by Susan L. Young | May 6, 2011 | Posts
I’m having a lot of fun in our multimedia class this quarter. I love mixing together a voice over, a touch of music and eye-catching images to tell a story. The hard part has been getting the courage to take pictures and video of people. Personally, I hate being...
by Susan L. Young | Apr 2, 2011 | Posts
As any pet owner will tell you, lots of non-human animals have their own personalities. Even within the same species, individual animals can have specific behavioral traits, such as tendency to be shy or playful. In the case of zoo animals, knowing a creature’s...
by Susan L. Young | Feb 28, 2011 | Posts
We had some relatively cold weather here on the central coast of California this weekend. There was even some talk of snow down in Santa Cruz, but I think that fantasy melted by Saturday afternoon. Not everybody in the area was hoping for flurries. Some growers in the...
by Susan L. Young | Jan 20, 2011 | Posts
The title might be a bit of a stretch, but the punch of it approximates how astonished I was to see the sea lions of the Santa Cruz Wharf this past weekend. [slideshow] Before a sunset dinner on Sunday, I was dazzled by a group of sea lions resting on the horizontal...
by Susan L. Young | Dec 4, 2010 | Posts
I love red pandas. These house-cat-sized cuties spend most of their lives in trees of the temperate forests of the Himalayas. Despite their name and a penchant for bamboo, red pandas are thought to be more closely related to weasels or dogs than they are to Giant...
by Susan L. Young | Nov 27, 2010 | Posts
Yesterday, my boyfriend and I went to the iFly Indoor Skydiving Vertical Wind Tunnel in the East Bay for his birthday. I was a little nervous on our way there, but it turned out to be pretty easy and a lot of fun. After a quick lesson on body position, visitors get...
by Susan L. Young | Nov 21, 2010 | Posts
Anyone flying on November 24th this year should probably plan to get to the airport extra early: A group of travelers’-rights advocates are organizing a nationwide boycott of the full-body scanners used in security checks in airports. The Wednesday before...
by Susan L. Young | Nov 11, 2010 | Posts
From today’s Twitterverse: Apparently Dick Van Dyke fell asleep on a surfboard and woke up to no land in sight, but fins all around. The fins belonged to a group of porpoises that pushed the actor back to dry land. ~~ What’s the news here, that Dick Van...
by Susan L. Young | Nov 6, 2010 | Posts
There’s lots of great workshops here at ScienceWriters 2010, with topics ranging from being an effective Public Information Officer, to the social web and online commenting, and how to write great science books. My first workshop today was Profitable...
by Susan L. Young | Oct 29, 2010 | Posts
1. Sea otters have the densest hair of any mammal – around 900,000 hairs per square inch (140,000 hairs/cm2)[1]. That’s more than 500X denser than the hair on the human scalp, which averages at 1600 hairs per square inch (250 hairs/cm2).[2] 2 Sea otters have...
by Susan L. Young | Oct 21, 2010 | Posts
Flushed from my rush back to the office, I throw open my laptop, slam in the USB cord, and hold my breath. A small moment of panic. Is it there? Is it entact? The file transfers, iTunes bounces awake, and the tinny voices of victory sing my success. Glory be, my...
by Susan L. Young | Oct 16, 2010 | Posts
Can science be crowdsourced? That is, can scientists turn to the average citizen for help in collecting data? Earlier this week, Genomes Unzipped, a group of genetics-savvy bloggers, announced that its 12 members had made the results of their direct-to-consumer...
