Pick up a passport, and travel along an ancient road with silk, haunting melodies and the simmering whiff of oils and spices. At its best, the American Museum of Natural History’s Traveling the Silk Road exhibition evokes as many senses as possible, particularly smell and sound. There’s a wonderful market where you can test your…
Last Friday afternoon, I spoke on a panel about media careers for the “What Can You Be With A Ph.D.?” Symposium held at NYU Langone Medical Center. I talked to several students and postdocs after the program and wanted to pull together a list of resources related to careers in science writing. It was a…
My latest story for Science Careers is up– about women who took extended family breaks from their careers and came back to the laboratory. I was impressed with these women’s creativity in crafting career and family life in ways that worked for them. What surprised me a little when I was doing the interviews for…
It’s evolved into women in science month here at Webb of Science. On October 9, I saw Gioia De Cari‘s one woman show, “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through MIT’s Male Math Maze” at the CUNY Graduate Center. Larry Summers’ now infamous comments about women in science inspired her to turn her own experiences as…
On Monday, I mentioned that it was a good week for women in science. Well, it got even better today with the announcement of the chemistry prize. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science becomes the fourth woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (sharing the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the…
It’s Nobel Prize season again, and the science behind this particular award for Medicine feels like a familiar friend. I got my crash course in telomeres and telomerase from a group meeting talk that one of my lab colleagues gave almost exactly a decade ago. The science recognized was done a quarter century ago. DNA…
NOVA scienceNow has a cool new web feature– “The Secret Life of Scientists”— that I explored today (thanks to Facebook and Symmetry Mag). It’s clear that this series is right up my alley– I probe my past experience and talk to scientists, in part, about what makes them tick. I’m constantly coming back to the…
Followers of this blog might have noticed that the Molecule of the Week (MotW) feature took a summerish hiatus. I’ve decided to expand the feature to include interesting materials, which are often more complex mixtures, either of synthetic or naturally-made compounds. So, I’m adding Material of the Week (MatotW in blogospheric shorthand) to help round…
How did I get so lucky? Seriously. A little while ago, I came across this post in Nature News’s blog about the new kids’ album from They Might Be Giants. And. The. Videos. My neighbors probably heard me scream with glee, and then I made an impulse buy on iTunes–which I rarely do. Honest. Wow,…
“So do you consider yourself a scientist or a writer?” An undergraduate student asked me that question last fall when I guest-lectured about communicating research for a social-scientist friend’s seminar course. I immediately said, “A writer, but I write about science.” But I do understand why he was confused. Even having done it, I wouldn’t…