The book launch and reading for my new book, Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  (Yes, I completely agree that that’s one of the least important of the pandemic’s consequences.)  I was disappointed, because the book is full of stories that are lots of fun […]

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I’ve written and published two books now – The Scientist’s Guide to Writing and Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider – and wow, have I learned a lot.  I’ve learned about scientific writing and about Latin names, yes; but I’ve also learned a lot about the process of writing and publishing books.  It’s a […]

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Last week, I gave a talk “at” University College Dublin, as part of their Earth Institute’s series for Earth Week 2020.  I talked about my new book, Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider (of course), and you can watch the talk here. It’s about 31 minutes, and I apologize for a sound glitch at […]

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You can sometimes teach an old dog new tricks.  Last semester, I made a significant change in my teaching, in one of my courses*: I dumped the traditional high-stakes midterm exam in favour of small weekly quizzes.  I know, it’s not a breathtakingly original idea.  I was persuaded to try it not because I’m a […]

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Emma Despland is a friend and colleague who’s blogging here as an ecologist – but also as a citizen and and a parent.  Her thinking about our current pandemic melds these perspectives, and that in itself is an interesting and important thing to me.  That’s because scientists are, of course, just people like everyone else, […]

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How do people learn to be scientists?  We’re very good at teaching our students how to titrate a solution, take a derivative, label a dissected earthworm, or calculate the p-value from a one-way ANOVA.  One might get the impression that learning these skills is an important part of training to be a scientist.  Well, arguably […]

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In northeastern Germany, about 75 km north of Berlin, a little lake sits nestled in the woods.  In the lake’s depths swims a little fish – a dwarf cisco, Coregonus fontanae.  In the fish’s name, there’s a story tucked away. Coregonus fontanae is one of a pair of cisco species in Lake Stechlin. Around the […]

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This is a joint post from Steve Heard and Carly Ziter. A few weeks ago, Carly contributed a guest post on editing* as an  act of caring.  This got the two of us thinking and talking about editing – and actually doing it too, because Steve couldn’t resist taking his red pen to Carly’s draft.  Carly […]

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Time now for the second instalment of #AYearInBooks, in which I track the non-academic reading I do.  Here’s why I’m doing this. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (David Sedaris, 2010). Wow, this is a peculiar little book.  It’s a set of 16 very short stories, each one a parable featuring some human quirk (usually, a detestable one) […]

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Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’m a little bit obsessed with eponymous scientific names.  When I notice one, I often find myself trying to guess its origin.  Sometimes I’m right, or at least close.  Falco eleonorae was definitely not one of those times. Falco eleonorae, or Eleonora’s Falcon, is a mid-sized falcon that breeds mostly in […]

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