In the autumn of 1996, my daily walk to school took more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. It brought me from the shores of Ramsey Lake in Sudbury, Ontario, through a bright birch forest where everything was whishy and dappled and stripy-white. Blueberry bushes lined the path. A birch tree alone is a […]
Miscellaneous
A couple of weeks ago, I was researching the history of polio vaccination, and I stumbled across a photo that stopped me cold. There was Jonas Salk, the researcher who developed the polio vaccine we use in the US today, giving his son a shot. The caption reads: “Peter Salk receiving the inactivated poliovirus vaccine […]
3 – 7 February This week, Richard visits a museum that starts with a ship and ends at the universe. It’s not rocket science: Roberta explains again why, no, seriously, you need to put your phone away while you’re driving (you too, cyclists). Ann recounts the horrors of living in New Madrid, Missouri, a town […]
January 27 – 31 This week, Jessa explained who you can trust and who you can’t. Guest poster Ivan Amato showed us the refrigerator in Maryland that houses the biggest collection of frog skin secretions in the world. Helen found that a clean desk changes your behaviour. Thanks to Pete Seeger, Michelle says, a river […]
When we deposit our money at the bank, when we drop our kids off at school, when we prepay for a future service, we are exercising the trust that has been encouraged in human nature by thousands of years of fruitful cooperation. But not every human we encounter will be trustworthy. According to The Truth […]
This week, it seems like all I am seeing in the news is sports. Athletes, trained to the very pinnacle of human possibility, competing for money, fame, and above all, glory. For Americans, the centerpiece is the Super Bowl, which will scoop up more than four times more viewers than an average Winter Olympics day. […]
Several years ago, I went on a reporting foray to Building 8 of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. I had known about the work of John Daly, one of the world’s greatest-ever amphibian natural product scientists, and I decided I would learn more by doing a profile of him for my writing […]
January 20 – 24 This week, Christie did us all the favour of dispensing with the notion that there are “best places to live.” Cassie had another go at “Three Cups of BS” Mortensen. Abstruse Goose and Ann contemplated why the best science is guaranteed to piss people off. I pondered whether everything isn’t a […]
