“My body contains more Neanderthal DNA variants than 87% of the rest of customers in the 23andMe database,” Marie Zhuikov reports in her poem, “Unwitting Neanderthals.” It appears in High Fire Danger: Poems of Love & Nature”, a collection of works written during Zhuikov’s three decades as a science writer for Wisconsin Sea Grant. Another poem, “Lake Superior Auntie,” recounts that experience.
On March 9, 2020, Brad Fox flew from New York to Peru to spend 10 days with a traditional curandero, or healer, learning about plant medicines in a remote jungle four hours’ walk from the nearest dirt road. After WHO declared the COVID pandemic two days later, Peru shut down international and domestic travel. In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Fox shares experiences from his 14 months there.
Contrary to common belief, cities offer superb birding ops, Ryan Goldberg reports in Bird City: Adventures in New York's Urban Wilds. Goldberg takes readers around New York and around the year, to urban canyons, parks, rivers, & marshes, examining the impact of air quality, bright lights, window strikes, & more on 100s of bird species. Thankfully, few women today wear hats adorned with birds.
Growing up on a farm in Virginia in the 1930s, Jim West loved taking radios and other devices apart and putting them back together to figure out how they worked. In Spark: Jim West's Electrifying Adventures in Creating the Microphone, Ainissa Ramirez introduces readers aged 5-9 to West’s role in developing the ubiquitous microphone. It’s the 1st book in her children’s series on Black inventors.
“Familiar things we tend to ignore in our daily haste are often more interesting than they seem,” David Stipp asserts. In Why Rats Laugh & Jellyfish Sleep and Other Enchanting Stories of Evolution, he ponders Darwinian puzzles such as why many species of bees have yellow & black bands, & why humans need to sleep. Why questions about living things, he explains, often point to adaptive purposes.
Running for miles to locate invasive weeds, mussels, and insects, e.g., the spotted lanternfly, is all in a day’s work for the dog sleuths Alison Pearce Stevens describes in Detective Dogs: How Working Dogs Sniff Out Invasive Species. Readers aged 8-12 will learn about pros and cons of tactics used to keep invasives under control: removing them, destroying them, and introducing natural predators.
“I used to follow parcels of water around the ocean,” Deirdre Lockwood reports in her poem, “My Chemistry.” She divides her first book of poetry An Introduction to Error into four sections: Materials, Methods, Results, & Discussion. A self-described “observationalist,” she offers meditations on research and life: “detecting what is or trying to write it down and not get too seasick along the way.”
“Even people with high levels of science literacy are prone to cognitive bias,” NASW member Beth Malow and others note in Beyond the Politics of Contempt: Practical Steps to Build Positive Relationships in Divided Times. The authors discuss barriers to critical thinking and ways to surmount them, topics reporters may find useful when addressing polarized issues, e.g. vaccine safety and autism.
Dennis Meredith's latest scifi novel starts with a real event, the 1961 Soviet detonation in the Arctic of a bomb far bigger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviets allegedly hid an even larger bomb in East Germany. In The Czar Bomb, rogue state terrorists locate it and plan to detonate it over Washington, DC. The race is on to neutralize it. Hi-tech warfare ensues.
Our infatuation with Mars, David Baron writes, “began in a strange era, not that long ago, when it was the astronauts who were fiction and the Martians that were real.” In The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, Baron explores the consequences of astronomer Percival Lowell’s 1894 assertion that “canals” he saw on Mars suggested life existed there.
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