“It’s like a good plague,” read the tweet from one of my NPR station’s editors. Epic floods across the Midwest this summer, which more than one local official referred to as “biblical,” brought a wave of frogs and toads to Missouri. It is hard to overstate how much water inundated my adopted state, and […]
Month: September 2019
I love the prickly, dry ecology of the northern California foothills. I love even it in late summer, when nothing is left of most plants and people but an exhausted, brittle husk. That is when my favorite plant, the California buckeye, or Aesculus californica, comes into its own. Unlike me, Aesculus californica knows when […]
Recently I’ve been noticing the milkweed pods, doing their thing, so I thought today would be a good day to revisit these old pictures of my favorite local patch of milkweed. Originally published Nov 21, 2014. About halfway between my apartment and my office is a community garden. In a corner of that community garden […]
I first wrote about abalone in 2012, and thing are looking even worse than they did at the time. The abalone sport fishery in California has been closed until 2021. Researchers and abalone divers are starting to remove sea urchin, which have taken over the abalone’s habitat and munched away at kelp forests. Hopefully the […]
This post originally ran in March 2014. Although tuberculosis cases are on the decline in the United States, we’re not headed for elimination, at least not this century. There were more than 9,000 cases in 2018, mostly among foreign-born individuals. But the news isn’t all bad: In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved a […]
This story first ran January 17, 2019. It’s about a quark. Any resemblance to the author is purely coincidental. In fact, any perceived real-world parallels reflect more on the reader’s personal issues than the writer’s, don’t you think? You know what, stop judging me. It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, […]
Different people wake up differently. My husband instantly transitions from a deep dark unconsciousness to crisp, bright alertness as if a switch has been flipped. I…do not. For me, waking is a mysterious, confusing, and generally quite extended process, involving the gradual understanding that the reality I have been inhabiting for some time—years maybe?—is in […]
Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new research tells us. Biologists already knew the scurrying rodents tuned into birds’ alarm calls, but they didn’t realize that the mammals responded to songs about the good times, too. Content chirps suggest to squirrels that all is well. To me, too. At this time of year especially […]
