I get a lot of ridiculous press releases, but the headline that made its way to my inbox today, “New Cancer-Fighting Game App Goes Global,” represented a new level of nonsense. The press release described a “ground-breaking” smartphone “cancer-fighting game app” that promised to “help young cancer patients fight their disease.” If you’re like me, […]
Christie
In 2006, a puppy came to live on a small farm in Colorado. His name was Oskar, and he was the runt of the litter. Oskar was a playful little guy, but on one fateful autumn day, he would learn that he was living in the dark shadow of a blood-thirsty assailant. In the days […]
I was about 50 feet up when I started to freak out. I had agreed to come to this Oregon forest and climb a very tall, very old tree with my mom, because it seemed like a nice mother-daughter bonding experience. Now I was approximately one-fifth of the way up a Douglas fir named Sophia, […]
One of my hens recently hatched a couple chicks. The one that survived is now a few weeks old, and I have no idea if it’s female or male. It’s not that I don’t want to know. It’s just that it’s surprisingly difficult to distinguish the two sexes when they’re young. There are two ways […]
Last July I ended a post on the Higgs boson with an admonition: “Just don’t get me started on this ‘God particle’ business.” But did Christie listen? “I’m sharing it with my husband,” she emailed me about the post. “This whole ‘god particle’ thing has been driving him completely crazy.” The term, at least in the […]
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of spending a few days at a place that nurtured my interest in science. The Mountain Research Station was where I conducted my first independent research project (funded by an REU grant from the NSF). As I’ve written previously, my experience studying the evolution of an alpine plant’s […]
June 17 – 21 “I think girls very much do want to be JASONs and they want to be in DARPA, they just don’t always know it, so we need to get them to read about it.” This week, Ann asked defense journalism powerhouse Sharon Weinberger to add her two cents to the ongoing LWON […]
On Sunday evening, I was standing in our orchard watching the sunset when I turned around and saw a strange beam of light that appeared to rise from the east, directly opposite the setting sun. Crepuscular rays or “God’s Fingers” are pretty common around here, but usually these majestic light rays emanate from the sun. […]
