Like other double reeds, the rackett produced by this instrument probably decreases as the player’s skill increases. When I was working on my article about carbon fiber instruments, I traded emails with a researcher in musical acoustics in Australia. He saw my blog post about Papalini’s bass clarinet and said: If you’re interested in low…
May 2009 marks a milestone for me: 5 years as a full-time science writer. Folks interested in the career (usually scientists) contact me occasionally about the transition, and I caution that it’s different for everyone. But here are my basic guidelines. 1. Look before you leap. It’s easy to have a bad week, month, semester,…
Daily blogging this month made for an excellent excuse to browse the 2009 Webby nominees and winners. The science nominees included Nature, Scientific American, and Wired Science. As a science journalist, these three are already on my regular web diet, so I didn’t feel the need to take a closer look. The Webby winner, NASA…
Looking more closely at the some of the coverage of swine flu, I recognized the (probable) handiwork of a CDC researcher from a lecture I covered recently at the New York Academy of Sciences about biological imaging. Amazingly this technology (negative stained transmission electron micrograhs) actually dates back to the 1950s, but it’s fast and…
Cheering for an animal’s organs makes up one of my many badges of geekdom. In February I found out that Lizzy, one of my 10-year-old cats, had diabetes. Granted, I’d been getting the “fat cat lecture” from vets for almost five years. My black bundle of meows, attitude, klutziness, and a bottomless stomach was overweight.…
No, it’s not some kind of YouTube ruse or even a clever trick. Some animals have rhythm according to papers published this week in Current Biology (this one and this one). So, yes, the science is cool, but when there’s a fun video to go with it? Even better. We’re a parrot-loving household (a nearly…
I got a phone call from my husband a few weeks ago when he was away doing dissertation research. “Well, I’ve had an epiphany,” he says. “I’ve realized why what I’m doing won’t work.” This explanation was so logical, delightfully simple. I’m sure he’s right, though he now has to rejigger his experiments. After we…
Mussels (and geckos) exploit all sorts of crazy chemistry that scientists are still trying to understand and learn from. Geckos’ feet are the ultimate post-it notes, sticking and unsticking to surfaces without any glue. Mussels coat their “feet” in a natural protein super-glue. Some scientists are even trying to combine the two features. I’ve written…
If you’ve done a Ph.D. in science (or particularly if you’re thinking about it) or if you’re just fascinated with the scientific process, I hope you have an opportunity to see the documentary Naturally Obsessed that chronicles the journey of three graduate students toward the scientific prize in protein crystallography. Only one of them, Robert, wins…
I started this blog with the notion of thinking about ideas and connections, so blogging about this study published in PLoS One last week was really a no-brainer. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory mapped the connections between research journals based on web clicks. The humanities and social sciences clump tightly in the center of…