Disease Theory in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Mary Shelley’s third novel, The Last Man (1826), is about the sole survivor of a global plague at the end of the twenty-first century. Um…should we all be reading it...
Sheep Snarf Seaweed at the Scottish Seashore
When many non-Scots think of Scotland, they envision it as once populated by angry blue-painted men in kilts who fought off the Romans and warred with the English to their...
An Islamic Approach to Environmentalism
Environmentalism as we in the U.S. typically think of it began in the nineteenth century, when nature lovers began to draw attention to the loss of wild land and to...
Upside-Down Jellyfish and the Mucus of Death
Jellyfish are a bane to ocean swimmers—the sight of a single small gelatinous mass can make them think the water is filled with stinging crowds of non-sentient Jell-O, and that...
Biomimicry Comes for the Noble Hedgehog
If you had no idea what a hedgehog is, you might read Pliny the Elder’s description and mistake it as fact: They catch apples with their quills, can predict the...
The “Doctress” Was In: Rebecca Lee Crumpler
On March 9, 125 years ago, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler passed away at the age of sixty-four. As the first Black woman physician in the United States, she had served...
The Chemist Whose Work Was Stolen from Her
Alice Augusta Ball was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1894, the child of a middle-class family in which both parents and a grandfather were photographers. At the time, developing and...
The Black Mathematician Who Resisted Nuclear War
When J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. graduated from the University of Chicago in 1942 with a PhD in mathematics at the age of nineteen, he became one of the one half...
Margaret S. Collins, Pioneering Black Entomologist
Born in 1922, Margaret James Strickland Collins was the first African American woman entomologist in the United States, at a time when the country made higher education difficult, if not...
Puffins Seen Using Tools, Breaking Dumb-Puffin Stereotypes
If bird intelligence were like high school, corvids (crows, ravens, jays) would be the whiz kids. They make and use tools for multiple purposes: to get at food, to poke...