For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file […]
Guest Post
Twenty biomedical companies. Seventy nations. An aggressive search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is underway worldwide. Yet even 21st-century technology can’t match one man who curbed a major influenza pandemic spreading across the United States in 1957. Pioneering virologist Maurice Hilleman, now oft-forgotten, detected that pandemic from across the globe, convinced reluctant U.S. health officials […]
I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something […]
Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, slightly fixed up. A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in […]
“There is an aspect to this story that is weirder than you can imagine.” That sentence was e-mailed to me by a geologist, Jan Kramers, at the University of Johannesburg in the waning days of 2017. I had e-mailed him about a paper of his in Geochimica et Cosmochmica Acta. The title of the paper […]
This is an update to a guest post that ran on December 12, 2018. A few days ago, I found the following letter from my grandfather, Donald Pearce, in my parents’ bookshelves. It was tucked into a copy of Medea which he sent to me when I was a high school sophomore. ( I was […]
Years ago, when I moved into my house, I had a dream. I was going to remove all the grass, destroy the lawn and never have to mow. My yard—nay, my patchwork of service-providing gardens—would offer food for humans and animals, as well as habitat, color and deeply soothing smells. I planted all the clovers—white, […]
This was my first guest post for LWON, in 2015. I’m reposting it because there’s yet another update: A few days ago, my mother revealed that, CONTRARY TO ALL HER PREVIOUS CLAIMS, it was the cat. … This week, while working on a little story for Science about hamster emotions, I decided to do some […]
