Monthly Archives

Originally published on Smithsonian.com, January 19, 2016 Taylor Myers thinks he has a green solution for America, one that advocates say can lower the average household’s carbon footprint of some 50 tons per year by three to four tons. A wood stove, lowering a person’s carbon footprint? The idea is befuddling. A wood stove provides … Continue Reading

Originally published in SPS Observer, summer 2016 Neil Turok, to hear him tell it, has always been a rebel. As a student in primary school in Tanzania, Turok says he had teachers who encouraged learning by doing, “going outside as much as possible, making electric motors, taking apart cars.” So when he moved to London … Continue Reading

Originally published in Inside Unmanned Systems, May 2016 Cloud-Map, a joint project of four Midwestern universities supported by the National Science Foundation, aims to triple the warning time for tornadoes—as well as generally improve weather predictions nationwide—with a network of drones that measure temperature, pressure and humidity in the hard-to-study air directly above the Earth’s … Continue Reading

Originally published in National Geographic News, July 22, 2015 Stranded jellyfish are common sights along beaches around the world. Some places can see up to a billion animals coating the sand. But beachgoers along the U.S. East Coast are running across a surprising sight this summer: thousands of knuckle-size, gelatinous blobs washing up from the … Continue Reading

Originally published in the Washington Post, April 17, 2015 Science fiction isn’t the only source of comically weird predictions about what we’ll be eating in the future. Great (and not-so-great) minds in journalism and science have also spent a century forecasting the demise of meat and vegetables and the rise of foods in a pill … Continue Reading