Nathan Dappen and I are proud to announce the launch of the Day’s Edge Productions website: daysedgeproductions.com! Day’s Edge Productions is our new multimedia production company, creating science and nature media for every audience. Please take a few minutes to browse the site — check out our videos and photos (more coming soon) and tell [...]
We have just received official word from the Ecological Society of America (ESA) that our two 2011 “Photography for Ecologists” workshops have been approved. Our team (myself, Molly Mehling, Nathan Dappen, and Neil Ever Osborne) will be leading the two workshops at the 96th annual ESA meeting in Austin, TX in August. The first workshop, [...]
Albert Einstein will be remembered for many contributions before this one, but this quote has been resonating with me recently: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” Einstein was probably being more self-deprecating than necessary – he knew what he was doing to a greater [...]
Earlier this month at ScienceOnline2011 (a professional meeting of science bloggers and others using the web to communicate about science), Brian Malow – aka. the Science Comedian – gave a wonderful impromptu performance. On the topic of viruses, Brian described a viral infection as “Your cells: Under new management.” It’s a clever but quite apt [...]
I just read an interesting blog post by Randy Olson, scientist-turned-filmmaker and author of the book Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. Olson teaches three-day filmmaking workshops for science students, and he just finished his most recent one in Norway… Read the blog post and you can see the [...]
Birds have some awesomely descriptive names. Like the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius), a North American woodpecker that specializes in drilling “sap wells” in trees to feed on their sugary phloem sap. Or the Brown Trembler (Cinclocerthia ruficauda), a Caribbean relative of the mockingbird that shakes its wings violently to communicate with other members of its [...]
The conference is over and I’m en route to LA again. Turns out that I’m on the same plane as the guy who played Mini Me in the Austin Powers movies, and yeah, he’s pretty darn small in person. Anyway, the last two days of the conference were even better than the first two. On [...]
Wow, I’ve already met a ton of interesting folks here, doing a lot of great stuff, and the meeting technically begins this morning (Saturday, January 15). I began the day yesterday by finishing and submitting a fellowship application from my hotel room (whee!), and then — entirely separate from the conference — I met up [...]
I arrived in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park yesterday afternoon, just in time for the opening keynote address at the ScienceOnline2011 conference. Robert Krulwich gave a wonderful presentation on how he and Jad Abumrad make science accessible to everyone – really, EVERYONE – on their NPR program Radiolab. If you aren’t familiar with the program [...]
As any serious birder will tell you, bird songs and calls are often the best – and sometimes the only – way to tell bird species apart in the field. In the central Great Plains, for example, Eastern and Western Meadowlarks (Sturnella magna and S. neglecta) look nearly identical. But as soon as they sing [...]