Science grad students are asked terrifying questions on the regular, but the very worst one comes from our moms. It’s usually tacked onto an otherwise innocent conversation, when Mom will casually pause and say, “Honey, your latest oxygen flux data are truly fascinating! By the way, have you met anyone lately?” It’s enough to make … Continue reading
Warren County, North Carolina, doesn’t seem the most likely place for the environmental justice movement to have started. It’s a small, rural county northeast of Raleigh, and might have stayed just that if not for a decision to dump a toxic landfill in its midst in 1978. The response of Warren County’s primarily black residents … Continue reading
“Drought occurred in 7th year of the Emperor Jiajing period, Ming Dynasty (the traditional Chinese calendar). Gui Jiang and Sishan Jiang came to Da’an town (the town where Dayu Cave is located) to acknowledge the Dragon Lake inside in Dayu Cave.” Quotation from Dayu Cave, 1528 A.D. (Tan et al., 2015) Working in science is … Continue reading
Are there any American historical figures more endearing than Ben Franklin? Who else could pull off kite-flying in thunderstorms, pithy suggestions about pennies and early bedtimes, and “diplomacy” with the French (ladies), yet still appear affable and erudite? Even today, Franklin seems to be winking out of portraits, encouraging the viewer to tick off some … Continue reading
Margaret Robinson did not begin working at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) in 1946 for any great love of science. After earning a Masters degree in languages from UC Berkeley, she was looking for a local job and made her way to Scripps because “there was nowhere else to work.” She ultimately became a … Continue reading
This week has been full of late-day thunderstorms, which add drama to an afternoon in the lab but might also render that lab completely useless. When the electricity goes out, today’s grad student is left staring bleakly at the instrument that was surely about to return the data that would revolutionize her research. There is … Continue reading
Whether you consider them centers of discovery or lairs of evil geniuses, you probably have some mental image of a scientific lab (or la-BOHR-atory, for you evil geniuses). There’s the row of white coats, the cabinets of mysterious glass bottles, and, always, the machines. Blinking and beeping, these instruments, as they are more formally known, … Continue reading
