I’d just sat down when the first carver approached me. It was my second evening in Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, 2000 kilometers north of Ottawa, and all around me well-heeled bureaucrats were tucking into Arctic char and steak. But the carver, a small weathered-looking Inuk, skirted them and made a beeline toward me. In […]
Nature
Last week my little black dog wandered off into the sloping hillside behind our Colorado home. Fifteen years old, deaf and suffering from congestive heart failure, she appeared to have succumbed to some primordial call to return to the wilderness to die. She didn’t have far to go. My husband and I live in the […]
Last month, I recommended a few children’s books that I thought reflected the curious, adventurous, and humble scientific spirit of The Last Word on Nothing. Friends and readers have since added their favorite titles to the list — thank you! May these books bring all of you, and the young explorers in your lives, some […]
As an undergraduate biology student, I loathed taxonomy. Plant systematics was the only college course I remember absolutely hating. It seemed like nothing more than rote memorization. I studied with flash cards I’d made on little index cards. Bracts instead of sepals, colored glands that take the place of petals? Probably a Euphorbiaceae. I spent […]
The anglerfish was the iconic animal of my childhood. This eerie creature lives miles under the ocean’s surface and – as you probably know, if you were ever an animal-obsessed kid like me – dangles a fleshy, glow-in-the dark “bait” in front of its monstrous jaws. The dangling bait attracts prey and gives the animal […]
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us […]
You remember Bees – Part 1, right? The waggle dance they do to show other bees where the flowers are? If not, go back there and click on those links, which explain everything. I’ve just looked through LWON’s archives and we apparently are preoccupied with bees. Them and corvids. Meanwhile, AG poses another little mystery, […]
A few weeks ago, driving south along California’s Highway 1, hugging the coastal curves just north of Big Sur, my boyfriend Drew and I stopped to wander along a cliff top covered in blue larkspur and yellow yarrow. Between the colorful wildflowers, the white cliffs and the crashing Pacific, it was all so lovely that […]
