Tree climbing is standard issue entertainment for rural kids. I was fairly chicken-edgy about heights myself, never once making it to the top tier of the schoolyard monkey bars, watching from several levels below as classmates leapt and twirled up there like a pack of gibbons. To this day, even…

Welcome to my new, episodic series on great moments in biology. Let me be clear, these are not Great Moments in the sense of Biology, but personal great moments in my own experience. As such, they are necessarily biased, and anecdotal. Think of this series as a story of personal…

Recent popular culture has given currency to the phrase, “winter is coming.” My progressive migration southward over the last four decades has rendered that adage nearly toothless, on top of the warming trends of climate change. Winter was harsh reality growing up on the Blue Ridge escarpment in southwest Virginia…

Objections to the year 2020, including the passing of eminent persons, have become social media feedstock. Future retrospectives will likely reveal little difference in the death rate of notables. Ordinary people continue to depart without widespread notice, mourned only by friends and family. …

What good is being a skeptic, unless you’re willing to poop a few parties? Being an old school naturalist brings me lots of “What is this thing?” photos. Many are photographs of backyard bugs, plants, or snakes. I also come across forwarded creature clickbait by the boatload on social media…

This is my second essay in a short series about technology, another stab at promoting nuance and critical thinking. My target is the not-infrequent claim that new technologies are always, or mostly, good. Or, at least, that the benefits far outweigh the costs, so we can consider the costs negligible. …