From the Petri Dish to the Backyard Grill
Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t buy test-tube hot dogs for your Memorial Day barbecue, but maybe in a decade or so we’ll all be noshing on barbecued goodies raised in the sterility of a laboratory near you. Doesn’t that sound tasty? Or yucky? For me, it’s a little bit of both. I’m fascinated [...]
San Diego Zoo mother & baby snapshots
In honor of Mother’s Day, I wanted to share a few snapshots from our trip to the San Diego Zoo last month. Here’s a giraffe calf and mother: Capybaras are the largest living rodents: there’s mom and a young upstart. Capybara mom and baby at the San Diego Zoo And the best for last: hippos [...]
Whales in NY Harbor, Part III
In our corner of Brooklyn, we’ve been waiting for our local whale sighting. But it looks like it just might be a matter of time. According to a NY Daily News article, local boat owners are already making money off a revenue stream that seemed confined to calmer waters: whale watching tours. I’ve posted before about [...]
Urban versus rural nature
Maybe it’s in the zeitgeist: this week’s New York magazine waxes poetic about ecology in The Concrete Jungle. Not what I was expecting when the city has been teeming with fashionistas and urban wildlife on the pop edge of culture. But, there it is in the first photo: Staten Island turkeys! In our heat island, enveloped [...]
Making sense of 200,000 gallons per day
How much? It’s one of those basic journalism questions, but when it comes to many science stories, it can be a tough one to answer in meaningful way. In most of my writing and reporting, I’m trying to find analogies to describe features smaller than the eye can see. But on the macroscale– like with [...]
The specter of ocean garbage
On a spring afternoon walk earlier this year, I obsessively took pictures of New York harbor garbage. A buildup of plastic bottles, crates, driftwood and furniture fragments littered the rocks along our coastal walkway– a strange jumble of junk. But my local trash doesn’t come close to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch– our global oceanic trash [...]
Exploding Color
Yesterday, we plotted how best to see the NYC fireworks display tonight with the least amount of inconvenience. In other years, we’ve had friends with roof access and good proximity. And a few years ago, we lived in an apartment in New Jersey that sat on a hill facing Manhattan with a bay window vantage [...]
Molecule of the Week: Carbon dioxide (part 1 of many)
This small molecule is too big for a single post, so I’ll probably revisit it at different points in this blog. It’s the most oxidized form of carbon, often thought of as waste product: both of fossil fuel burning and of the energy reactions that fuel life. But it’s also an essential component of photosynthesis [...]
Molecule of the Week: Water
It’s been a rainy week in New York City, and my office next to our front porch and my container garden has me thinking about that ubiquitous wetness. It’s been soaking my plants, and after a quick errand on Friday afternoon, its dampness lurked for hours on the hem of my jeans. It’s easy to [...]
Whales in NY Harbor: Update
In my post last week about blue whales singing in NY Harbor, I mentioned that I had an email out to the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program to find out the current status of the NY harbor listening project. I heard back yesterday from Connie Bruce at Cornell: The current status is that we have terminated [...]
