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 Nadia Drake | Nov 5, 2010 | Posts
“…and everything is going to the beat – it’s the beat generation, it be-at, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart…” Jack Kerouac At least twice in this past week, someone asked, “What is your beat?” And I answered: “It’s new...
by Sascha Zubryd | Nov 2, 2010 | Posts
Doggies and rodents and bears, oh my! They all have to dry off somehow. So they shake. I know this from personal and very drippy experience (not with bears). As Andrew Dickerson and fellow video authors put it in their abstract, animals: …rapidly oscillate their...
by Sandeep Ravindran | Nov 2, 2010 | Posts
Or, “How the article I wrote got ripped-off within an hour” I was excited this week to publish an article about a new kind of underwater robot in Nature News. I basically got lucky and happened to talk to a researcher about the right thing at the right...
by Danielle Venton | Oct 31, 2010 | Posts
Since I’m sure we’re all friends here, I’ll admit something to you. I’m a tidier person when I’m living with someone. I’m looking at my kitchen table as I type. It is a kind of wounded battlefield of Post-its, notebooks and slips of paper covered in a familiar hand. I...
by Catherine Meyers | Oct 31, 2010 | Posts
The otters our class saw on our field trip to Monterey Bay were awfully cute. But I have to admit there was a piece of my former engineer’s heart that was touched, not by the furry faces, but by the antennas, radio transmitters, temperature and depth recorders, and...
by Keith Rozendal | Oct 31, 2010 | Posts
Nads is on a roll and I thought I’d share a set of my own loose associations triggered after my facebook status update netted a comment by an astronomer. My original caption: “See, otters. OR It otter be illegal to kayak near otters. Oh wait, it is; 50...
by Nadia Drake | Oct 30, 2010 | Posts
Never turn your back on the ocean. [images captured during SciCom trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Tuesday, 10.26.10, to observe and learn about otter-observers learning about otters.]
by Sascha Zubryd | Oct 29, 2010 | Posts
I found another writing trick this week. This one helps me make sure my story flows in a logical order, and that it addresses all the important points. Editing our own work is hard. We all gloss over sentences when we already know what we meant them to say. We know...
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 Sandeep Ravindran | Oct 28, 2010 | Posts
I got a little taste of the perils of field research when some of us got drenched by a wave where the researchers first set up. They assured us they’d never experienced something like that in over 10 years. Once we got set up though, things went smoothly, and we...
by Donna Hesterman | Oct 28, 2010 | Posts
Here is a short video of our class field trip to see the otter trackers in action. I’m just learning to use iMovie so this was an editing film exercise for me. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-RGS9nMkj8&fs=1&hl=en_US]
