Just over a week ago, I finally fulfilled my inner 9-year-old’s wish: to see artifacts from King Tutankhamen’s tomb. In this case, it was a relatively short journey, to Times Square rather than Egypt. One of these days, I’ll actually see the pyramids and the Sphinx. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs Hairston, introduced me to…
These days the kitchen is my chemistry lab, and if I were back in college I’d probably be one of the students beating down the door to get in to a cooking science class like this one at Harvard. Despite my experience with chemical gadgets, the wildest item in my kitchen is a food processor. Watching…
Carbon is the big star among the science Nobel Prizes this week. Sure, IVF is a big deal, too. But, today, I’m all about the element that ruled my life as an organic chemist. Carbon more than math is the universal common denominator of ‘O-chem. “As my undergraduate professor once quipped , “You just have…
As my husband and I were roaming from tent to tent at Maker Faire on Sunday, we were recognized, but not for any reason that you might expect. “Hey, I know you,” a guy said as he turned around from examining a table. “You got hit in the head with that plane.” Yes, our claim…
I’m looking forward to Maker Faire NY this weekend. I’m not directly involved, but I love this concept: people coming up with new ideas, building things, sharing what they’ve learned with other people. Mark Frauenfelder, Editor-in-Chief of Make magazine (the sponsor), describes the educational value in do-it-yourself in the most recent issue of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, says…
Maybe it’s in the zeitgeist: this week’s New York magazine waxes poetic about ecology in The Concrete Jungle. Not what I was expecting when the city has been teeming with fashionistas and urban wildlife on the pop edge of culture. But, there it is in the first photo: Staten Island turkeys! In our heat island, enveloped…
Last Saturday started out as a low key weekend adventure: just a little local beach without having to fight too much weekend traffic. So we crossed the Verrazano bridge to Staten Island. In Great Kills Park, we spotted plenty of your expected birds– plovers and gulls of varying shapes and sizes. But then my husband,…
[slideshow] Quirky animal stories are big fun, but three in a month is a new record for me. The most recent one, hot off the presses in C&EN’s Environmental SCENE, looks at how arctic seabirds provide a convenient way to track persistent pollutants in marine environments.The researchers measure the chemicals in stomach oils, a concentrate…
Last week, Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science started a post that’s collecting the stories of how science writers came to this particular career. I finally got around to adding my contribution, which I’m reposting with relevant links. At 16, I published my first article of science writing, a profile my high school chemistry…
This Beakman’s World for nanotech video, When Things Get Small, came out a few years ago, but it’s still a great, entertaining introduction to the world of nanotechnology. I reviewed the video and interviewed Ivan Schuller, one of its creators and a physics professor at UCSD, at a showing in NYC back in 2006. My story…