When Charles Darwin compared the beaks of his finch specimens from the Galapagos, he saw that each had been shaped differently by evolution, depending on the natural history of the island on which that finch made its home. Many evolutionary biologists see life through this natural history lens, and while they are right to declare […]
Miscellaneous
April 17 – 21, 2017 My neighbors, of whom I was exceedingly fond, moved away and I was sad. So I made a list of things to do to be a neighbor whose neighbors are sad to see you go. The People of LWON apparently live on different planets and their community listservs reflect that […]
This post about honeybees originally appeared May 2015 here on LWON. I still love bees and they’re still in trouble, so I figured I’d draw attention back to how amazing they are. So, here’s your big buzz for the day. Enjoy! ——– Early the other morning, I woke up to a strange humming noise. My […]
This post first appeared on April 24, 2013. Unfortunately, the problem of dust on snow has not gone away. Since I wrote this post, NASA has gotten involved in studying snow on the Grand Mesa. I wrote about the NASA project for FiveThirtyEight. Spring is a nervous time for skiers and farmers. I’m both of these, […]
April 10 – 14, 2017 The word was, DC’s famous cherry blossoms had died untimely deaths due to cold and ice. Wrong, says Helen, and proves it, sepal by sepal, petal by petal. The music behind the math in movies, says Guest Stephen Ornes, can sound just like the math: doubling back, laying down patterns, […]
In 2007, while a researcher at Oxford, astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski co-founded what would become the largest online citizen science project to date. Galaxy Zoo involved several hundred thousand volunteers pouring over images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to classify galaxies. Significant discoveries were made, dozens of journal articles published the results, and another site, […]
I wrote this post less than 24 hours after the U.S. presidential election. It’s been a long five months since then, but I’m still finding this metaphor useful, in work and in the rest of life. I hope you will, too. Dear readers, dear friends, As I write this, on the afternoon of November 9, 2016, […]
In honor of Helen Fields’s beloved series about the bugs she comes across in her daily life [see Fields, H. “Bugs on my Window,” LWON (June 24, 2015)], I’d like to present a semi-related post: Bugs (or Other Things) that my Dogs Probably Regurgitated As a writer and a “scientist” (I studied Conservation Biology, which […]
