moose?” We were at the point in our camping trip where everyone was dusting off their close-encounters-with-wildlife stories. “Now, Davis, don’t tell that story or we’re going to get into an argument,” warned his wife. “She was downwind of the bear spray […]
I was having lunch with a vegetarian friend recently, when I caught myself wanting to tell her the story. When you’re a vegetarian, a lot of people — friends, distant relatives, complete strangers — barrage you with the story. It starts like this: “Yeah, I tried going vegetarian once.” During my 13 years as a […]
This week, a great white shark named Lydia may be the first white shark seen crossing into the eastern Atlantic. Scientists tagged her a year ago in Florida; since then, she’s swum 19,000 miles and as of yesterday morning, she was about 1000 miles from the Irish coast. White shark populations, along with those of […]
