What’s the best thing on my phone? The Merlin Bird ID app. It listens and tells you (with reasonable accuracy) what birds are around you. Recently I heard someone singing who I didn’t immediately recognize, but I thought sounded fluty and musical, like a thrush. Merlin agreed: Swainson’s thrush, a new bird for me. In […]
Miscellaneous
I was sipping my second cup of coffee the other morning when I got this call: “Hi Jenny, this is Dr. Menon’s office. You need to go to the ER immediately. You have a pulmonary embolism.” Pulmonary embolism? Isn’t that the thing where the old guy down the street gets shepherded away in an ambulance […]
This coming Monday is the new moon, which means by tonight we are in the soup. There’s nothing to block the stars but clouds…and us. Every month has its dark nadir and we’re pretty much there, stars as bright and numerous as they’ll ever be. That’s the thing about a full night sky, it’s as […]
I need your help. I’m trying to find a phrase to describe an important phenomenon and maybe help people recognize it more easily. The phenomenon is this: When we fix a problem, we forget it. I don’t mean you and me in “we” — we, of course, remember. But pop culture forgets, and the mass […]
It’s my pleasure to welcome Betsy Mason as the newest person of LWON. Betsy is an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a senior editor at Wired for many years, and she has won a lot of accolades, including the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman award for breaking […]
When I pull into the boat ramp parking lot, it’s just after midnight. It should be deserted. Nobody goes night boating. But my headlights illuminate a red sedan parked hood to the woods. I can’t tell if it’s occupied. The windows are dark. My brain tries to make it make sense. You can’t pull a […]
One morning a few years ago, I woke to find I had lost most of the hearing in my left ear. In place of my usual acoustic environment was a high electronic ringing—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—as if a giant TV had been left on mute. Me being me, I assumed the issue would work itself out, but when […]
Can I just say this? Those of us born in the 1960s and ‘70s are in a special hell right now. With jobs being taken away and careers being cut short and talents losing out to “influencers” and AI and Bots that Chat, it’s been a uniquely painful time. Those in my generation who chose […]
