A week ago, I flew from the wide open spaces of Grand Junction, Colorado, to New York, the city I now call home. Air traffic at LaGuardia airport had delayed my flight two hours and still the pilot had to circle several times before we received clearance to land. I was late, I was crabby, […]
A few days ago, while cruising my Facebook feed, I came across link that stopped me cold. The headline was “Study: Eggs Are Nearly as Bad for Your Arteries as Cigarettes.” Bullshit, I thought. There’s no way that can be true. So I clicked on it, and ended up on the Atlantic’s Web site. But […]
Slugs have sex. You probably already knew that. And if you read my last post on banana slugs’ strange sexual appetites, you had the rare opportunity to see a slug penis. So you already know what the organ looks like. Except you don’t! That was a trick statement. You know what a banana slug’s penis looks like. […]
In 2010, I wrote an article for ScienceNow titled “Fish Oil Fights Inflammation.” The article focused on new research showing that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil block inflammation in cells and fight diabetes in mice. Jerrold Olefsky, who led the research, even had an explanation for how they do this. This whole process […]
My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked like a shiny stick. I leaned in for a closer look and realized I was looking at a long, fat worm. “Is this a worm?” I asked my husband. (I like to ask questions […]
My parents own roughly 100 acres of land smack dab in the heart of Wisconsin’s driftless area, a portion of the state left largely untouched by glaciers. When I was in high school, we built a cabin on that land. I remember weekends spent sawing two-by-fours and pouring cement. And when we couldn’t stand to […]
When my grandma got married, the question of whether to have children wasn’t something that one pondered. If you could have kids, you did. My grandma had eight. Luckily she loves children. When my mom got pregnant at 17, she decided to keep me even though she had to drop out of high school. She […]
When I was in junior high, my family moved to a house in the country. The dining room table sat beneath a vent designed to allow heat to rise from the main floor into my mom’s bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately the vent also served as a conduit for noise. The soft clink of metal spoons against […]