Rose: Bigleaf Maple Die-Off

Rose: Bigleaf Maple Die-Off

New member Ian Rose (@ianrosewrites) writes for Earth Island Journal about an alarming decline of the iconic bigleaf maple in Washington state. All over the state, people had been reporting trees losing leaves or simply just dying, and the reason for the devastation...
Kantor: Forest Disappearance

Kantor: Forest Disappearance

Sylvia Kantor writes for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Rocky Mountain Research Station’s “Science You Can Use Bulletin” about an increase in cases in which forest resilience and recovery are pushed beyond a breaking point by wildfire. As a result of continued severe...
Nelson: Octopus Smarts

Nelson: Octopus Smarts

What can pathologists learn from an octopus? Plenty, writes Bryn Nelson (@SeattleBryn) in a piece he coauthored in CytoSource. Cancerous tumors are such wily foes that studying cephalopods’ different forms of intelligence and problem-solving approaches could yield...
Golard: Thinking Errors

Golard: Thinking Errors

In his first book, “A Field Guide to Thinking Errors: Using Neuroscience to Classify, Avoid, and Exploit Our Biases,” André Golard explains that all people are prone to errors in thinking, such as confirmation bias and loss aversion, and offers readers tools to...
Berkowitz: Cell Network Rain Data

Berkowitz: Cell Network Rain Data

For the American Physical Society’s Physics magazine, Rachel Berkowitz explains how cellular networks can offer critical rainfall data to the smallholder farmers across Africa who feed most of the continent but lack access to weather-prediction systems used in...
Steinberg: Plastic in Whale Diets

Steinberg: Plastic in Whale Diets

Nancy Steinberg writes about a new scientific partnership to investigate connections between human-made debris, zooplankton and gray whales. In the cover story in Oregon Stater, the magazine of the Oregon State University Alumni Association, she describes researchers’...