Imagine that you’re considering having children. Upon visiting a genetic counselor, you discover that you and your partner both carry the same rare, recessive genetic mutation. While neither you nor your partner shows any symptoms, there is a 25% chance that your child will suffer from a debilitating genetic disorder. Then imagine that the counselor [...]
I’m officially launching a new website today: Sea To Sky: Birds of the Santa Monica Mountains. When I moved to LA in 2006, I was impressed with the diversity of birds in the area. I knew there were great birds in southern California, but I didn’t realize how many wonderful spots there would be close [...]
A couple of months ago, I posted an interview with Suzanne Rutishauser, part of the Untamed Science team. Untamed Science is a group of biologists and filmmakers who produce great educational science films. Well, Rob Nelson, co-founder of Untamed Science, liked our “Video Blog” project from the Science Filmmaking course enough that he’s featuring it [...]
I recently wrote about the excellent Scientific Filmmaking workshop I took at Bodega Bay last month, and I shared a few of the exercises I had done during the workshop. Well, after submitting a big grant last week, I had time to sit down and put a few finishing touches on the final “video blog” project [...]
First things first: if you have never watched the 1988 documentary “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History” by Mark Lewis, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy as soon as possible. You can thank me later. If you have seen “Cane Toads,” then you know all about the warty, highly toxic, yet strangely endearing [...]
It’s DDIG season. That means that I, along with most other Ph.D. candidates in my field, have spent the last several weeks working on an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (or DDIG). A lot of the graduate school experience (in the sciences, at least) is applying for small grants to support your research. The DDIG [...]
In this second installment of our Biology Road Trip series, we’ll highlight some of the remarkable wildlife of Southwest Australia. As you may recall, Nathan Dappen and I were in Perth for the ISBE meeting last month, and we managed to explore a bit of the countryside to the south of Perth once the conference [...]