Though my writing life ranges from writing health stories for teens to writing about research topics and careers issues for scientists, the sources that I speak with for the former type of article generally don’t overlap with those for the latter. Until now. Last spring, I was working on an article about the common cold,…
I prefer my seaweed applewood smoked. However, truthfully, before yesterday, I’m not sure I could have told you whether I liked seaweed, smoked or otherwise. I do like sushi, but the seaweed within a maki roll has always seemed more functional than flavorful– a necessary material to keep the whole thing held together. But when…
I get to talk about an interesting application of carbon dioxide today in my latest article for Scientific American: sterilizing transplanted tissues such as tendon and bone. Before I heard about this technology, I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that the ubiquitous gas that we exhale could become a super-scrubber with a little heat and a…
Though the tryptophan rush from turkey is more hype than reality, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to put up the most structurally complex of the amino acids, tryptophan. The body uses it to make serotonin, and biochemists use its absorbance of ultraviolet light to determine concentrations of proteins in their samples. Today I’m thinking that…
My scientific world is probably best defined as medium-to-small. Because there’s usually a tie-in to a molecule, my conceptual world operates somewhere between the slightly sub-nanometer to human sizes of meters and kilometers. Except for my occasional forays into astronomy, I don’t often stretch my mind to light-years or cram it down to subatomic particles.…
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…