3 New Articles about Antarctica: Science, Exploration, and Hairdressing

At Mental Floss, I believe I’ve carved out a small niche for myself as the resident expert/enthusiast on the Arctic and Antarctic. (Perhaps I could add “polar editor” to my business card someday!) In the last couple of months, I’ve written a trio of stories focused on Antarctica. In September, I highlighted the recent restoration …

New Article: Samuel F.B. Morse Opens America’s First Photo Studio

Samuel F.B. Morse is best known for inventing the telegraph, but he was also an accomplished painter and patron of the arts–which led to his intense interest in Daguerrotype photography. In my first story for Mental Floss (where I began working as a staff editor in June), I look at the events that led to …

New Article: Nuclear Films Reveal Blast Details 60 Years Later

My new story for scientificamerican.com looks at an ongoing project to find, scan, analyze and declassify thousands of films depicting America’s nuclear weapons tests from the 1950s and early 1960s. Atmospheric testing was banned in 1963, and since then, physicists have had to design computer simulations to “test” the efficacy of weapons in the current U.S. stockpile. …

New Article: Bird Ancestors Built Nests Like Defensive Forts

My story in the May 2017 issue of Scientific American explores the evolution of bird nest shape. Most researchers believed that the common cup style, like the kind robins build under your porch eaves, evolved first, followed by the more complex and time-consuming roofed style. But one team of scientists has found that it happened the …