Scientific American usually does a great job — but today, I suspect their reporters weren’t listening very closely when they wrote this post: “Texas vote moves evolution to the top of the class.” I listened this afternoon to the Texas Board of Education as its members revised the state’s science teaching standards, and it sounded to [...]
Lest you think I’m as bad at math as I really am, let me just say I know I skipped Day 60. Day 60 is dead to me. On Day 60, I landed at the doctor’s office again, because an infection didn’t respond to the first antibiotic — so now I’m on two. Yesterday, I [...]
Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of his famous book “The Origin of Species,” has riveted the science community. It’s fun to read major publications, like the journal Nature, and realize they’ve been planning their stories for ages. Social networks including Twitter and Facebook are abuzz with the celebration. It’s like an Olympic [...]
Welcome to the Behind the Science blog, which is meant to peer behind the scenes of some of the science stories I write for various media outlets, most often National Geographic News. Let there be no implication that these media outlets have endorsed the content of these entries; in most cases, they haven’t. The point [...]
